My Kids Aren't Playing the New Zelda, But They're Playing It With Me

It's more fun, it turns out, to watch dad flail around with snakes. Plus, insight from the Crossplay community on how their own family experiences have gone.

Oct 04, 2024

For weeks, I’ve been suspecting The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, Nintendo’s new Zelda-centric video game where players summon and control objects, would be a seismic event in the house. What I did not anticipate was how much Astro Bot would linger in the imaginations of my children, because they keep asking to watch me play Astro Bot, even though Dad has (obviously) already collected every hidden robot in it.

But because Dad is playing Echoes of Wisdom, the children are curious, especially when their screen time is up. My eight-year-old has made her way through the intro on her own, more or less catching up with the demo she played at PAX a few weeks back. My four-year-old hasn’t shown any interest in holding a controller, but she has been keen to watch me play and provide her input on what exactly I should be doing.

(We did, to be fair, lose a chance to capitalize on the game’s release date because my children spent the weekend in Wisconsin catching a Simone Biles gymnastics show.)

Echoes of Wisdom is an interesting game because it’s only subtly prescriptive about what players “should” do. When I played the game at PAX, for example, I clumsily beat a boss fight by tossing hordes of bats (aka “Keese”) into the arena, only for the Nintendo representative to chuckle and ask if I wanted to know how the fight was “supposed” to go. It turns out, I’d forgotten a mechanic, so the reminder was helpful.

But!

That scenario, where you solve a challenge in the way you want, is at the heart of Echoes of Wisdom. And it’s led to a funny game with my four-year-old. When her screen time is up but we’re not ready for bedtime, I will allow either kid to watch me play a game, and Echoes of Wisdom has been the choice for the past few evenings.

My four-year-old grasps that Zelda summons things to help her. The controller, the mechanics, the amount of on-screen text—all of that puts the game beyond her. But she gets the nuts and bolts, which means she can pass on her ~~suggestions~~ directives to me. How this works out in practice is that whenever we have to climb on something, whenever we have to fight something, she tells me what tools I’m now forced to use.

You can imagine how this ends up going: she trolls me.

Is it possible to use a bed as a weapon in Echoes of Wisdom? I’m gonna try. (No.)
Can you summon enough pots to take out a room of enemies? Let’s see. (Yes!)
“Dad, I know you hate spiders. Use the spiders.” Do I hate spiders? Yes. (Ugh.)

You can hear an interaction in this style in the video below. Apologies for the sound of dishes being washed. This these moments usually happen when evening is upon us!

Note: The gameplay presented in both videos is just random footage from Echoes of Wisdom, because the Switch does not passively record minutes of video. I’m hoping this will be a feature of the next Switch, or else I’ll have to invest in some equipment to help capture these moments.

Recently, we also stumbled onto Echoes of Wisdom’s “smoothie” storefronts, where the player slaps together two different ingredients found in the wild and hopes it produces something useful. At the very least, you’re likely to gain some health back, but it can also be imbued with other properties, such as protecting your from lightning strikes. It’s a simplification of the cooking system in modern 3D Zelda games, but it’s also simple enough that my four-year-old can chime in with ideas.

Though it’s not present in the video below, her favorite is producing a “yucky” smoothie. You can usually guess when ingredients go awry, and she absolutely howled every time the game would tell us we’d made something disgusting. Really good fun.

Though it’s only been a few days since release, I asked the Crossplay community to write in with stories about their own Echoes of Wisdom experiences at home.

“I’m a Dad of 3 boys (14, 12, 5) and we are all enjoying Echoes of Wisdom tremendously. So far, my 5 year old has played the game the most, he’s been able to overcome most obstacles with help from his older brothers.
What’s worked about the game design: Not having a sword as a primary weapon makes us think of unique ways to solve problems. Maybe we want to send a swarm of bats to attack that mummy. Or maybe we want to use a spider web to climb over them and avoid them all together. This game doesn’t default to killing everything and encourages problem solving.” — Hugo

Echoes of Wisdom plays with elevation. Even when you want to rely on swinging a sword, it’s possible the sword is functionally useless against the enemies you’re facing. It’s also just…kinda boring? I understand how Nintendo ended up including it, but even here, it feels like a crutch, a backup for a player who’s exhausted other options. I wouldn’t be shocked if a sequel to Echoes of Wisdom ended up ditching the feature.

My youngest, the one I played the game with the most, has not asked for it once.

“Zelda has been pretty good so far with 8&3 YO daughters. They watch me play and I have to read out loud A LOT. They like to watch instead of playing themselves for what it’s worth. [...] I wish Nintendo would move to a less wordy approach to games aimed at kids. It’s such a different experience to something like the games that are on iPad where you jump right into action. Reminds me of how games that I grew up (early 90s NES/SNES) with at home or in arcades just got you into the fun faster. I feel like a lot of the story can be pantomimed or summarized quickly, maybe as an accessibility option.” — Ryan

This is a problem I’ve noticed with Nintendo, generally. I don’t mean to keep praising a Paw Patrol video game, but sheesh, even that game understands that reading comprehension is not universal amongst kids, and provides an option where all menus and all text within the game has speech attached. Echoes of Wisdom is wordy, often unnecessarily so. Tutorials for basic concepts are several pages long. There’s no chance my eight-year-old is fully parsing though. My guess is she’s clicking the A button, moving them along, and hoping to pick it up via action.

In defense of Echoes of Wisdom, it’s a fine line. Its art style, which is light and fun, betrays its depth. You can imagine a kid being attracted to that, before going “oh.”

There is probably a happier medium between wordless tutorials on iPad and, well, this.

“It’s very interesting to see both my boys (ages 7 + 5) excel in Echoes of Wisdom compared to Tears of the Kingdom.
Like, EOW feels like the game designers asked themselves ‘TOTK is too open ended for younger players, how could we simplify these ideas without sacrificing creative experimentation?’ And that their solution was to take a Super Mario Wonder “Wonder Flower” approach and tie a bunch of simple verbs to a various nouns that makes sense.
Of course my 5 year old gets that the spider climbs up vertically like spiders do. My kids understand the echoes, even when given a giant list. And I’ve noticed that it’s okay if they forget old echoes. The game is very ‘Nintendo’ where echoes can be used anywhere…but the game often guides them to use certain echoes in an area for a reason. Bat echoes? Forget that, in my house my kids use sand scorpions now and I’m sure they’ll change to something new tomorrow.” — Gabe

It’s funny, because the simplified approach works for me, too.

I’ve long said that Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom are games I respect more than I enjoy. I managed to see Breath of the Wild all the way through, mostly out of guilt for how highly praised it was, but didn’t make it more than a few hours into Tears of the Kingdom before going “hey, it’s OK. “It’s less I’m a Zelda traditionalist, more that the find-your-own-fun angle of both games isn’t my bag. The possibility space of Echoes of Wisdom is smaller, andI’m finding myself getting more creative!

They’re right about how the game presents as open-ended, but often subtly guiding the player towards the “right” approach. You’re allowed to use any echo, but the echoes surrounding the player in the area/dungeon are probably the most useful. It serves as a subtle hint system for players whose personal solutions aren’t working.

All told, it seems like a good game. I’m early hours, so maybe the mechanics will prove shallow over time, but at the moment, I’m enjoying playing the game on my own, while popping the game into the dock to turn it into a family affair. It’s really nice.

My Kids Aren't Playing the New Zelda, But They're Playing It With Me

It's more fun, it turns out, to watch dad flail around with snakes. Plus, insight from the Crossplay community on how their own family experiences have gone.

Discussion about this post