I expected The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds

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This familiar Hyrule - built from brown layers of rock topped with bright green grass, secret caves full of scuttling creatures, deep blue rivers that carve through a landscape of desert ruins, volcanic mountains, and swampy wetlands - is a childhood dreamscape brought to life, colourful and imaginative and stuffed with secrets, and it has barely changed since 1992. But Between Worlds combines the emotionally potent familiarity of Link To The Past’s Hyrule with some of the most significant innovations that the Zelda series has seen in years. Loading

The bombs, boomerangs, bows and other items that make up your adventurer’s toolkit - secreted since the series’ origins in chests deep within dungeons (which have to be completed in a certain order) - are now available to rent and use almost from the beginning, courtesy of an enthusiastic chap in a purple rabbit hat. It’s a small change that has huge repercussions, freeing you from a set path of progression and imbuing Between Worlds with a liberating sense of adventure and discovery that’s lacking in, say, Spirit Tracks and Skyward Sword. You really can set out, tools in hand, and explore in whichever direction you choose.

This retro aesthetic - halfway between SNES-era sprites and modern 3D - is a strange mix, and once the initial nostalgia has worn off it loses some of its impact. The Past’s top-down 2D style translates well into 3D, but it’s a straight visual upgrade rather than a statement, like Wind Waker’s cel-shading or Skyward Sword’s beautifully daubed, impressionist feel. That said, Between Worlds boasts the same masterful use of 3D as Nintendo’s other best 3DS games, from Luigi’s Mansion to Super Mario 3D Land. With the slider up, it comes into its own visually.

It’s also thematically befitting, as Link himself is also caught between 2D and 3D. A button press transforms him into a painting on almost any wall, letting him move left and right across them like an animated Egyptian wall painting before rematerialising in 3D. It adds a spatial element to the puzzling, as you have to navigate Hyrule and its dungeons in both dimensions, looking for paths across chasms or through gaps in walls, and remarkably it finds new applications throughout Link Between Worlds' 15-or-so hours.

A Link Between Worlds offsets these innovations with a tendency to stick to very safe, very familiar territory, both literally in this recreated Hyrule and figuratively in the story. Link himself is back to being a blank cipher, a bobbing quiff and a green tunic, rather than the tragic young hero of Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask or the lively youth of Skyward Sword, and this Hyrule - rewarding as it is to explore - lacks the personality of other Zelda worlds. The story, meanwhile, could be uncharitably described as twee, though it’s partially redeemed by a rousing ending. It’s almost as if the designers felt the need to appeal to our sense of Zelda tradition in order to give them license to experiment with it.

Hyrule - and its dark twin, Lorule, which opens up after the first three dungeons and adds trans-dimensional travel to your exploration toolkit - is designed to reward your inquisitiveness and curiosity. It’s like a gigantic puzzle box, with a multitude of secret levers and compartments within compartments. Small rewards like chests of Rupees, pieces of heart and, uh, collectible shellfish are scattered everywhere, teasing you to figure out how to claim them. Ten dungeons, meanwhile, punctuate the map, and might lie either at the end of a convoluted and treacherous path or hidden in plain sight. Loading

You may not always have the item that you need when you get to wherever it is you’re going, but instead of having to wait for it to drop into your hands at a predetermined point, you can run back to the item shop to fetch it. Cutely implemented fast-travel, which comes in the form of a helpful but snarky witch on a flying broom, mitigates the need for trekking across the map. In this world, though, even backtracking can be a pleasure, as something you hadn’t noticed before leads you off in a new direction.

Hyrule is still subtly gated, to an extent. But I never felt restricted in my self-directed exploration, and for the first time in years I wasn’t bothered by the over-familiarity that had begun to encroach upon my enjoyment of this wonderful series. Any long-term Zelda fan can relate to the slightly deflated feeling of opening a chest to that triumphant refrain, only to find a long-expected boomerang or hookshot. With those toys already in your hands, Between Worlds is free to surprise you in other ways - like in its spectacular puzzle design.

And surprise it does. The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds is the best puzzle game that Nintendo has ever released. Each dungeon is a self-contained conundrum, with its own rules and dangers. In one, darkness reveals what light won’t, turning the use of torches into a strategic decision. Another is a fiery deathtrap navigable only with an ice wand to turn its columns of lava into stone. Yet another is a giant prison, full of switches and cells and hollow walls. Some are more familiar than others - there’s a dungeon with levers to change the water level, and a sand dungeon deep in the desert - but even those feel fresh, and come with new approaches. For all Between Worlds’ aesthetic familiarity, the puzzle design is as inventive and novel here as it has ever been.

As someone who’s grown up with Zelda, I greatly appreciate that it treats you like an intelligent person with a functioning brain and a decent attention span, unafraid to let you get stuck. Where in previous games you’d walk into a room and Fi or Navi or Midna would immediately pop up and tell you what to do there, here you’re left to figure it out for yourself, just like we used to be. But it’s not without helpful pointers – instead of using words, Between Worlds uses the language of its design guide your eyes towards the separate elements of complex puzzles, and when my brain arranged them into place I’m certain even other people in the room could hear the satisfying click. Loading

There is help available if you can’t figure out what to do, but Between Worlds has the grace to offer it up quietly instead of shoving it in your face. Right near the beginning, you’re given an item called the Hint Glasses - put them on, and you can see Hint Ghosts standing near points of interest, and they’ll give you a tip in exchange for a 3DS Play Coin. Once introduced, it’s never mentioned again. The system has its limitations, though: I tested it out in a later dungeon, and the Hint Ghost’s words of wisdom weren’t always much use, being either too obvious or too general.

Item renting adds a new dimension of challenge to Between Worlds, in that it introduces real consequences for death. Should Link fall in battle or fall off a ledge too many times, your rented items are whisked away back to the shop, leaving you potentially in the middle of a dungeon without something you really need. Often, though, there will be a way to get through without using items at all - you just have to think your way around obstacles more creatively.

And Between Worlds actually will kill you, too, even if you’re a Zelda veteran. It’s unashamedly difficult, and cyclopses and centaurs roaming the dangerous areas of the maps will happily rob you of four hearts with a hit. For me, the element of danger heightened the thrill of exploration; in a dungeon you can always restart from the entrance, trekking through empty rooms and back through solved puzzles to where you were, but out in the wilds you have to fight your way back.