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Waypoint

'Breath of the Wild' Is Better When You Turn Off Everything Trying to Help You

In a game that avoids holding your hand, it's worth throwing off the only guard rails left.

Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. If I wasn't wearing headphones in bed while playing  The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, it wouldn't take long for my wife to start punching my arm, as the game's tool for hinting at the location for new shrines starts going off every few minutes. Though useful, I'm torn on whether I should be taking advantage of its many beeps.

Shrines are important to surviving the surprisingly tough  Breath of the Wildpossible, as many of them are home to important loot (I recently found a bandana that made it easier to climb!) and upon finishing four of them, you can exchange spirit orbs for health and stamina upgrades. The game has more than 100 of 'em.

And while it's possible to both stumble upon shrines and scout them from lofty locations like mountain tops and towers, some are located in weird spots, or purposely hidden out of view. Given how crucial shrines are (not to mention how fun they are to solve), it's not surprising that Nintendo would give players a way to more easily track them down. But it's an open question on whether this betrays the core ethos of  Breath of the Wild, a game about pure exploration.

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