the pilgrimage (a breath of the wild post)

The thing about Breath of the Wild’s Hyrule is that I can feel it under my feet. Its grassy hills, its rugged rocks. So many game worlds fail at this. They feel sleek and synthetic even when they mean to feel organic. Horizon Zero Dawn, which came out just before Breath of the Wild and which lives now forever in its shadow, felt calculated and constructed in comparison, all that tall grass everywhere, so transparently gamey in presence and function. Where HZD lays out all the limited, obvious interactions its world offers–shoot this part of this enemy with this type of arrow for maximum damage–Breath of the Wild is a world that says, Well, here you are. Explore and discover. Things here interact in ways obvious and in ways surprising. You never know just what might happen.

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Sometimes even the real world feels thin to me, or maybe it’s just that my existence in it doesn’t feel solidly rooted to much of anything. I lack a witness, a mirror, a partner, a family, and maybe that’s why sometimes I feel like I might clip through the ground and fall through the world, never to be seen again. Sometimes a change of scenery helps. Perhaps the coffee shops, subway stations and city streets I see every day have grown too familiar to me; when I visited New York City last summer, it was invigorating just to be in a different place, a place not wholly unfamiliar to me, but fresh enough to be stimulating, and seemingly alive with possibility. But I think it’s more a result of too often not having a person to share places with. Time with good friends can remind me that my life and my existence are real, and can help me feel the ground a bit more solidly beneath my feet.

Link faces his quest in Breath of the Wild alone, and yet not. As in previous games, he communes with the dead, here aiding the spirits of four fallen friends of his from a century past, so that they may in turn aid him in his final battle against Ganon, the embodiment of evil. But despite their ethereal presence on his quest, each imparting to him some part of themselves, he cuts a solitary figure on the long treks across Hyrule, seeking both to help his friends and to remember himself.

It’s this quest, the one for his own memories, that I found the most fascinating. You have a photo album with 12 images from across Hyrule: find the spot where the photo was taken, and you will find a fragment of Link’s forgotten past. Some are quite easy to find, with obvious landmarks to use as points of reference, and for some, a man named Pikango will kindly nudge you in the right direction. There was one image in my album, though, with no landmarks in it, and for which I found no Pikango willing to give me a helping hand. It was this one.

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Just a spot in a forest. There are many forests in the game, and this looked to me as if it could have been taken in any number of them.

So I began my pilgrimage, heading to every clump of trees on the map that looked sizable enough to be the place where this photo was taken, and marking off the ones on my map that I’d already visited.

Think how many games don’t have this kind of trust in their own worlds, how many games would give you a waypoint, or at most (as Horizon often does) a small circular area on the map in which what you seek is sure to be found. Breath of the Wild asked me to go on a real quest, one in which what I was looking for might have been almost anywhere in the wide, wide world, and when was the last time a game let me go on a quest like that? A quest like that forges between the player and the world a kind of intimacy that is destroyed by the tunnel vision waypoints foster, as you charge full steam ahead for your goal, missing the trees for the forest.

People and places are inextricably linked in our minds, aren’t they? Certainly there are places around San Francisco–coffee shops and bars and neighborhoods–that always remind me of certain people, and certain times we shared. Not long ago I heard someone on the street call a bar by the wrong name, “First Edition,” he said, and I had the impulse to correct him, to say “Local Edition,” because every time I walk by that bar I think of a time I met a friend there for drinks, and she doesn’t live here anymore, and so there’s a sense in which that place is sacred to me, a little haunted by my memory of her.

Finally, after hours of searching, I found it, in one of Hyrule’s many forests, and I felt so much closer to Hyrule than I would have if the game had denied me the fullness of the search.

These memories root Link’s life to Hyrule, and I had to imagine that what Link was really looking for was to be reminded, through memories of the people he loved and the places they’d shared, of who he was, what he was fighting for, what he was living for. Walking all over the kingdom in search of his past made me see the land as something real, and worth saving. It’s worth saving because real things happened there once, long ago, and someday, they could happen there again.

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