The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword's dungeon design | Boss Keys

In the first Legend of Zelda game, Nintendo introduced us to the dungeon. These were winding underground mazes, with branching paths, locked doors, dead ends, and secret passageways. Sure, there were enemies to fight. And simple block-pushing puzzles to solve. But those acted as quickfire micro challenges - designed to keep you engaged while you solved the more important macro challenge of actually finding your way to the boss room.

So, in Zelda 1, we realised that we couldn't just think of these rooms as individual areas - but they had to be considered within the context of the entire dungeon - as we worked out where we've been, where we need to go, and how we're going to get there. Later Zelda games would, of course, expand on this idea. Different keys and different locks meant there was more to keep in mind when exploring the space. Multiple floors added a third dimension to our mental map. And tricky elements like these roundabouts forced us to think ahead.

The most memorable dungeons of all would task us with radically changing the layout of the space so we could get to our goals. That includes dropping one floor onto another in Eagle's Tower. Raising and lowering the water level in the Water Temple. Switching the water direction in the Great Bay Temple. Changing the past to affect the present in Mermaid's Cave. And flipping the Stone Tower Temple onto its head so Link can walk on the ceiling.

But by the 8th game, Wind Waker, something had changed. With fewer branching paths, a more straightforward progression, level design that guided you around by the hand, and hardly any instances of the player radically changing the dungeon's layout - players no longer needed to consider each dungeon as a cohesive whole, but more as a sequence of individual rooms - where the micro challenges had been given a much greater focus.

And, for the next few games, that became the norm. You'd have some classically designed dungeons here and there - the Wind Temple in Wind Waker, Fortress of Winds in Minish Cap, and Lakebed Temple in Twilight Princess - but they were surrounded by dozens of fun, but very easy dungeons. Until... and I can't believe I'm saying this. But until Skyward Sword, which brought sharp dungeon design back to the Zelda series. The reason for my surprise is that I really don't like Skyward Sword. It's intensely repetitive, it's full of annoying padding, it's ludicrously linear, claustrophobically restrictive, Fi is the most annoying sidekick in the series, and as fun as the motion controlled fights can be - the technology is still imprecise and unreliable.

But, in the attempt to block the game from my memory, I had also forgotten just how clever and imaginative the dungeons can be. Take, for example, the Ancient Cistern Now this is an interesting dungeon for a number of reasons. For starters it's just gorgeous, with chilled out music, a cool colour scheme, and this massive statue at the centre. But this serene central room hides something more sinister: a dark and disturbing underbelly painted in deep purple tones and crawling with cursed bokoblins.

It turns out that this design is likely based on the Japanese short story The Spider's Thread, where a criminal attempts to escape from the depths of hell by climbing up a thin string. I don't know if this has some deeper meaning for Link or is just a cool motif - but, either way, it's a neat touch. Anyway, that's not really the point. What I'm most interested in is this statue which acts like a giant elevator car. When you first enter the dungeon the statue's three doors lead to the central room, a pointless balcony up top, and a hidden room containing the key item: the whip.

But when Link pulls on this switch, the statue moves down. The doors now lead to the central room, the whip room, and the underworld. Which is cool but there's an issue... Previously in the dungeon we saw that there was an important treasure chest in the underworld. And then Fi appeared and told us that there was an important treasure chest in the underworld. And we realise that when the statue moves down, it covers up the treasure chest and we can't get to it.

Woah! That's a puzzle! The statue leads us to the chest, but also stops us from getting to the chest. So, we need the statue to be up and then find an alternative way of getting to the underworld. We need to understand the relationship between the statue and the chest, consider the dungeon as a cohesive whole, and - oh. Oh hold on. What does this tablet say? Return the statue to its original form, and descend below the earth again along the thread.

Oh. It tells you exactly how to solve the puzzle. Sigh. I mean, I guess this stone tablet really shows Nintendo struggling to make a dungeon that is complex, challenging to traverse, and faithful to the design legacy of Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask - but also not wanting anyone to get so lost and confused that they can't finish the game. Which I appreciate, of course. Nintendo makes accessible games for all ages and that is wonderful.

but there's got to be a better way to deliver this sort of hint. The game already has a system where you can ask Fi for help with the current puzzle - so just put it there! Otherwise, a really interesting dungeon just loses its bite in one stone tablet. Okay. Let's talk about time travel. One of the most interesting things in Skyward Sword are these timeshift stones that you find in Lanayru Desert. Whack one of these and suddenly you open a window to a world hundreds of years in the past, where robots worked away in giant factories. It's actually a great way of tying world-building detail to a game mechanic.

It's also used in two and a half dungeons for some great puzzles. Lanayru Mining Facility, the third dungeon in the game, has rooms that are inaccessible in their current form. Conveyer belts and floating platforms have shut down, and mechanical enemies have come to rest in annoying spots. So the goal is to find the timeshift stone and activate it, to send the level into the past and turn on all the machines. It's both a blessing and curse, as old robot foes spring to life and shoot Link with lasers. Ouch.

That's about as complicated as the puzzles get for this dungeon - outside of some clever sections where you have to keep up with a timeshift stone that's in a moving mine cart. But the stones have no effect on rooms outside the one you're in - keeping them as micro challenges, in an otherwise pretty simple-to-navigate temple. Then there's the Pirate Stronghold mini dungeon, where you pick up a timeshift stone and carry it through the area. This place teaches you that electrified doors can be turned off in the present, and spikey obstacles are removed in the past. And there's even a clever puzzle where you need to put the stone in one room, so it bleeds through into another and gives you access to the switch. That's getting better.

And then you have the Sandship - a truly brilliant dungeon. In this one, there's only one timeshift stone but it affects the entire ship - turning it from a dusty relic to a functioning sea vessel, and back again. And, oh ho, now this opens up some interesting puzzles. Of course, one of the cooler ones is spoiled by Fi. You need to be in the past to go into this door. But inside, there's a door that requires you to be in the present. And because the timeshift stone is up on the deck, you can't change the timeline inside the room. So what are you going to do?

Well, the solution is to shoot an arrow through a grate in the ceiling and into the timeshift stone up in the mast. That would make you feel very clever if you figured it out, but sadly Fi just explains it to you. Cheers. Thanks for that, love. But okay I will take that as a way of Fi training you for an upcoming puzzle that subverts those original rules. The set up is the same: you've got a door you can only get through in the past and inside there's a door you can only get through in the present. But this time, there's no window in the ceiling to shoot at the timeshift stone. A conundrum!

But you also have these two portholes. And from one of them, we can see that there's a small boat up high, directly above the other porthole. So! We need to go up to the top deck, go into the present, ride the boat down, go through the porthole, and through the door to the goal. That is a pretty terrific puzzle. It builds on mechanics learnt in previous parts of the game, and the only way to solve it is to have a real understanding of the way the ship is put together, using that scrumptious spatial reasoning stuff that makes Zelda dungeons... well, Zelda dungeons.

A key part of this puzzle, and other challenges in the sandship, is that the time shift switch is in a different room to the one where its effects are felt. This means we have to use the switch without seeing the consequences. Which means we need to have a good understanding of the dungeon so we know what activating the switch will do - before we walk all the way back to the room where we need to take advantage of its effect.

This idea, of distancing the switch from its consequences, drives some of the best dungeons in Zelda like the Stone Tower Temple and the Water Temple. And this is something we'll need to come back to in the future, because of the way Breath of the Wild works. The last dungeon in Skyward Sword is also pretty bonkers. In Skykeep you can literally shift the dungeon's rooms around - so to get to the right room you need to truly understand the layout of the dungeon, so you can figure out where to stand before jumbling up the rooms to make an entirely new layout It's absurd and it's brilliant and it's impossible to depict with my graph system. But that's okay because all the best dungeons in Zelda either stress the limits of my graphs, or outright break them - the graph for the Sandship, for example, is a mess.

But the graphs do show us that the other dungeons in Skyward Sword are a lot less ambitious. Skyview Temple, the first dungeon in the game, gives us a bit of choice in how we raise the water level in the first room. but you can see a real forward progression in the dungeon where we complete the first section, move onto the second, and then finish the third without ever needing to return to earlier areas. The two fire temples - Earth Temple and Fire Sanctuary - both look gorgeous and have cool mechanics like riding on top of a giant ball and using drops of water to create lava platforms, but in terms of the macro challenge they're very simple.

Here's the graph for the Earth Temple. And here's the one for the Fire Sanctuary. But I guess that's okay. Not every dungeon needs to focus on that macro goal and having some dungeons that focus more on the micro goals does make for an interesting mix. Especially now that Nintendo has gotten even better at puzzle and enemy design in the zelda games. A number of dungeons feature those nifty evolving puzzle motifs first seen in the Wind Waker.

In the Skyview Temple, for example, you first spin your sword around to make this eye dizzy. Then you do it again, but this time for two eyes at once. And then you do it a third time, but now you need to find a way to stand up higher to defeat all three eyes at once. I think the enemies are pretty fun to fight, too. Like these snakes where you need to strike all three heads at once. or the Lizalfos, where you need to slice your sword to avoid their metal gauntlet. Or these mechanical monsters from the Mining Facility where you use your gust bellows to open their mouth before landing the final blow.

In terns of how it looks, by the way, this is some great enemy design. Some quick stray thoughts before I wrap up. This game features a few puzzles that are about learning information, which you can then use in a different room, like in the ancient cistern where you piece together the solution to a lock, found elsewhere in the dungeon. This is borrowed from Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks, and is an interesting twist on the key and lock idea. Because the key is in your brain!

The bosses are a bit hit or miss. Some are painfully easy and have extremely obvious weakpoints. But Koloktos, in the Ancient Cistern, is one of the best Zelda bosses ever just because of how much fun it is to slash away with those oversized weapons. One significant change to the Zelda formula is that the compass has been removed, and now the map shows you absolutely everything - rooms, chests, the boss - just like the compass in previous games. But also now locked doors, and even things like this wall you need to blow up in the Earth Temple. I would say that advanced players can just ignore the map, but then there's a puzzle where you can't see the path through some quicksand - and the solution is on the map screen! Argh!

In general, the game feels quite easy with generous checkpoints, oodles of hearts - you start with six! - and loads of save points. And, finally, Skyview Temple is one of the only dungeons in Zelda history where you have to come back to it, later in the game. Sadly, there's nothing interesting to be found here - it just feels like more padding and repetition. So, I keep coming back to this idea of thinking about a dungeon as a whole, rather than a series of separate rooms.

Because things like keys, locks, items, obstacles, backtracking, branching paths, non-linearity, water levels, and shifting statues can all be tied to this idea of asking the player to think about something bigger than just the current room And this might just be the key to what makes Zelda dungeons so special because outside of Metroidvanias, there just aren't many games that turn navigation into a meaningful and enjoyable type of gameplay.

Which is why it was such a bummer for Zelda games to lose that spark for so many years - and such a surprise, to see Skyward Sword bring it back in a big and bold way by featuring the sort of shifting architectural puzzles we haven't really seen since Majora's Mask. So. Hooray. Welcome back, Nintendo. Let's see where you go from here. On the next episode of Boss Keys, we're looking at the Nintendo 3DS game, A Link Between Worlds.