The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom

Developer: Nintendo
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Release Date: September 26, 2024

It’s been a long time coming for Princess Zelda, the namesake of Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda series, to star in a proper game that’s not a middling CD-I spin-off. With The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, we see the series step back into the classic top-down adventure style of games like A Link to the Past and Link’s Awakening, but with a heightened focus on building up Zelda as a heroine of her own story after Hyrule becomes corrupted by mysterious rifts and Link goes missing. From the hour I spent with Echoes of Wisdom, it’s shaping up to be the most inventive take on a classic-style Zelda game we’ve seen yet.

What surprised me most was how much you can push the game’s echo system to create surprisingly effective combat and puzzle-solving strategies. With Zelda able to use her powers to conjure up imitations of ordinary items and even enemies like Darknuts (those obnoxious knights that have been the bane of many a Zelda player’s existence) or moblins, she can use bits of the world to her advantage in nearly any situation – such as conjuring a row of beds to create a bridge. It’s far more open-ended than I expected it would be, and I can already envision players devising unique and clever ways to traverse the world and clear encounters that others may not have considered. In one fight, I spawned a flaming blob to set fire to brush to attack enemies and then tossed rocks at them to finish them off, and in another, I kept swarming a mini-boss with snakes.

It was so amusing and satisfying to see what I could do with the echoes, and I was just really taken in by how much this light immersive-sim aspect adds to a classic Zelda experience. After my hands-on, Echoes of Wisdom shot up my list of most anticipated games. I can’t wait to see more of it.