Waking Up To Breath Of The Wild’s Unmissable Opening Hours

Waking from my slumber with a familiar feeling voice calling my attention, I stumble out of the cave I’m in, grabbing the strange tablet device that’s foisted upon me and heading out into the bright sunlight that bathes the Great Plateau. I’ve played the opening to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild a few times now. This time I forgot to put any clothes on.

So I go back and grab my weathered shirt. I don’t bother with trousers. I try to sneak around behind the Old Man sat calmly by a campfire, to steal his torch without him noticing, but it’s to no avail, and he engages me in conversation. Amongst other things, he asks me if I’m chilly… because I’m not wearing trousers.

Breath of the Wild is a dramatically different game to those that have come before in a series that’s now more than thirty years old – it turned thirty-one just a few days ago. One of the many things that sticks out for me, though, is that you get to be kind of a jerk. Steal the torch and the Old Man asks what you plan to do with it, to which I stated my intent to set fire to things. Should you find his humble abode, you can take everything he owns and read his diary. I didn’t try to burn his home down. I’m not that bad a person.

This is perhaps the first time since Link’s Awakening permanently branded you as a thief for stealing from the shop, Nintendo have opened up to the fact that an awful lot of players are going to be complete and utter jerks. Sometimes you can get a bit of a reaction to it, but it goes right down to being able to exit almost any conversation at any point by simply saying “Bye” and running off.

Perhaps that’s being a little unfair on Link, when really it’s just one little signifier of a greater shift within the game. This is more playful and more exploratory, it gently pushes you in one direction, but you’re free to head the opposite way or ignore the advice given to you and simply discover things for yourselves. One of the four shrines in the opening area is only accessible if you prepare yourself to deal with the cold. So, you can try and find warmer garments to protect yourself.

The Sheikah Slate, a mystical tablet that you grab on the way out of the cave you wake up in, is an unusually technological device. it’s somewhat at odds with the fantasy setting, I feel, but it brings a lot of flexibility to the game. My absolute favourite is being able to freeze objects in time, such as a rolling boulder or a cog in a mechanism. However, once something is frozen, you can then hit it several times and build up a cumulative force that’s far more powerful than anything you can do in real time.

Beyond that, you can throw as many bombs as you like, limited only by a cooldown timer, create blocks of ice from pools of water, and grab metallic objects with a magical magnet and move them within the world. The slate is going to be at the heart of so many of the puzzles in the game, many of which are in the shrines dotted around the world.

Also dotted about are the Bokoblin camps, with small groups of these recurring Zelda enemies huddled around fires, relaxing while food cooks, or even trying to chase after a boar that has wandered too close. Taking them on is a basic pleasure, whether you run in and start fighting or try to use the environment to your advantage and get the drop on them.

They’re also wonderful for showing off some of the more emergent aspects of the game’s design. Fire can spread from one object to another quite happily, and is true of when an item is in a Bokoblin’s hand as well. One moment that caught me completely by surprise was when a Bokoblin’s swipe with a spear passed through the flames of a torch dropped by his fallen comrade. I’d expected to be hit, but I hadn’t expected for that hit to suddenly be from a flaming spear that would set me on fire in turn. There’s countless examples of such beautifully interwoven points of game design, just from the first few hours you spend with the game.

This is absolutely the kind of game where I’m going to wish I could play it for the first time again, where I would love to take a fortnight to explore every nook and cranny to figure things out for myself. As it is, these first few hours were still beguiling, but I played without sound thanks to a peculiarity of capturing footage, periodically checked that features had gone live, replied to emails, and so on. I was working, in other words, and the same will likely be true of the rest of my playthrough, as I try to stick to the main path through the story to complete the game or play enough of it in order to review it.

You, if and when you get to play it for yourself, will have all the freedom in the world to pick your own path. Unlike previous Zelda games, there’s no prescribed path to follow. You can tackle the shrines on the Great Plateau in any order, scouring the land for every chest, every hidden secret and Bokoblin camp in the process, and once you descend from this secluded area, you can follow the path marked for you to go East, or stray from it and head North, South, even making a trail for Calamity Ganon while still wearing your pants. Seeing speed runs of this game is going to be an absolute delight.

I’m just four or five hours into Breath of the Wild, but I have to say, I already envy those players that will get to experience it for the first time next week.

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I'm probably wearing toe shoes, and there's nothing you can do to stop me!

3 Comments

  1. Wow, that’s a beautiful looking game. The world seems so rich too, huge, good amount of vertical and full of life. Some bits of text are funny in a self aware kind of way too, like that when you’re told the wooden mop is ‘actually useful’, hah. Looks great! Hope you’re enjoying it Tef.

    • Absolutely loving it. It’s such a modern, revisionist take on the series.

  2. This really does sound magnificent and everything I’d hoped for, honestly.

    It’s funny that you say you wish that you could re-experience it for the first time again because that’s a feeling I hold highly too with every gaming experience and I’m not watching or listening to any videos or music on the game.

    I’m rethinking my decision to not pre-order the machine.
    An F-Zero announcement would push me over the edge.

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