(Tl;dr video companion to this article):

My favorite part of any piece of media is when someone sees what you’re watching, and then trying to justify either why you’re watching it, or that what you’re watching is “not usually like this”…

Like being so embarrassed that you’re caught watching wrestling, you lie to whoever walked in on you and tell them you’re actually watching gay porn

I doubt I’m alone in this, but I always found the Bottom of the Well/Shadow Temple portion of Ocarina of Time to be one of, if not the height of the entire adventure, as so many elements coalesce in such an extraordinary way, it’s hard not to enjoy how everything plays out. Between the timey wimeyness how one must soldier on in continuing to round up the sages, to seeing Link and Sheik briefly work together, to the game leaning in on spoopyness…and then taking a sharp right turn into legitimately creepy, the amount of moments of “shit just got real” are many and do not let up. This is an especially compelling moment for such a thing to occur, where timing is concerned, due to the sheer notion that if one is going in order, this sequence of events will be following the debacle that of the Water Temple, which, for anyone not in the know, had kind of a reputation of being a bit of a slog, so the breath of fresh air that represents this whole gothic affair unfolding before is a saving grace in most regards.


And to think, the nightmare that followed is all because of one unintentionally soured, destiny ladened stormy night

This is another one of those cool DIY moments in the game, where as, at least the first time around, the way forward is not necessarily obvious, so one has to kind of do some sleuthing to find the way forward. The Remake, as it has done so often thus far, makes it a little more obvious that one has business in Kakariko Village, though it’s not just a where scenario, it’s a when kind of problem solving moment, as well. Since the well does draw quite a bit of attention to itself, and quite obviously, something in Adult Link’s timeline already seemed to have gone down, it is time to take Link to the past, and sort out just what caused everything to go pear shaped, and who’s responsible for fucking everything up for everyone.


Spoiler alert: find the nearest mirror

Like most good time travel stories, it turns out the answer was in front of you this whole time, cause you’re responsible for fucking everything up for everyone. In what turns out to be an ontological paradox, also known as a bootstrap paradox, you (i.e. Link) end up causing the chaos involving the well….by learning about…you causing chaos in the well. This is best illustrated by the Song of Storms itself, which is one of the key elements of this time traveling faux pas, as the song itself is on a causal loop, as it has no discernible source of origin, as the Windmill Man teaches it to Link in the future, which is only possible because Link played the song for the Windmill Man in the past…but this event did not occur until after Link went forward in time, and then back again, with the Song of Storms seemingly always have been existing, except when it didn’t….again, wibbly wobbly, timey wimey…stuff.

Pic

I’d be more astonishingly flummoxed by all of this nonsensical paradoxical tomfoolery, if I wasn’t busy staring at THIS SILENT HILL ASS BULLSHIT GOING ON AT THE BOTTOM OF THIS FUCKING WELL

Through this insane act of straining the space-time continuum into an utterly warped frustration, the Link in the past ends up drying up the well when he plays the Song of Storms, which obviously has great implications for the village of Kakariko. This also happens to open up the possibility of a Young Link to be able to get to the bottom of the well, crawl into a very small hole, and enter into one of the most atmospherically menacing levels in the game, in the form of “The Bottom of the Well”. The dev team was definitely cooking with gasoline at this point, and I’m wondering it they did actually work on this more towards the end of development or at the beginning, cause it would be cool to know if they came out of the gate going this hard, or if it took them most of the cycle of the games creation to warm up to pulling the designs for these final dungeons off, because both the Well Bottom and Shadow Temple just nail everything about what they do: presentation, difficulty balance, puzzle setup, combat scenarios, level design…it’s all just vibes for days, and happens to be a delightfully rare moment where Nintendo didn’t mind not holding their punches and going pretty hard on some dark undertones to one of their mainline games, which is a horrifying fevered dream to behold.

Oh hell no…I’m about to throw these hands….

Thankfully, because Nintendo isn’t totally deaf, dumb, and blind like so many of the rest of us are, they leave both areas almost entirely untouched in terms of altering any of where the original design is concerned, so we really are just treated to a glow-up of atmospheric proportions both in terms of grim visuals, dank residuals, and haunting music. When you also consider that due to the nature of the item one is looking for at the Bottom of the Well, the Lens of Truth, one doesn’t realize on an initial playthrough what kind of havoc that is going to create for the player, as the number of elements like pitfalls, obscured puzzles, or fake walls acting as visual illusion only, really open up what is possible in terms of how to fuck with the player is concerned. It’s simply awesome.


Forever deeper into hell we descend

Which is honestly such an interesting dichotomy that goes on here, due to how difficulty/trolling/tactics and pacing are concerned, as you’d think if people were going to have more of a problem with a dungeon and how it messes with the player, you’d think more people would have complained about the Bottom of the Well and the Shadow Temple vs the Water Temple, as the tricks, traps, and mischief present and accounted for in the former choices are various sorts of malevolent and cruel in their machinations, where as the Water Temple just tripped people up due to a little bit of backtracking. I made mention a little while back about how Zelda was kind of “Dark Souling” much earlier than that series actually was, making it more appropriate to say it was a “Zeldalike” in some ways, which ends up translating to Dark Souls own namesake, due to the evolutionary step forward in terms of ramping up the crazy to the nth degree the series is responsible for, but if there is any areas of 3D Zelda where you can see the most direct influence on the Souls series, its definitely in the Shadow/Well combo, as everything is nefarious, torturous, and completely macabre, and the mixture is a brilliant execution that keeps the players on their toes in the best ways possible.


I wouldn’t blame you if while you were looking at this screenshot, you thought for sure there is a bonfire just outside of frame…

Crazy enough, I was initially going to cram both the Well and Shadow Temple overviews into this single article, but realized it would have been doing both an injustice, and altered the ending of this one to give them both their own separate pieces. Having said that, I still don’t feel like I did the Well and it’s surrounding story elements enough justice, but sadly, I am out of time.


I just keep running into all kinds of terrifying this night

Tomorrow: we tackle the Shadow Temple.

Stay tuned.

~Pashford