On top of a table, Princess Zelda magically binds herself to a green machine pouring gusts of wind. She goes zooming across the screen instantly as the air blasts the table forward as well as any jet engine. “Table go vroom-vroom” reads the caption—just a small taste of what an inventive player can do in The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, the latest in the series from Nintendo.
Echoes of Wisdom is all about finding new ways to use the world’s items. It relies on Zelda’s ability to copy enemies and objects and repurpose them as needed. In the early days of its creation, developers explored different ways the game could be played. That included the ability to edit dungeons by copying and pasting objects like doors or candles, allowing players to essentially create their own gameplay—and their own cheats.
When series producer Eiji Aonuma had the chance to test it, however, he had a different take. “While it’s fun to create your own dungeon and let other people play it,” he said in a recent Ask the Developer post on Nintendo’s site, “it’s also not so bad to place items that can be copied and pasted in the game field, and create gameplay where they can be used to fight enemies.”
So no, Echoes of Wisdom is no dungeon-builder. Like The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, however, its ability to create makeshift solutions and items means players are quickly finding unusual ways to traverse the world and conquer its many levels. In some cases, by using items in ways so outlandish it seems like they shouldn’t exist.
One of Echoes of Wisdom’s most useful items is also its plainest: a simple, brown-framed bed. Players have quickly latched onto beds as a go-to for getting around—stack a couple and they make a great bridge or a ladder. Dispense one in a fight and Zelda can nap to recover health while summoned monsters fight on her behalf. In one particularly inspired example, a player put Zelda on top of a bed and summoned an enemy to create wind gusts that made the bed fly. Tables are just as useful, especially when you want to barricade a couple of guards into their own prison.
On Reddit, players are sharing creations that have allowed them to bypass both gated-off areas and the laws of gravity. One worked out how to create different variations of flying machines, no bed needed, by binding together a crow, a rock, and an enemy that creates wind gusts. In the game’s water temple, which requires players to slowly raise the water level to reach the top, one enterprising adventurer figured out how to skip that whole mess by carefully stacking water blocks—echoes that create a contained cube of water Zelda can swim through—to head straight up.
As creative as these workarounds are, they also play directly into Nintendo’s hands. While echoes may feel like a nerfing of the Tears mechanics that let gamers build flame-throwing phalluses, Nintendo still wanted to empower them to be “mischievous.” As director Tomomi Sano has said, the point is for players to find ways to use echoes that “are so ingenious it almost feels like cheating.”
