The Legend of Zelda™: Echoes of Wisdom

I went into Echoes of Wisdom half-expecting Nintendo to hedge, giving Zelda a sword and calling it a day. What I got instead was something genuinely harder to categorise: a top-down action-adventure where your primary tool is a summoning rod, not a blade. The core Echo system lets you copy objects and defeated enemies from the world, then deploy those copies as platforms, shields, cannon fodder, or puzzle solutions. Stack a bed to reach a ledge, summon a Peahat to harass a miniboss, line up water-block echoes to cross a chasm. The flexibility is real, and the first half of the game does a great job drip-feeding new echoes so each dungeon feels like a fresh set of toys. The dungeon structure itself leans traditional: eight main dungeons, each capped with a boss fight and a heart piece reward. That structure is comfortable for anyone who played the Link's Awakening remake, and the same diorama art style carries over beautifully. Environments are small-scale and warm, with a charm that makes exploration feel low-stakes in a good way. The overworld is dense with side content and smoothie crafting, where you collect ingredients across Hyrule to brew stat-boosting drinks and keep Zelda's energy meter charged. There are real friction points worth knowing about. The echo selection menu, which has you scrolling sideways through up to 127 unlockable entries, becomes genuinely awkward mid-combat. The swordfighter mode, which lets Zelda temporarily wield Link's full sword-and-bow kit, is a useful pressure valve for tougher encounters, but it also exposes how undercooked the base combat feels alongside it. Pop into swordfighter form, spam bombs, done. That loop does not get more interesting over time. Performance on Switch can also dip during open-area exploration, a complaint that tracks with the identical issue in the Link's Awakening remake. For puzzle-forward players, none of that hurts much. The Echo system rewards lateral thinking in ways that hold up across the whole campaign, and there is genuine delight in discovering that a monster echo you wrote off in hour two becomes the MVP of a late dungeon. For action-oriented players who want satisfying combat from moment to moment, the game will feel like it is always one step away from clicking into place without quite getting there. Echoes of Wisdom is a confident, well-constructed Zelda entry that makes one excellent design choice, which is putting puzzle-solving at the centre of Zelda's identity, and then mostly commits to it. It is the right game for the right audience; just walk in knowing you are here to summon, stack, and think, not to combo.

Alex · Scout Team

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