Despite borrowing plenty of elements from both titles, The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom definitely falls closer to the recent The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening remake than The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. This is a traditional Zelda experience through and through, with plenty of puzzles to complete, intricate dungeons to master, and a more linear fantasy story to discover.

That might be a turn-off to some, but will undoubtedly be a huge draw for others. I can’t deny that there’s something incredibly refreshing about the return to the 2D format. As brilliant and innovative as it is, the shift to a more freeform open-world has definitely sacrificed some of the more careful, considered design of older games like The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past.

Nearly every aspect of Echoes of Wisdom feels finely crafted, with the introduction of some clever new mechanics successfully differentiating it from what we’ve seen before. I think that it will be remembered as one of the best Zelda games, perhaps even one of the best Nintendo Switch games, because of this, but it’s not a title that is without its flaws.

Girl power

Echoes of Wisdom marks the first time that the series’ titular princess takes the starring role. Link has vanished, swallowed up by one of the countless purple rifts enveloping the kingdom of Hyrule and spewing out legions of shadowy monsters. The king has been replaced by a sinister clone that sentences his daughter, Princess Zelda, to death, confining her to the castle’s dungeon until her execution. It’s here that you meet Tri, a mysterious fairy who becomes your companion throughout the game.

Tri grants Zelda a suite of magical abilities in order to facilitate her escape and eventual defeat of the malevolent force behind the rifts. This begins with the power to create echoes, copies of certain objects that can be placed at will. From tables, giant crates, and beds that can be stacked to form bridges to floating blocks of water and bouncy trampolines, there are countless echoes to discover and experiment with. Any that you find are added to a growing library and can be brought out at any time, adding a fantastic collectible element.

You quickly learn Bond, which allows you to bind yourself to objects and carry them while you move. You can even activate Reverse Bond, which causes you to follow the movement of your bound object. While this whole system is not as expansive as the building of Tears of the Kingdom, these powers are leveraged in a plethora of interesting ways once you escape into the world of Hyrule and begin your quest in earnest. Puzzles frequently require the intelligent use of echoes and Bond. A large rock, for an abstract example, might be positioned on the opposite side of a grate. You can’t reach it normally, but you can use Bond to move it around.

If the rock needs to be placed in a high position, perhaps on top of an out-of-reach pressure plate, you can simply create a stack of echoes to climb as a makeshift ladder in order to drag it up. It’s all delightfully intuitive and, importantly, remains so as the complexity ramps up. Many puzzles also have multiple solutions and I found that the vast majority of the time, if I expected a certain strategy to work, it would.

This openness can be a bit of a double-edged sword at times, though. Many dungeons contain platforming challenges that, although tricky, are very enjoyable to finally crack. Unfortunately, almost all of these can be bypassed by simply stacking up long chains of beds in order to bridge across them. This is in itself a lot of fun and rewards experimentation in a way, but does feel like a bit of a waste of the otherwise superb level design.

Free roam

Although it follows a very linear story that is broken up into clear digestible chunks, Echoes of Wisdom does feature something of an open world. You’re free to wander around any accessible area as you please, though large portions of the map are blocked off until you reach about the halfway point in the story. There’s not a huge amount to do in this version of Hyrule, but there is just enough to make a little exploration worthwhile.

Hidden chests are littered throughout the world, filled with rupees and the occasional smoothie ingredient. These can be eaten raw as a quick health top-up or combined into powerful drinks with a variety of special effects such as elemental resistance at a handful of smoothie vendors. There are a decent number of unique combinations to find and the whole system is pleasantly reminiscent of the creative cooking introduced in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. You can even make your own rather ineffective ‘Dubious Smoothie’ by adding in a splash of monster guts, a detail that I found quite amusing.

There are a good number of side quests too, most of which have you collect and summon a specific echo at the behest of an NPC. They’re quick to complete and don’t offer much in the way of useful rewards, but do result in some quite amusing and memorable interactions that help the world feel that much more alive.

On top of those found in dungeons, Hyrule is also packed with enemy creatures to fight. Combat is one of the most significant areas where Echoes of Wisdom departs from previous entries, as Zelda does not possess any conventional combat abilities at first. She can toss heavy rocks to deal damage in a pinch, or create echoes of previously defeated foes to fight on her behalf. This is a blast at first but unfortunately wears out its welcome quickly.

Even with a button to direct your minions toward a specific enemy, they’re just too slow and unresponsive. I often found myself skipping running past entire fights, purely because I didn’t want the hassle of managing an army of unreliable slimes. Thankfully, you unlock more combat abilities as you progress, including a magical sword that lets you transform into a swordfighter form.

In this form, Zelda dons Link’s trademark attire and effectively gains all of his abilities. You can slash with a sword, get shots off with a bow, and eventually toss explosive bombs. Your strength in this form can be upgraded too, with special collectibles hidden at the end of dungeons or in the most hard-to-reach corners of the map.

Miniature mayhem

The whole of Echoes of Wisdom is rendered in an adorable, miniaturized visual style that makes everything from the characters to individual trees and buildings look like it was plucked from a cute diorama. It’s very similar to the look of Link’s Awakening and, sadly, means that Echoes of Wisdom suffers from many of the same performance problems.

Frame rates are a little higher overall, especially within dungeons, but are still prone to significant drops. This is understandable in particularly intense moments, especially when you’re dealing with lots of enemies and summoned creatures on the same screen, but is pretty inexcusable when it happens at random points in the world.

The particularly awful performance of one snowy area late in the game is almost unbearable in both handheld and docked mode, which is a massive shame and does spoil an otherwise attractive part of the world. Hopefully, there will be patches to address at least some of these problems down the line.

Otherwise, there’s an awful lot to like in Echoes of Wisdom. It’s cute, charming, and, despite relying on an older formula, it is packed with a handful of novel ideas that make it well worth your while.

Accessibility

There are no dedicated accessibility settings on The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom. The game allows you to choose between a normal and Hero difficulty setting, with the latter designed for more experienced players, but that’s it. This is very disappointing, especially given the reliance on holding button inputs to use abilities. A few basic options to alter the control scheme to remove longer inputs would go a long way to make the game more accessible.

Should I play The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom?

Play it if…

Don’t play it if…

How I reviewed The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom

I played over 15 hours of The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom on Nintendo Switch OLED. During that time I completed the main story and played in a combination of both handheld and docked mode. In docked mode, I played on a 1080p monitor and used a Nintendo Switch Pro Controller. In handheld mode, I played using the standard Pastel Pink Joy-Con controllers and used a pair of Final VR500 earbuds.

Throughout my time with the game, I was careful to compare my experience with other adventure titles and plenty of past entries in The Legend of Zelda series including The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening, The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages, plus plenty of time in the original The Legend of Zelda.

First reviewed August 2024.

A few hours into my first campaign in city-building survival game Frostpunk 2, I was asked whether I thought parents should be able to accompany their kids into quarantine. A mother had been waiting outside, desperate to sit with their unwell child. Relaxing the law could help my trust with the locals; however, it was a risk nonetheless. Ultimately, I thought it was fair to let them in. Within moments of this decision, I was notified the mother had died of the same disease with a second popup letting me hear the thoughts of their bereaved husband, who ‘wasn’t sure how they could manage without them.’

It was painful, and depressing, a fitting ambiance for the broader context of the world. In Frostpunk 2, empathy can often feel inessential, frequently undermined by the brutal but engaging task at hand. However, despite the overwhelming urge to check that feeling at the door, this complex and moreish city builder wants you to learn from your mistakes, consider the alternatives, and often fail dramatically anyway. But regardless of how it goes, you’ll never be left without a story to tell.  

For those unfamiliar with the series, Frostpunk 2 takes place thirty years after the original game, in an alternative history where a volcanic winter has left society in an eternal state of ice. With limited technological resources and a city of vulnerable souls, your job is to steward the remaining civilization to utopia through excavation and exploration in frosty outer wilds - simple, right? But of course, no. The journey is naturally plagued with problems like disease and trust issues. However, if you brave the many (many) storms, your nurtured society can thrive and live on in this eternal freeze.

My first run at Frostpunk 2 was a chaotic balancing act as I acquainted myself with the cohesive medley of systems needed to survive in the icy post-apocalypse. Thankfully, suppose you are a little rusty like myself or a newcomer to the series. In that case, developer 11 Bit Studios softens the landing with variant difficulty settings and a short but sweet tutorial that wraps up the basics of how to play. Through this opening act, you’ll learn to break the ice (literally) to explore, find, and excavate your resources and manage your society through laws and research upgrades. While the bulk of Frostpunk 2’s mechanics come later - and through harsh lessons - this introductory level was the perfect amuse-bouche to the feast that is the rest of the game.

Through this introduction, you’ll also get acquainted with Frostpunk 2’s striking visual style, which makes the most of its late-1800s-style setting with burnt orange and copper mechanized industrial buildings and parchment paper script. After spending hours staring into the quiet blue-toned abyss, I found myself leaning towards the warmer parts of my screen almost instinctively to stay snug despite the 26-degree forecast outside. It’s clear that considerable care has been taken with each detail, and I was always pleased to find and inspect the finer notes, like the graffiti details on the drawings that accompany pop-up choices or unique features on character designs.

Get resources or die trying  

Frostpunk 2’s story mode is broken into sections that unlock as you achieve specific parameters, like finding alternate fuel sources, to keep the city of New London afloat. Success leads to another goal, and failure, well, that ends in exile. Despite my best efforts, my attention span was constantly drawn away from my pressing larger goals by the more minor but equally urgent issues like food management and rising crime rates due to youth delinquency. That is, in essence, Frostpunk 2’s central ethos, though - holistically managing and considering your ever-present and ever-changing parameters and goals that come with the cost of keeping thousands of people alive.

As such, there is no easy answer, and I’d often have to sacrifice the quality of life of my workers to maintain the incoming supply of goods to satisfy the consequent demand. It was often a rough decision, especially when my mismanagement got them here in the first place. Soon enough, that would lead to societal discord, which meant appeasement and new regulations to keep them on side. 

Surprisingly, with such harrowing situations and heady topics, I never wanted to disengage from the nightmare, and instead, I fell deeper into the systems, hoping to tunnel my way to success. Where the general ambiance kept me engaged, Frostpunk 2’s off-kilter humor also worked well to lighten the emotional load. Sarcastic tannoys and schadenfreude-filled situations occur often enough that those bitter failures don’t feel so bad, and equally, triumph isn’t to be celebrated too quickly either. 

You can improve your citizens' lives, though, and that’s through innovation. The Idea Tree plays a significant part in your survival throughout Frostpunk 2, and you’ll need to choose avenues to research at a cost of currency and time. There are political factions to consider when bettering your society, too, and no group will agree wholeheartedly. Still, you can invest in projects like Asbestos lining to help keep heating costs down… if you dare.  

It’s not the end of the world  

Speaking of factions, city management inevitably includes politics, and you’ll have to manage the needs of these various groups to keep things running smoothly. This is done through the lawmaking process, where you broker deals in backrooms with certain factions to get enough votes on your side to get laws passed. As with The Idea Tree, not all factions will agree on the best course forward, and it’s your job to decide which direction will do the least harm. 

As much as it pained me to do so, I often sided with religious zealots because their ideals felt a little less harsh than the other factions and because their numbers, thanks to my tinkering, remained so strong. You can easily negotiate too close to the sun here, too, though, as on more than one occasion, I made too many promises and got myself stuck, humbled, and unable to pass any meaningful laws without compromising my vision.

An ominous soundtrack accompanies your endeavors, blending the world's ferocious howling winds with symphonic sounds. As with the visual flourishes, the score feels appropriately solemn, offering fleeting moments of optimism through its clever orchestration. The intricacy of the music speaks to the detail that extends across Frostpunk 2’s vast pool of systems that I’m barely scratching the surface on, - if you haven’t yet got this impression, it’s definitely a game that is best explored for yourself. 

Despite having so much fun with Frostpunk 2, some recurring issues with inconsistent frame rates did rear their head, muddling my otherwise smooth playthrough. Thankfully, due to the game’s slower nature, none of those issues directly impacted my playthroughs by too much, and I’m optimistic that 11 Bit can solve said issues before launch. 

Once you've tried your hand at the main story aspects of the game, you can also jump over to the Utopia Builder mode, which offers a more sandbox approach to the gameplay, allowing you to pick certain parameters of a playthrough before you dive in. Equally as difficult and just as enjoyable, this mode was a great way to throw caution to the wind and test out some of my theories without feeling too heartbroken when I’d inevitably fail.

Accessibility

In Frostpunk 2, you can access the settings menu from the main title page as well as in-game, and you can toggle most features whilst in-game or before starting a session. Here, you can find a slider to toggle the UI text size, as well as an option to slow down game time when messages appear on the screen. For audio, you can set sliders for SFX and Music. Plus, if you have a specific keyboard setup, you can rebind the keys to your preference.  Requested more here.

Should I play Frostpunk 2?

Play it if...

Don't play it if...

How I reviewed Frostpunk 2

I played Frostpunk 2 on PC in both the Story and Utopia Builder Modes for around 25 hours. During this time, I experimented with various difficulty options, researched different skills in The Idea Tree, and supported a variety of the factions we were presented with.

I played Frostpunk 2 on an AOC 27-inch QHD VA 144Hz gaming monitor with a Logitech MX Master 3S mouse and a Logitech G915 TKL keyboard. For sound, I used my external Creative Pebble V2 computer speakers and my Audio Technica ATH-MX50X headphones, which were plugged into a Scarlett 2i2 interface. My gaming PC has an RTX 3080, and an AMD Ryzen 9 3950X.