The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild's Dungeon Design

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild does not really have dungeons in the usual Zelda sense.

Instead, the massive overworld is terrorized by gigantic divine beasts: Vah Ruta, a mechanized elephant in Zora's Domain; Vah Rudania, a weaponized salamander on Death Mountain; Vah Medoh, a robotic bird above Rito Village; Vah Naboris, a hulking camel in Gerudo Desert; and, in the expansion, a secret fifth beast beneath the Shrine of Resurrection.

Link disables these machines, crawls inside them, wrestles control back, and uses them in the fight against Calamity Ganon. Inside, the similarities to classic dungeons are visible: there is a map, puzzles, a boss, and a heart container.

But almost everything else is different.

The divine beasts are completely open. They do not have individual rooms in the usual sense, clearly separated floors, or doors unless a door is itself part of a puzzle.

They also have no key items. Link gets core powers like Magnesis, Stasis, Cryonis, and bombs at the beginning of the game, while bows, rods, and special arrows are consumable tools rather than dungeon-defining treasures.

Their structure is also stripped down. Find the map terminal, activate a handful of other terminals in any order, then activate the main terminal and fight the boss. That is the whole flow.

There are no small keys, no locked doors, no new item that recontextualizes the space, and no fixed sequence of events. Any graph built around traditional Zelda locks and gates stops being useful here.

The divine beasts are not entirely new. Their central idea is that they move.

Vah Ruta's trunk can be moved into 10 positions. Vah Rudania can rotate 90 degrees. Vah Medoh can tilt left or right. Vah Naboris has three rotating chambers in its belly. The expansion dungeon has a central axle that can rotate clockwise or counterclockwise.

These movements let the player navigate and solve puzzles: tilt a bird to send a cart down a rail, use an axle as a spinning elevator, move an elephant's trunk to rain water onto a flame, or roll a ball through a salamander by rotating the entire beast.

That puts them closest to Zelda's puzzle-box dungeons, such as Ocarina of Time's Water Temple, Twilight Princess's Lakebed Temple, and Skyward Sword's Sky Keep. Those dungeons ask the player to think globally about how parts connect, how rooms affect each other, and how a large mechanism works.

Zelda has explored global dungeon mechanisms before. Link's Awakening has Eagle's Tower, where one floor crashes into another. Ocarina of Time pushed the idea further with 3D spaces and clockwork-like dungeon design.

That clockwork sensibility became a major part of the series. Water routes, rotating staircases, time stones, mirrored layouts, moving rooms, and giant mechanisms all ask the player to understand a dungeon as one connected object rather than a string of separate rooms.

Breath of the Wild keeps that lineage, but changes two important things: the movement happens in real time, and the player controls it from anywhere through the map screen.

In earlier games, a dungeon transformation often happens in a cutscene or after a distant switch is triggered. In Breath of the Wild, Link can keep running around while the whole beast shifts under his feet.

There are not many puzzles that require acting during the movement itself, though Medoh has a nice example where tilting the bird sends a hammer toward a gong while also moving a fan that closes a door. The player must use Magnesis during the tilt to keep the fan in place.

Even when the puzzles do not fully exploit real-time movement, the system adds interesting traversal. Rudania can be flipped to catch Link before he falls into Death Mountain. Naboris lets Link balance on rotating chambers to reach higher ground. Ruta asks the player to leap from a high point and glide to a terminal, something that would be impossible in older Zelda dungeons with separated rooms and no jump button.

That movement fits Breath of the Wild's freeform feel. By comparison, older dungeon spaces can feel rigid and stiff.

The second difference is more complicated. The player can manipulate each divine beast from the map screen, from anywhere.

That is very different from a dungeon like Skyward Sword's Sandship, where the player changes between past and present by physically shooting an arrow into a time stone. Because changing the state requires time and positioning, the player is encouraged to think ahead: set the era before going below deck, understand why a mechanism needs to be in one state, and make an intentional plan.

That distance between switch and mechanism can create puzzles. If a room needs the past to open an outer door and the present to open an inner door, and the time stone sits outside the room, the puzzle exists because the player cannot simply toggle the state from inside.

If the player could change time from a menu at any moment, that puzzle would disappear.

Putting dungeon controls in the menu has real benefits. The divine beasts are faster to complete, backtracking is almost entirely removed, and the player gets the grand feeling of manipulating a massive location without much legwork.

But the same convenience weakens some puzzles. If a mechanism can be changed from anywhere, some problems become easier than they could have been. Others can be solved by fiddling with states until something lines up, like hammering a perspective-shift trigger in Fez until the solution appears.

There are exceptions. Some divine-beast puzzles require Link to stand in a specific place before the beast moves, which restores some planning. Naboris is especially strong because its three rotating chambers create many possible combinations and ask the player to think logically about what is moving and why.

A good Naboris puzzle lowers the camel's tail, asks Link to stand on it, then restores the circuit so the tail rises with him on it. Another hides a terminal in a cage that must line up with an exterior window. These are the moments where the system feels closest to its potential.

The divine beasts also contain self-contained puzzles that do not rely on moving the whole dungeon.

Naboris has a puzzle where two electric balls power switches, but if the second ball is hard to find, the player can bridge the current with metal objects such as chests, swords, bows, or shields. Ruta has a water-wheel puzzle where Cryonis stops the wheel at the right time.

Those smaller conundrums are often smart, and they benefit from Breath of the Wild's systemic toolset. The player can sometimes solve problems through physics, electricity, metal objects, or environmental rules instead of a single intended item.

The issue is that puzzles are almost the only thing the divine beasts have going for them.

Because there are no keys and locks, the divine beasts have little classical navigation gameplay. Combat is also thin: a few Guardian Scouts, a few floating skulls, and one boss, with no real mini-boss structure.

The aesthetics are another weak point. The beasts themselves are striking from the outside, but their interiors look and feel very similar. Murky textures, similar stonework, and understated music make the five spaces blur together.

That matters. A dungeon's architecture, music, atmosphere, and visual identity contribute heavily to its quality. The Forest Temple's strange mood, Snowpeak Ruins' originality, or Skyward Sword's Earth Temple architecture are not side details. They help the dungeon stick in memory.

Breath of the Wild's divine beasts stumble because their inner spaces are mechanically distinct but aesthetically repetitive.

Most Zelda dungeons have a narrative or flow. A tower slowly climbs upward. A central hub opens piece by piece. A dungeon is recontextualized after the key item appears. Open exploration can coalesce into a more linear rush toward the boss.

Breath of the Wild's divine beasts rarely create that feeling. Ruta has the best flow: start low, get a water wheel moving, ride upward, then use the trunk to reach the elephant's head.

For the most part, though, the beasts are completely open and non-linear. That openness fits the rest of Breath of the Wild, but it does not always make for memorable pacing.

In a game built around a freeform overworld, the dungeons might have benefited from offering more structure as contrast.

Alongside the divine beasts, Breath of the Wild has 120 shrines: small, self-contained challenge rooms scattered across Hyrule.

Many shrines focus on a single idea and explore it from several angles. Joloo Nah Apparatus centers on spinning a block: first turn on all the lights, then blast four fans at once, then light six torches while avoiding streams of water. Blue Flame builds small challenges around carrying a blue flame by torch or arrow.

This is classic escalation. Start simple, add complexity, then test the player's understanding.

Some shrine annoyances remain. Running out of arrows or breaking weapons inside a shrine can be irritating. Some shrine names make their own solutions too obvious. But many shrines still feel closer to traditional Zelda puzzle rooms than the divine beasts do.

A few shrines almost feel like small dungeons. Trial of Power is longer and more eclectic, with varied challenges and a layout that wraps around itself. Shrines are also the only places in the game where small keys appear.

More often, a shrine feels like one room from a Wind Waker or Twilight Princess dungeon: a short burst of puzzle solving before the player returns to the overworld.

Most shrines are puzzle rooms, while others are blessings for solving overworld challenges or combat rooms against Guardian robots. Their biggest shared problem is repetition. They use the same visual language and music every time, which looks and sounds good at first but becomes familiar over dozens of visits.

They also feel disconnected from the rest of the world, tucked into abstract underground chambers rather than woven into specific places.

One more area feels dungeon-like: Hyrule Castle.

It is the game's ultimate goal, and it has many expected dungeon ingredients: a winding, maze-like structure, combat encounters, small puzzles, branching paths, and secret rooms.

It still lacks keys, locks, and dungeon items, but it may scratch the itch left by the divine beasts. It is also very open. The player can enter from the front, sneak in through a cave by the moat, follow a relatively linear path through fights with Lynels and Guardians, or climb and explore to find a personal route.

The castle also changes dramatically based on what the player has earned. Revali's Gale can skip huge chunks of it. The Zora armor can let Link swim up waterfalls and bypass almost the entire place, which perhaps goes a little too far.

The divine beasts are a mixed success.

Their puzzle-box aspect is appealing. Manipulating huge locations to move around and solve puzzles feels excellent, and the best terminals involve giant water wheels, spinning rooms, massive fans, and electric circuits.

But the problems are hard to ignore. The beasts are short. Their interiors lack strong visual identity. Many puzzles are easier than they could have been. The pacing is flat because the spaces are so open, and there is not enough combat or navigation to vary the rhythm.

They also all use the same puzzle-box style. That is exciting for players who love global mechanisms, but other Zelda games benefit from mixing straightforward dungeons with more complex clockwork spaces.

The divine beasts contain some of the best ideas in Zelda dungeon design, but they do not fully nail the concept. They are bold and ambitious enough to fit Breath of the Wild, yet they do not quite stick the landing.