I don't want to spoil story elements and I believe this image does not spoil anything. As people progress through the game they will undoubtedly come upon a "chest on a rope". I tried several methods to acquire the chest on the rope and although it seemed like they should technically work, I couldn't pull off the execution. That's when I had the brilliant idea of fire splash damage. It worked! When I checked online to see what people were doing to claim the chest on a rope I saw the ideas that I failed to succeed at, but there were a couple more that I didn't even think of.

Do you have any instances of using the game mechanics in interesting ways to get a thing that you know had multiple solutions?

There was this one shrine that had a huge cube, with braziers in most of the sides, and some connecting braziers on the left and right of the cube. One of the braziers was lit up, and one was spewing water- and the solution was presumably to use a series of switches to rotate the fire brazier in such a way that it would light up all the others without having the water brazier put them out.

I said "fuck that" and created a fire by making a spark with my sword and igniting flint and wood that I dropped from my inventory. Then I simply shot each of the braziers with regular arrows that I would light on fire with the campfire.

It totally worked.

@dzll: I remember that shrine and totally did it by using the switches. It never crossed my mind to just use fire arrows.

There was another shrine where the mechanic was lighting leaves on fire and then they would burn things to help you progress. One of the puzzles was getting a chest (with a key) down from a wooden platform. There was a flaming brazier hanging from the ceiling and I assume the intent was to use that flame to burn the platform. Turns out bombs work just as well to destroy wooden platforms.

@meteora3255

I'm super glad the developers got rid of the traditional item progression path, especially since some of the previous games' items seemed to only ever get used within the dungeon you received it in, and almost no where else. Since you get all the runes right off the bat, they were able to have a much more open ended puzzle design, I think.

My friend mentioned to me how he always thought that the metroidvania style of showing players goodies that they can't reach until getting certain abilities like double jumping or whatever was never actually clever or very fun for players, especially when there's a ton of backtracking involved. I didn't really agree with him until now! Having almost everything you need to conquer the game right off the bat is a good feeling!

My only issue is that I felt because they didn't have any sprawling larger dungeons they still fell into that trap. Since the shrines (and dungeons to some extent) are so small I felt like they often were focused around just one ability. You could still find other solutions (ours are just a couple) but I didn't really feel in the 90 something I did that there a good number of puzzles that really required you to combine your powers in interesting ways. Most of the time, even though you have multiple powers you only used one to get through a shrine.

@golguin: Regarding the pic; magnet to get it swinging, stasis on the way toward the pIatform and an arrow to the rope =)

@meteora3255

Yeah, you're definitely right about that. I do think they could have had some more interesting puzzles combining the runes. most of the time when they do combine its usually just X + Bomb. At least there are a huge amount of shrines, with a great variety of types, puzzles, and even entry methods.