In the belly of the Wind Temple, on your way to one of the hidden locks that disables the central air vent, you’ll find a treasure chest in a sealed room. The chest is the only thing in the room, which is surrounded by walls on each side. Between you and the chest is a gate with a square hole in the center. That hole is the only way in or out of the room, but you can’t climb the gate or jump to reach it. The chest is too far away to simply grab it with Ultrahand and pull it out through the hole. Without some other tool, there’s no way to reach the chest. The entire puzzle is just figuring out how to get through a hole that's just a few feet out of reach.I came up with what I thought was a pretty elegant solution. To get into this chamber you have to break through a wall of icicles, so I backtracked a little bit to gather up some icicles and bring them back to the chest. Using Ultrahand, I stuck three icicles side by side to form a platform that looked something like a raft, then propped it up on the lip of the hole to create a ramp. I walked up the ramp, crouched through the hole, and grabbed the treasure. The icicles were the only usable objects in that area of the temple, so though I’d played enough Zelda to know this wasn’t necessarily the only solution, it felt like the one the developers had intended for me to use.I watched a friend play this section. Like me, they first tried to climb the gate and jump through the hole. When that didn’t work, I expected them to go find the icicles. Instead, they pulled a Zonai Wing out of their inventory and leaned it against the gate to make a ramp, then walked in the room. They needed to make another Zonai Wing ramp to get out, but it worked. Different method, but same solution. I was even more sure that this is how you are meant to get the chest.Today I saw a clip on Twitter that broke my brain. I watched someone pick up an icicle with Ultrahand, feed it through the hole, attach it to the chest, and then pull the whole thing out back out through the hole. They got the chest without even going into the room, and they didn’t even use a ramp. The person who posted the clip asks if it's the intended solution, and the thread is full of people telling them that yes, that is the correct way to seize the treasure. “That’s how I did it too - it is the intended solution I think!”, “It is legit the only solution I can really think of in that area so it had to have been”, “This is 100 percent the intended solution and when I figured it out I screamed”, and so on.Deeper in the thread, a few people share their ‘incorrect’ solutions. One person says they started outside and used the paraglider to glide all the way into the room, threading the needle to slip through the hole. Someone else says they use their weapons to make a ramp. Another person posted a video of their own solution wherein they melted the icicles down to make tiny legs, then attached them to a Zonai Sled to make a tall platform, which they climbed on top of and used it to crawl through the whole. These are all considered to be incorrect solutions, because they’re all more complicated and less commonly used solutions than the OP’s icicle fishing strategy.
I’ve seen hundreds of puzzle solutions posted on social media over the last week, and almost every single one of them includes a description with something to the effect of “this can’t be the right solution, can it?”. I’m fascinated by the way people are reacting to TOTK’s puzzles, deciding that some solutions are correct or intended while others are not. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the game’s design ethos, and everyone, myself included, keeps doing it.
A lifetime of video game experiences has not prepared us to negotiate with Tears of the Kingdom’s design. In any other video game, including previous Zeldas, the puzzle would have one solution. Pressing a hidden switch would open the gate, or turning a crank would cause a platform to rise from the floor that you could climb on to reach the hole. The solution may involve puzzle solving, but mostly it would involve carefully scanning the environment for things you can interact with. There may be other ways to get in the room, but there would only be one right way.
Clearly, Tears of the Kingdom is built different. As soon as you start playing, you are given the solutions to an infinite variety of puzzles. The intention the developers had was to give players the freedom to tap into their creativity and use whatever means they could come up with to find solutions. The person who put the hole in the fence may have only tested to ensure that both Link and the chest could fit through the opening. That’s all you really need to ensure that the puzzle is solvable. There’d be no point in wasting time creating an ‘intended’ solution, because every obstacle in the game inherently has a thousand ways to get around it.
A hole in a gate made me realize that we’ve all learned to see games as a collection of locks and keys. The key could be a button you press to open a locked door, or a bullet could be a key and the lock the head of a Nazi, or the key could be an icicle and the lock a gate with a hole in the middle. Tears of the Kingdom is such a profound evolution of game design that we don’t even understand how to think about it. The only intended solution is the one that you decide to use, and I think that idea is going to forever change the way games are made, and the way we play them.