When Uncharted 4 came out, one of the things that annoyed me about the game to no end was all the climbing. Basically, climbing in Uncharted or Tomb Raider or many other games boils down to finding ledges. Find the ledge (sometimes marked with a bit of white paint, sometimes just an obvious ledge) and swing over to it, then climb along it and move to other ledges, rinse and repeat. It's not really a puzzle and not really platforming for the most part, save for the few occasions when you need to time things just so. And those occasions are few and far between.
When the VR game The Climb came out, I was excited because it added a puzzle element to climbing that was missing from most AAA games. You had to chalk your hands and manage your stamina. Unfortunately, I had a hard time playing The Climb for very long because it required me to wear a VR headset which, I'll be honest, is not particularly pleasant.
Enter The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. You can climb just about anything in this game. There's a ton of climbing in it. There's even towers you have to climb to unlock the map, just like in Far Cry. I should be annoyed by this, but I'm not, because climbing in the newest Zelda is almost always some kind of puzzle game, and the further in you get the more difficult the challenges become. Thankfully, you also get more tools to get the job done.
I came to a particularly difficult tower recently that I simply wouldn't have been able to climb if it weren't for a special power I had unlocked not long before. It's just dumb luck that I did things in that order, too, since the game pretty much gives you license to go anywhere you like at any point. Fortunately, I'd unlocked this power that made getting up the tower quite literally a breeze. Other towers have stumped me entirely until I figured out the trick.
There's other elements that complicate climbing, or make it easier. Climbing uses up stamina, and some items will make climbing less drain your stamina wheel more slowly, for instance. Rain, on the other hand, makes any surface slick and almost impossible to scale. Nintendo has put such thought into the climbing mechanic, that even the grade of the slope you're attempting to climb figures in to the stamina equation, making steep cliffs much more challenging than more gradual slopes.
All of this goes well beyond the typical 'use ice-pick to climb wall' or 'find ledge' mechanics we're used to. It transforms climbing into an actual puzzle. It also opens up new avenues to approach different areas. I came to one bridge where the enemies simply had me out-gunned. I was out of arrows and couldn't take them on from a distance. Coming too close meant a fiery death. What to do? Oh I know, I'll just hop off the bridge, paraglide to the nearby cliff, and climb up behind enemy lines.
This is the sort of thing that has defined my experience with Breath of the Wild so far. I honestly wasn't sure if I'd ever find climbing in a video game fun again, but here we are. Nintendo's game designers prove, once again, that they're at the top of their game.
In so many ways, Zelda takes modern gameplay mechanics and then makes them better. Climbing is just one example of this. In modern games, climbing is often just pushing a stick in the right direction. Nintendo makes it a puzzle. Nintendo makes it a game.
Read my preview of some of the incredible things you can do in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild here, and stay tuned for my review of the game (or at least part one of my review) tomorrow.
You can read my review of the Nintendo Switch here.
