The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past's dungeon design | Boss Keys

Hi. My name's Mark and this is Boss Keys. So, I make a YouTube show called Game Maker's Toolkit and an episode I've wanted to make for a long time is a breakdown of the dungeon design in The Legend of Zelda games. I think these things are fascinating. They're these twisting, contorting, non-linear maze-like puzzles boxes filled with enemies and traps. They have terrific boss fights and unique architecture and the best ones are these gigantic mechanical riddles for you to solve.

But if I want to do this episode properly, I'm going to need to revisit every major Zelda game, and that's going to take hundreds of hours. Which is a lot of research for just one video. So I thought it might be fun to release a bunch of spin-off episodes as I go. One video on each Zelda game I play, with my thoughts and findings on the dungeon design in that game. If you want to follow along, that's cool. If you prefer the more thoroughly researched and bite sized episodes I usually make, just wait a few months and I'll do a proper episode of Game Maker's Toolkit featuring everything I've learnt on this subject.

I'm kicking off with The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. It's the third Zelda game but it's where Nintendo really established the formula, and introduced iconic elements like the master sword, heart pieces, and the hook shot. Let's start by talking about linearity. Do the dungeons usher you from room to room, or let you explore their layouts in any way you desire? The answer is that some dungeons do the former, others do the latter, and some lie in the middle.

Those in the middle include the Eastern Palace: the first proper dungeon in the game. What you'll notice is that there is only one path you can take through the dungeon. You have to go up here past these boulders, then around in a big loop to get to this room, then across to this area to get the big key, then it's off to the item chest to get to the bow, and upstairs to fight the boss. But the dungeon feels less linear than that, for a number of reasons. One is the number of optional rooms - this one contains the dungeon map, which isn't essential. And this one just contains a bunch of rupees.

Those rooms - plus the ability to visit rooms that you'll come into later such as this area where a pair of blocks make a one-way path - give the dungeon a large explorable space. There are lots of rooms and doors to choose from. Also, keys force you off the critical path. You can't get through this door until you make a detour off into this room to find a key. Nintendo can modulate difficulty by moving the key further away from the door.

And finally, the path crisscrosses over the entire dungeon. The bridge is over the boulders you dodged earlier, the excursion to get the big key sends you in a huge loop around the dungeon, and the big key makes you backtrack to this room with the giant chest. All of this obscures the critical path, forcing you to explore to find it. So while the dungeon essentially guides you along one path, you get the sense that you're making your own route. Clever stuff.

Other dungeons are less prescribed in the way you solve them. The Palace of Darkness - the fifth dungeon - will see you holding more than one key in your pocket for the first time in the game. And you can use those keys on multiple locked doors. What this means is that you can proceed through the dungeon in a truly non-linear way. For this door, you could use this key, or this key. And then you could open this door or this door, and use this key, this key, or either of those first two keys.

There's still a predetermined set of rooms you have to visit but having some agency over your route gives you the real sense that you're making decisions, and you find yourself hitting fewer dead ends. What's surprising is the number of optional rooms in dungeons of this design. Take this main floor of Ganon's Keep: you don't need to go in any of these rooms to finish the dungeon. And in Misery Mire, there are five keys to find but you can actually solve the entire dungeon with just two if you know what you're doing.

Of course, you rarely know what you're doing so these unnecessary rooms must be there to make the dungeon feel bigger and tougher than it truly is, giving you so many keys and locks and rooms to explore that you feel like a champion puzzle solver when you finish. Turtle Rock is another dungeon that feels harder than it is. This room has a crazy spaghetti junction of pipes but in reality you only need to keep track of two of them to succeed.

Some dungeons are completely linear. Especially in your return to Hyrule Castle. You move from room to room, and all the locked doors are unlocked with keys found in the exact same room. But that fits the tone of the story. At this point, Zelda has been kidnapped (again) and you're charging up Hyrule castle's tower - slashing everything in your way. This is the time for a gauntlet of enemies as you chase after Zelda. Not pensive puzzle solving and getting lost.

This is the only dungeon like that but you'll find that some dungeons are halfway between two styles. Desert Palace, the second dungeon, starts relatively non-linear with this massive opening chamber that has a whopping seven doors to explore, and one more to unlock. But after that it turns into a straightforward path to the boss. This gives a sort of ramping tension. You rarely just stumble upon the boss door while exploring: you get there after a section where you have to move quickly from room to room, fighting baddies, and amping up the stakes before you go head-to-head with the final monster.

There's a nice moment in The Tower of Hera which reminds us that while Zelda wouldn't go 3D for seven more years, dungeons in A Link to the Past were already making us think about the space as a building with verticality. Because to get to the Moon Pearl, which is in this big chest on floor four, you have to drop down from the exact right spot on floor five. This puzzle won't bust your noggin, but it will get you to think about these dungeons as actual 3D spaces.

It's a shame that there aren't more dungeons that really make you think about how they're put together, in order to navigate them. But here's a nice set-up that does just that. In the Palace of Darkness you need the orange blocks to be lowered to get up this staircase. But if you drop them by hitting either this switch or this switch, it will also raise the blue blocks and stop you getting to the staircase. So you have to go in a loop around the dungeon and come up from the room to the south.

It's simple but it's an elegant piece of design that encourages you to understand the layout of the level and it promotes some forward thinking. A more complicated version of this puzzle comes in the long and winding Ice Palace. It's perhaps the hardest dungeon in the game and then when you finally get to the end you realise that you need to push this block down the hole and - this time - you need to lower the blue blocks but that will lift the orange ones and block you. And this time the route back around is a lot harder to find.

Another dungeon worth mentioning is Skull Woods, which takes place both underground and overground. It's interesting to see Nintendo toying with the dungeon formula so early in the game. Likewise, Thieve's Town has you leading this girl to a room bathed in light, where she'll transform into the dungeon's boss, Blind. So there we have it. 12 dungeons - some straightforward, some twisting, some non-linear. They ask you to understand the way the dungeon is put together, and they surprise you by breaking with convention.

Overall, it's a strong start for this series. And the question is - where to next? On to Link's Awakening, or do we jump to Ocarina of Time? Let me know your thought in the comments below. Thanks for watching. Boss Keys is made possible thanks to the fine folks at Patreon who are somehow happy to fund a several month long project to make a 10 minute video about Zelda games. What a bunch of cool weirdos.