You’ve probably seen and read a lot about Tears of the Kingdom’s heights, so let’s start by plumbing its depths. The most accessible of these are water wells – around 50 in total, typically located near villages and stables, though a few lurk in the bellies of forgotten ruins. Drop in, and sometimes, all you’ll find below are puddles and moss, a few lizards you can toss into a potion, and the trace of a story. One well I visited had a hydroponics garden beneath it, with melons swelling in the glare of bioluminescent shrubs. Another harboured a fellow well-enthusiast, one of the many charmingly written vagrant nerds you’ll meet in Tears of the Kingdom’s vertically expanded Hyrule, who promptly handed me a sidequest to discover – you guessed it – all the other wells.
Wells are fleeting distractions, a nice way to cool off after a giddy descent from a floating island, or warm yourself up for the next major dungeon after a night at the inn. But sometimes, you spy a cracked wall you can shatter with a rock hammer you’ve improvised by fusing a boulder to a rusty sword. You stroll through the gap expecting a treasure chest or similar, and find yourself in a labyrinth. There could be anything down here – a skeleton ogre encased in brittle magma; a dusty palanquin housing a piece of antique armour; a multiple-storey cavern full of flammable brambles, screaming wall-crawlers, and outcrops of precious ore.
Occasionally, you come away from these cave systems dissatisfied, with nothing but a pocketful of mushrooms in return for 10 minutes of sweaty excavation – a process not helped by the returning weapon degradation system, which obliges you to fashion new mining tools at regular intervals. As with Skyrim’s old Draugr dungeons, there’s a slight sense of design-by-spreadsheet, and a greater commitment to filling in spaces the previous Zelda game, 2017’s Breath of the Wild, left powerfully vacant. But many of these underground warrens are marvellous in scale and intricacy, and I haven’t even gotten to the best of them – the Chasms, huge, billowing rips in Hyrule’s geography, which provide access to a full-blown second open world lurking beneath the first.
Source – eurogamer.net
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