The last Zelda game I played was “The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past” for the old Super Nintendo Entertainment System.  In my mind, to this day it is one of the best videogames of all time.  Sixteen years later, I finally pick up my second Zelda title, “The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess” for the Nintendo Wii.  Filled with trepidation and nostalgia, I set off on my journey with Link.

The game opens slowly, letting you delve into the character of Link through the eyes of the other villagers.  You get to see that he is a good man, well-respected, and beloved by the people and children of his village.  He is a hard worker and a simple person at heart.  The story slowly draws you in and after some settling in, I found myself enjoying the pace – but only after the second time I played the introduction and realized that it’s no Mario Galaxy.

After a slow and meaningful introduction into Link’s character, I was intrigued by the first puzzles it presented to me – how to obtain a slingshot so he can play with the kids.  This wasn’t just a “gather some money” kind of quest.  There were a few problems to solve in the interim:

The shopkeeper won’t sell me anything because she is depressed about her cat.
The cat won’t come home because he’s busy trying to catch a fish in the stream.
The lady who has a fishing rod won’t give it to me because she is preoccupied with a missing baby basket.
The monkey won’t give up the stolen basket because he is beyond my reach.

It took a while to solve the problem that was presented to me.  But through some clever plot device, I was introduced to the idea of using a Hawk to aid me.

Somewhere, an old puzzle-solving voice (long disused by all the twitch-gaming I’ve grown accustomed to) spoke up: “Use hawk on monkey.”

As the story unfolded, I explored my first real dungeon.  And as I started making my way around the dungeon, every room opened up to me like yet another series of puzzles that I needed to solve.  The game slowly but surely showed me a vocabulary with interacting with the world around me.  And as puzzle after puzzle unfolded before me, a familiar sensation of experimentation, discovery and achievement filled my heart as puzzle after puzzle was solved.  But what stopped me was the vocabulary of how I was solving puzzles.

That puzzle-solving voice kept speaking:
“Use lantern on torch.”
“Use boomerang on bomb.”
“Use boomerang on bomb then wall.”
“Stand on spiderweb.  Use latern on spiderweb.”

Each room was a new puzzle and to solve each puzzle I had to understand the proper vocabulary to manipulate the puzzle.  Unlike other videogames where the solution is readily apparent with pushing levels, blocks and crates, I found myself seriously wondering what I was doing wrong to get the dungeon key from its treasure box.  But once the solution clicked in my head, the familiar satisfaction of its realization resounded in my mind.  It reminded me of the old “point and click” adventure games that I loved when I was a child.  The puzzle-solving voice reemerged from its long hiatus from this disused genre.

The games I loved the most were the ones that really made you think.  Games like King’s Quest, Quest for Glory, The Secret of Monkey Island, Loom, and even Yahtzee Croshaw’s Adventure Game Studio stories were among the games I most revered.  For the most part I had wondered why the genre died off with the advent of 3D gaming.

There have been many attempts at reviving the “point and click” adventure genre, and some have been met with acclaim and success, but nothing has sparked the same commanding presence the genre once had in the industry.  Also the genre was never able to overcome it’s resounding flaw: many of the puzzles and solutions were either too obvious or convoluted beyond reasonable logic.  So once “point and click” adventures got replaced with first-person “point and click” headshots, it spelled the end of the adventure game.  Instant gratification replaced long thought processes and solutions.

Or did it?

The challenge that I was met with in the first few hours of Twilight Princess narrative and puzzles made me question that assumption of that gamers always need instant gratification.  The first dungeon presented me with challenging and well thought-out puzzles mixed that almost made me lo0k for an online walkthrough just to get by.   And the story’s pacing was slow, but it was meant for you to get into the pace of a rustic village and get to know the silent yet steadfast character of our hero – something you don’t see much of in many of our FMV-loaded JRPGs of the day.

Twilight Princess revived a hopeful spark in me that the principles of the old adventure games have not been lost but evolved into something new.  I am looking forward to more of this already masterful work and seeing if my hopes are fulfilled by the promise of Zelda – the Twilight Princess.