My visit to Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom’s Forgotten Temple began auspiciously with the tragi-comic death of my horse, Dennis. I was peering into a deep canyon north-west of Hyrule Castle, trying to work out the precise elevation of the quest waypoint on my minimap, when Dennis came charging across the grasslands and went right over the cliff, disappearing into the murk without a sound.
I plunged after him, fanning my glider a few feet from the bottom, and caught up with my valiant steed’s crumpled body just as it despawned. Not in a cloud of purple smoke, as with defeated enemies – that touch of pantomime which stops Zelda’s fights feeling like slaughter. My dead horse just vanished, deleted from the simulation. I felt like I’d crossed a boundary of some kind. Looking up from the space where Dennis no longer was, I found myself on a huge expanse of sandstone, cut into long blocks and raised circular designs.
I walked in one direction for five minutes, scrambling awkwardly across squat geological motifs that were too high to jump over but too low to glide from, only to find myself at another cliff face, without even a Korok seed to compensate me for my troubles. I set off in the other direction for another five minutes, and came to an edge. I dropped over it, flew in a lazy circle with my glider, and belatedly discovered what I’d been standing on: a massive, sunken building with a sloping, pillared entrance way, huge enough to house a family of dragons.
12 HIDDEN Quests In Tears of the Kingdom – HIDDEN QUESTS IN TEARS OF THE KINGDOM + LOCATIONS! Watch on YouTube
The Forgotten Temple exists in the previous Zelda game, Breath of the Wild, and it looks the same here from a distance. But it feels different. Partly it’s that it’s no longer full of clapped-out robot spiders with laser eyes: all you have to worry about, on your first visit, are a few stray Bokoblins. And partly it’s that Tears of the Kingdom’s additional systems – many of them defined the act of addition – throw the essentially subtractive nature of the Forgotten Temple into sharper relief.