The Water Temple

Whilst I’ve been playing Ocarina of Time, one particular location has loomed at the forefront of my mind for every moment I’ve spent inside the game’s world. We all know what I’m talking about, but I’m going to say it anyway.

The Water Temple.

A fabled location of such infamy, that the mere mention of its name can strike terror into the heart of a certain type of person. And whose legendarily fiendish difficulty has given it a second life as something of a gaming folk legend. So it was with no small amount of trepidation simmering in the pit of my stomach that I crossed the threshold of the Water Temple to set about conquering it.

Now, after two hours of sub-aqua adventuring, I can let you in on a secret. The Water Temple isn’t really so bad. It’s not a cakewalk by any stretch of the imagination, but neither is it so impossible that the only way through it is with a guide. I did get stuck once, on a particularly cheeky puzzle that needed the water level raising to the correct level, so that I could blow away an otherwise inaccessible wall to get at a key. But even then it was nothing that five minutes of thought couldn’t solve.

So how did The Water Temple gain its fearsome reputation? At first I thought I’d found The Water Temple so unexpectedly easy because I’d spent so long playing Zelda games this year that I’d started to think like a Zelda level designer. I quickly realised how hubristic that train of thought was and started again. With the exception of Skyward Sword, all of the Zelda games I’ve played this year have been 2D. Then I had a small epiphany.

Let us posit that the average gamer is between mid-twenties and mid-thirties. Using myself as an example, I’m thirty, which puts me at fourteen or fifteen at the original release of Ocarina of time. One’s mind is not a fully formed thing at that age, not really. Think also about the time of the release of Ocarina of Time. We were in the very early age of polygons, and the previous generation of console games were almost exclusively two dimensional.

Like Khan in Star Trek II, we were two dimensional natives thrust into a new three dimensional world where we had had little time to adjust. We had little experience with three dimensional thought. Like Khan, that inexperience would prove to be our undoing.

Puzzles in The Water Temple are about as three dimensional as they could get for the time. They require you to not only think about the effects of your actions on the floor you are on, but also the floors above and below you. Add this to our, at the time, relative inexperience with three dimensional thought and we have the perfect ingredients for a major difficulty spike. We had trouble with The Water Temple because many of us had literally never seen anything like it, so we'd never really had to think this way before.

So, at the time, The Water Temple would have been genuinely difficult. Add this to the collective internet folk memory’s remarkable ability to exaggerate and that’s how I think The Water Temple came about its reputation.

Returning to The Water Temple today after nigh on two decades of experience of 3D gaming, The Water Temple presents less of a challenge. We’re all three dimensional natives now, and we’ve seen and solved hundreds of 3D puzzles in the time since Ocarina of Time was released. Experience is key here. Two decades of thinking in three dimensions, added to the fact that we’re all much older now means that we can arrive upon a solution to a puzzle much easier than we could in the late nineties. That kind of rams home just how innovative Nintendo were with Ocarina of Time. With The Water Temple, they gave us something many of us had never seen before and encouraged us to think in a whole new way to solve the puzzles they had set. There have been others in the time since, but Nintendo got there first, and they did it so well that they managed to spawn a gaming folk legend with their creation.