Gameboy Puzzleworlds
Created: 2025-07-25 (12:36:42) — Modified: 2025-07-28 (18:29:09)Status: in progress
I have been slowly and intermittently replaying the Gameboy Zelda installments, Link’s Awakening, Oracle of Ages and Oracle of Seasons. Given the directions the more recent games in the series have taken, it’s interesting to return to these earlier ones. Constrained by hardware and storage, these games are sometimes limited and frustrating, but they are also ingeniously designed, dense and twisty bottle grottos, detailed tiny worlds.
In these games, navigating dense and twisty worlds is largely the point. Early Zeldas are structured like intricate puzzleboxes that you need to figure out as you traverse through them. There is usually a strict order to the way you do this but the games work best when they go beyond the linear enter dungeon, acquire tool formula, when the characters, the story and the nature of the world itself also become puzzles.
This page is ostensibly about the Gameboy Zelda installments. More broadly though, it is about both the constraints and potentials represented by hardware like the Gameboy. Developers had to work with a tiny screen, tiny processor and tiny storage, and still made expansive, resonant gameworlds. My long-term aim in talking about this is to move past nostalgia and try to explore the ways in which specific qualities of these games come about because of these limits.
Oracle of Seasons
The main loop of most Zelda games is to explore the world, enter dungeons and acquire tools that allow you to explore a little more of the world. This is usually a matter of traversal: acquiring bombs lets you destroy walls, acquiring a power bracelet lets you move boulders, acquiring a feather lets you jump across pits. The tools you acquire become an extension of yourself. They let you explore further but do not fundamentally affect the world around you.
The Oracle games in contrast hinge on mechanics that do alter the world around you. In Oracle of Ages you acquire a harp that will allow you to travel back and forth through time. In Oracle of Seasons you acquire a rod that will progress through the cycle of the year.
I only originally owned Seasons and didn’t play Ages until it came out on the 3DS Virtual Console a decade later. So of the two, of course Seasons is my preferred version! I love both of these games for their labyrinthine maps, but Seasons for me is a little more enjoyable for the way its season-cycling mechanic affects the way you explore the world.
In the starting screen of Seasons, there are already three inaccessible exits. Two of them you will be able to reach when you regain a sword and can cut through the grass blocking the way. The third is blocked by crystal boulders. Until you beat the first couple dungeons and acquire the power bracelet you cannot head that way.
Almost every screen in the game turns out to be like this, divided into the places you can reach and the ones you cannot reach - yet. The way around some obstacles, like boulders, lakes and pits, makes intuitive sense. Others… less so, like crystal mushrooms, like cliffs and waterfalls, like the gate on the eastern coast guarded by a dead sailor. Figuring out how to get past these tends to reveal something more about the world, about its inhabitants, their histories and relationships.
Early on you acquire the Rod of Seasons. When you stand on a tree stump and wave it around the entire map progresses into the next season. The initial screens you visited that were frozen into winter, you can now progressively visit in summer, autumn and spring.
In summer, you can climb the vines that blanket cliffs and explore dried-up waterways. In autumn fallen leaves fill in the pits, but also, those crystal mushrooms become actual fungi you can pull up to get past. In winter, you can skid across frozen lakes and through the gaps between bare trees. But large snowbanks now block the old throughfares. Spring is the closest to a default state for the world. Lakes are full, cliffs cannot be climbed and fungi return to their crystalline state.
With this, the way you navigate this already dense and twisty world shifts fourfold. The setting, Holodrum, is intricate. The way you move through it and interact with its inhabitants changes with the seasons. Even when it is not clear where you are supposed to go next, which happens often, there are always other things to follow up on, earlier areas to revisit in a different season, obstacles you can now get past, further progress to make in the trading quest.
Replaying, I had forgotten how generous the game is in giving you new tools early on. By the time you have finished the third dungeon, you’ll be versatile enough to go dawdle about pretty freely. And even still, there will be places out of reach or whose purpose remains unclear.
As enjoyable as this, it does affect the balance. By about the midway point you will have gained the ability to progress through all four seasons as well as most tools. From there on you mostly acquire upgrades, like the ability to double jump or a slingshot for your magic seeds. These really are not as well integrated into the overworld: a lot of the tools you find later in the game work out to be mostly only useful for dungeons.
As a result, the game world which for a time felt so expansive and full of secrets starts to contract. The experience shifts away from exploring and learning about the world. You come to expect that the next dungeon will be in one of the single conspicuously blank map tiles you previously haven’t been able to reach. Because you know by now what to expect, some of the excitement of it dissipates.
This sort of prefigures my problem with Breath of the Wild. The open world of that game is full of strange geographical features and difficult-to-reach monuments. It should be an enticement to keep exploring, to figure out how to get to them, but past a point the game reveals its hand. Every seemingly mysterious thing in Breath of the Wild ultimately turns out to be another shrine. If you are trying to find every single shrine, then great, but if you were hoping to learn a little more about the world then this gives you nothing.
I suspect this problem is inherent to the open world structure of Breath of the Wild. What is frustrating about Seasons though is that it could have been avoided with more careful balancing. A few less items at the outset, a few more secrets held into the later half, and the world could have kept enjoyably unfolding itself.
Possibly this also highlights just how difficult it was and is to put together these minute puzzleworlds, hardware constraints or not. Maybe it is similar to what traditional puzzlemakers must experience in trying to frame players’ experiences.
All that said, Seasons is still fantastic. For the greater portion of the game, the world only seems to expand the further you progress, which is an amazing effect for anything to achieve on this console. The fact that things do eventually snap back may just be in the nature of its design. The Oracle games are working with all of one megabyte of cartridge space. They cannot expand infinitely outwards.
Subrosia sidenote
Aside from everything to do with its season-cycling mechanic and its labyrinthine overworld, Seasons for some inexplicable reason also has its own underworld. It is called Subrosia and it is inhabited by robed figures who eat and… bathe in… lava, who trade in multicoloured ores dug out of the ground, and who live an almost entirely separate existence to the people of Holodrum on the surface.
In Subrosia you will participate in dancing, a serviceable enough minigame. You will go on a date with a pop star, Rosa, who owns a key that unlocks every door in the underworld. Because she is famous? I love Subrosia. I love that this sequence calls back to walking around with Malin in Link’s Awakening. I love that in this game ostensibly about correcting the balance of nature, you will also spend a nontrivial amount of time in an underground hellworld too.
See also
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