Center Stage: Sky Keep (The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword)

In “Center Stage,” Wolfman Jew discusses environments and level design across the games industry. They may be single levels, larger sandboxes, or broader settings. They may be as small as a room and as large as a world. Some may not even be good. But they are all interesting.

EDIT, Thursday, June 5, 9:34 AM Eastern: Thanks to Hamada for edits.

There is a belief amongst some fans within the Nintendo faithful that The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword is bad, or at least deeply flawed. The motion-controlled sword fighting was unplayable for many gamers in 2011, despite being the crown jewel for the Wii MotionPlus accessory. Many of the ideas—particularly light survival and crafting mechanics, some of which sequels would spin in various ways—were viewed as a half-baked and forced way to promote exploration. Its nagging sidekick Fi was derided as perhaps the worst companion in the series. It was the anniversary game, the big release for the series’ 25th anniversary at a point when the Wii was desperate for anything, and instead it was contentious. Impressive critical reception didn’t quite match fan reception. This is the legacy the game was saddled with, though its stock has risen somewhat thanks to the 2021 remaster Skyward Sword HD.

Image: Source Gaming. Not more than ten minutes into the forest level, and Fi bursts out to stop me from exploring. It was an era where Nintendo was worried about the player losing their way. Image, like the others, taken from Skyward Sword HD.

I… don’t feel the need to refute these. Skyward Sword is a deeply shaggy game. It always was. It’s filled with great ideas but not always the methods for employing them. Things like resource collection and many of the motion control gimmicks feel superfluous, like the game decided to include them first and then struggled to justify them. The world is a series of somewhat tepid courses you keep running, while the romantic skyscape above is empty. Finding resources to trade for upgrades often feels like a collect-a-thon platformer of the Nineties. And personally, I struggled with the controls repeatedly. My replay of it via the remaster helped a lot—it’s filled with small quality-of-life improvements, most importantly the option for a more standard control scheme that’s actually accessible for me—but the core issues are still there. As the first Zelda to make serious strides against the formula A Link to the Past made twenty years prior, and the one that buckles underneath it the most, it’s a game that wants to be truly different but struggles with how.

But even a shaggy Zelda is still Zelda, the greatest of game series, and Skyward Sword is great. It has the strongest conventional story of the franchise thanks to some Disney-esque plotting. The few auxiliary items (the game cut down on gadgets to emphasize the motion controlled sword fighting) have plenty of fun utility, none more so than the delightful flying Beetle drone. The score, the first one of the franchise to be recorded live, is phenomenal. While the original release’s graphics were a bit restricted by technical limitations, its painterly art style was always imaginative and delightful. Even when it’s killing its own pace for another forced stealth segment in the boring volcano area, it’s still coming up with ideas.

Image: Source Gaming. Koloktos here is a boss who could only exist in a Zelda this focused on combat, and it led him to being one of the series’ most iconic bad guys.

Best of all are the dungeons, the back half of which are among the strongest in the Zelda canon. The Ancient Cistern is a crypto-Buddhist temple full of gorgeous pools, a scary underside, and a spectacular boss fight. The time-shifting Sandship has you jump backwards and forwards through centuries by way of a single switch—a target on the mast—you have to trigger through increasingly elaborate methods. The Fire Sanctuary jumps from caves to volcanic bridges, creating a sense of scale few dungeons evoke. While these dutifully followed the standard the game was ostensibly trying to flee, they did so with panache and are a testament to the power of “classic” Zelda dungeon design.

Image: Source Gaming. The entrance to Sky Keep. It’s very subdued by the rest of the game’s standards.

The final dungeon, Sky Keep, is not the best of this flock (though it is quite good), nor is it the full encapsulation of the “Skyward Sword dungeon experience.” In fact, not being the perfect version works in its favor. While it ostensibly sums up Link’s entire journey, it does so in a way that entirely upends the Zelda formula. In that sense, it loses some of its own specific strengths to do what the game is most interested in, which I find commendable and compelling.

Image: Source Gaming. Previous fire areas in Skyward Sword employed puzzles about riding temporary rock platforms across lava. This room adds a few wrinkles; you have to redirect the flow of the lava, jump on a rising platform, and set up a new platform on a time limit.

The seventh dungeon in the game, and the very last challenge before the final battle, Sky Keep is something of a greatest hits album. There are only eight rooms, and with the exception of two (the entrance and one inspired by the Deku Tree of Faron Woods), each is an homage to a prior dungeon complete with reused graphics. Skyview Temple, Lanayru Mining Facility, Earth Temple; they’re all there. And they’re filled with puzzles based largely if not exclusively on the puzzles and tropes you encountered in those areas. The Fire Sanctuary room has lava flows you have to ride on and redirect. The Mining Facility and Sandship both use Timeshift Orbs to turn on robotic enemies and age barbed wire out of existence. Though it’s not just a copy of those areas, as these rooms also liberally borrow the graphics, structure, and puzzles of other environments. That Sandship room isn’t in a pirate ship, but in a quicksand-filled cave that’s a dead ringer for an early room in Lanayru Desert. The Skyview Temple room is all about using different items, most of which you only got after completing that dungeon. This patchwork quilt of graphics and puzzles and items—and a Sandship miniboss relocated to the tree room—makes Sky Keep a tribute to the game’s general ingenuity.

Image: Source Gaming. The Sandship room that also uses the general layout of a random room from a dozen hours earlier. The mashup gives the dungeon a distinct energy.

This itself isn’t dramatically new for a game, certainly not for action-adventure games. Over the years, the Zelda series has forced players to go through a final hodgepodge of challenges or a gauntlet of boss fights. It’s just a natural way to make a game, especially if your game features a combination of combat and puzzles. But it’s different in Sky Keep, thanks to one mechanic that’s fairly rare for this kind of thing. To explore, access every room, and finally get the long-sought-after Triforce, you have to contend with the single most notorious standard of video game logic: the sliding block puzzle.

Image: Source Gaming. The plaque in the entrance. Like any other sliding block puzzle, you move whatever blocks can go in the free space.

When you enter Sky Keep, you’re instantly given a map of the dungeon; it shows eight square rooms in a three by three, none of whose doors connect to any of the other rooms. The entrance has exits to the south (where you came in) and east, but the eastern one is barred. It wouldn’t be safe to have it open when it doesn’t connect to anything. The only way to open it is to go to the room’s plaque, which has a sliding block recreation of the dungeon layout. If you can slide a room with a western exit next to it, the door opens and you can proceed further.

Image: Source Gaming. The Sky Keep map right after you get it. Like the game’s other maps, it tells you the locations of every important thing in the dungeon.

For those of us (i.e., me) who get hives from this kind of puzzle, it’s thankfully and astonishingly easy. The first room can’t be moved at all, and as it’s in the middle-down position you can barely make any changes. It’s far, far easier to handle than the sliding blocks you might see in other games, which are at times notorious for how badly they can flummox a player. This is probably for the best in the name of accessibility, though it’s maybe a tad disappointing in the grand scheme of things. It’s also probably impossible, or at least very impractical, for you to get all eight rooms connected into one chain. At least at the start, the best you can do is connect two, maybe three rooms to the entrance. So you go through them one by one, solving each block’s main puzzle and opening a shortcut between the two exits.

Image: Source Gaming. All of the rooms are fairly linear challenges, and pretty much all of them end with an option to open a shortcut. It makes returning and backtracking easier, but I’m only now realizing that the structure precludes players from simply starting at the other end of the shortcut.

But soon, the rules change. At some point, you’ll find a room with the same plaque from the entrance and the same sliding block puzzle, except now this is the room that’s locked in place. While how far you can go is still restricted (again, having one blank space and one immovable room wildly cuts down on your ability to manipulate things), it makes exploration more freeform. You can actually set up a pattern in one room, walk to another room with a plaque, and exploit the pattern you just made. It’s actually a very helpful way to go about reaching the final room. There are probably not many permutations for how to go through Sky Keep, but multiple ones do exist and you’re not punished for going in a “nonoptimal” way. It upends the format of most dungeons, where there are optional items and rooms but the critical path is structured, unwavering, and still satisfying.

Image: Source Gaming. One possible layout of the dungeon after you’ve entered every room. At this point, after getting the key, I had to jump between rooms to make a path to the Ancient Cistern and get the final piece of the Triforce.

This is what Skyward Sword wanted to do from the start. It was excited to create a world of openness, interaction, and survival; it just didn’t support those virtues. But handing you partial control of the dungeon manages that. It’s not as though Sky Keep is the first dungeon in the series to give up the reins; several like the Water Temple let you manipulate them, while Eagle’s Tower could only be finished by permanently destroying one of its floors. This one, however, lets you direct the actual progression in a way that’s rather meta. You get to play with the layout. Not a ton, but giving you power to help tell the story of how Link conquered the final trial is really important. It taking place in an area built off the assets and gimmicks of earlier areas adds a meta element, like you’re cementing a greater mastery of Skyward Sword itself. All of these sorts of final areas work like that, but it feels just a bit different here. A bit greater, and that likely comes from the room-shifting mechanic.

Image: Source Gaming. Skyward Sword was very focused in on the Wii sword fighting, and some of its fun auxiliary items get abandoned as the adventure goes on. Sky Keep’s puzzle focus lets them get one more showcase before the combat-heavy finale.

You can find a bit of Sky Keep in future entries. Breath of the Wild’s Divine Beasts can all be physically controlled and manipulated from within, albeit as contiguous spaces instead of collections of moments. The idea of controlling your own progression drives the entirety of that game, too, as did A Link Between Worlds’ system of letting you buy the required tools in whatever order you liked. Tears of the Kingdom and Echoes of Wisdom channeled this, but mostly in a granular, item-by-item fashion. But it’s most overtly echoed in the build-your-own Chamber Dungeons of the Link’s Awakening remake, which forces you to work within far more open predetermined patterns. I think this level of player agency is what the Zelda series is going to focus on for the foreseeable future, no matter how nonlinear the experience is as a whole. And dungeons will always be a major avenue for Nintendo to explore this. They are the spice of Zelda, the mirror to its grand overworld.

In that sense, Skyward Sword’s final dungeon has a legacy that’s odd, complicated, but not in a bad way. It’s the space where the game did what it set out to do most successfully. It’s the impetus of a lot of what made people love the sequels that followed it, in the same way that several of Skyward Sword’s more irritating features were reimagined later to more success. It’s part of the canon of Zelda dungeons, partially because it’s so alien to how a Zelda dungeon works. It’s arguably the end point of one form of level design and the beginning of another. Perhaps it fits that it ends with Link getting the Triforce, the holy, wish-granting relic of the franchise that’s captivated people in and out of the Zelda universe. There is a magic to this secret labyrinth in the sky.