If Tears of the Kingdom represents one thing, it’s unfettered freedom—taking the already
wondrously open expanse of Breath of the Wild, and providing you with all the tools you could
possibly need to break its world in half; defining completely your own path through
it. Its potentially limitless options might seem overwhelming at first, but for the most part the
game’s atmosphere is one of tranquil, breezy play. Which is why it’s so surprising to me that my
favourite part of Tears of the Kingdom seems at first to go against everything the game otherwise
stands for—something more sinister, having less to do with this airy exterior than it does something
lurking way, way, way below the surface. Indeed, with all the marketing material
for Tears of the Kingdom being so focused on the skyward expansion of Hyrule’s explorable space,
the discovery of The Depths is rendered all the more disquieting—while you’ve been so
used to everything else in this world begging to be clambered upon, here you have this sludge
covered hole in the ground, surrounded by injured people telling you not to go
down there. It couldn’t be less inviting. And then of course you actually jump into
the thing, descending for an unusually long time, until you emerge in this whole other world—dank,
rotten, filled with almost alien plant life… and crucially, it is dark. We’re not talking a little
dark here either—this is pure, abyssal void, to the point that your very ability to see (the
most rudimentary sensory experience of video games beyond touch) is tied to a consumable,
numbered resource; your only guide should you run out, consisting mainly of the vast rivers
of violent crimson seeping into every crevice of this hellscape. Those rivers,
and those enemies corrupted by its glow, won’t just hurt you—they’ll take away the heart vessel
containing your health, until you can find the underground equivalent of a tower to unlock.
All this to say, far from bright and airy, the atmosphere here is downright suffocating;
the dust particles in the air giving off the vibe that you have reached the very bottom of the ocean
floor—making it terrifying when you chuck one more brightbloom seed in front of you, only for
it to fall, and keep falling, completely reshaping your view of just how deep these depths really go.
I mean, the environment above has its moments of anxiety-inducing scope and dread, but rarely if
ever is that dread as sustained as it is here. All of which begs the question—why, when there’s
so much else to Tears of the Kingdom’s world, so much joyous fun to be had,
so much room to breathe, do I spend all this time down here in this miserable world devoid of light
and colour? Well, the answer goes beyond its massive size, the fact that such raised stakes
are matched by greater rewards and powerups, or the many hauntingly beautiful ruins you’ll
stumble upon. Instead, it’s that the very act of exploring here is fundamentally shifted, forcing
you to rethink how you view and interact with your environment—with every step taken carrying
far more narrative and tactical weight than that same step carries up above. And we’ll get into
it but caves are a really wild thing, man. Like, look, I adore Tears of the Kingdom,
obviously, this is the second video I’ve made on it – but while I think the people calling the game
a mere expansion of Breath of the Wild are being unbelievably reductive, it’s hard to deny that
this is the same Hyrule we made our way through before, following largely the same structure of
progression—go to the four corners of the map, help the people there by solving a dungeon,
gain a new power to ultimately defeat Ganon. I know my way around Breath of the Wild,
so barring the suite of new powers, I know my way around the surface of Tears of the Kingdom.
The sky exploration stuff is interesting, sure, but it’s more like a bunch of bespoke
little puzzles, like shrines unto themselves, with relatively little in the way of connective
tissue between any of them. It’s neat, but there’s not a whole lot to actually explore. The Depths,
on the other hand, are the real new adventure here – the actual new mystery to solve.
This world is so genuinely massive down here, that the question you begin to ask as you explore,
as you climb, isn’t merely “do I have enough stamina to make it to the top of this rockface;”
it shifts to “where is the top of this rock face? Is there a top? Where am I on it? How far do I
have to fall if I’ve misjudged?” Everything—every mountain, every tree, every structure—feels so
much more imposing when you are denied such an immediate means of comprehending its scale.
I find myself using my map to lay down markers far more consistently than I do on the surface, as the
ability to get truly lost on your travels down here is real, in a way it isn’t when the bright,
colourful visual landmarks are plain to see. All it takes is one enemy ambush to completely throw
you off your trail if you’re not careful. But it’s that very fact that you can get lost here,
that makes finding your bearings again and reaching that destination so much
more meaningful, in a way that the world above, by its very nature, cannot match.
And here’s where we get into the cave stuff. In my thinking about why the Depths resonated
with me so much, I got into a bit of a pit looking up interviews and writing by real world cavers and
speleologists to see what so drew them beneath the ground. It’s kind of fascinating to see some
of the thinking behind the pursuit—representing a unique intersection of cold, scientific research,
competitive pioneership, and the kind of deeply physical and emotional challenge you don’t
normally associate with sterile lab work. Almost everyone I read about mentioned how
dangerous these environments can often be. This chunk of nature may appear pristine, tranquil,
but one of the most humbling, scary parts of nature is its total indifference to human
endeavour. You could say that caving represents the extreme of discovery—a sentiment summed up
nicely by renowned cave diver Martyn Farr, where his rather straight-ahead analysis of
current caving culture suddenly gives way to talk of these environments being something to vanquish,
as if a mythical enemy to be toppled. And crucially, this is exactly the sentiment that
sums up why I love the Depths as much as I do. See, Hyrule as it exists on the surface is a
playground—far more than even Breath of the Wild, it is there to be poked and prodded at
by the player, it gives you all the options you could possibly need to showcase your creativity;
it is a game space. By upping the hostility in almost every conceivable way, the Depths
distinguish themselves as something bigger than just the player, not overtly designed
to accommodate you or your quest; less mechanical and more primal—all of which makes carving your
way through the darkness in the face of said hostility genuinely rewarding in and of itself.
Obviously that’s not to say that Hyrule is free from that kind of hostility—it’s just that,
what the Depths have put into perspective for me, is why those big, grand dungeons and boss fights
designed to be truly momentous, ultimately feel far more rote, less compelling for me than, say,
those simple, lengthy treks across frozen tundra, with my only source of heat being
a fire wand strapped to my back, whose rapidly declining durability forces me to make constant
risk-and-reward decisions about whether to defend myself against the foes in my path,
or the very elements themselves. But the Depths, by reframing the
basics of navigation and movement, by having you constantly juggling whether or not to expend an
ever-diminishing resource, to utilise the hostility of this world as a visual guide,
or just to venture into the void and hope for the best – this environment takes that same
glorious game of moment-to-moment decision making like the scenario I just described,
and manages to bake it into every single step you take through this landscape. That step represents
calculated risk and increased danger. The ground you’re standing on,
moreso than anything above you, suddenly becomes that beast to be vanquished,
as Martyn Farr might have put it—a prospect as humbling as I imagine caving in real life
nature probably should be; as rich with emergent narrative potential as it is viscerally thrilling.
All of this to say, everything about The Depths makes it seem like they go against
the notion of complete and total freedom that otherwise defines Tears of the Kingdom – where
everything is at your fingertips to mess with at your leisure. With that luxury gone, however,
what you choose to do with those tools and abilities goes beyond daft messing about,
and instead becomes an ongoing, emergent story of survival and triumph entirely of your own making.
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