Mention the words “water in games” and nine times out of ten the conversation will immediately turn to how good that water looks in said game, and whether it ripples and sploshes nicely as you attempt to wade through it or not. It rarely gets people talking about how clever that water might be, or how it completely shakes up your approach to moving and travelling through a game’s landscape.
But that’s precisely what the water block echo did for me in The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom this year, and I’ve rarely felt so bowled over by such an innocuous and unassuming puzzle item. After all, it’s just water, right? The kind of liquid that Link (and Zelda) have been able to swim through for years at this point, and whose uses have been rarely more revelatory than pushing down the odd pressure pad in various Water Temples.
But the brilliance of Echoes of Wisdom’s water block goes far beyond anything we’ve seen in a Zelda game before – and the best thing about it is how immediately obvious that is the first time you acquire it. You’ll likely come across the water block early on in your adventure when you start investigating the rifts around the two Zora territories, and straight away you’re asked to build tunnels of cube-shaped water to make simple bridges across the void below. Suspended in mid-air, the water holding its shape fast and firm and defying all laws of gravity, its elegant simplicity washes away all those hours spent constructing awkward bed concoctions to get across similar-sized gaps.
But then, as with almost every other echo you’ve accrued thus far, you start messing about with it. In no time at all, you realise with eye-widening, no, surely not possibility that if you create two water blocks on the same spot, they’ll spool skywards into a tall, liquid column. Surely yes! Nintendo did just give me the keys to making magic, physics-defying liquid steps, and this changes absolutely everything.
It’s these kinds of quiet revelations that always feel the most magical to me in games. The water block doesn’t just make Zelda’s movement feel more intentional in the game, providing purpose where Crawltula spider echoes were previously erratic and sometimes unpredictable. It also expands her reach into her own kingdom, carrying her further and higher than the trampolines, beds and boxes that regularly fell short of getting her where you wanted to go. It makes the world feel more alive with secrets and hitherto unseen nooks and crannies to explore that are now ripe for cracking open and pushing your nose into, letting you inhale everything this toylike playbox has to offer and then some.
That it comes in such an unusual and delightful form, too, is precisely what makes the water block feel so special – more so than the myriad abilities you gain in some of this year’s other exploratory highlights, such as the Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, or harnessing the power of the seeds you plant in Ultros’ strange, organic spaceship. Those – the double jump, the swing vine, the grapple hook – all feel much more deliberately gamey in their design. They’re exactly what you expect from those sorts of games, which doesn’t make them any less delightful or pleasing under the thumbs when you encounter them, but the fact you’re anticipating them from the off can’t help but rob them of some of their mystery.
But Zelda’s water block is just a humble water block – a single, ordinary(ish) object that can be used and combined in such creative and inventive ways that it catapults right to the top of my favourite puzzle items – both from this year and in recent memory. It’s a wondrous and so very Nintendo way of recalibrating how you view the world in front of you, and I only hope Zelda and her Echoes get another outing to dazzle us with in the future.