The first Piece of Heart you encounter in Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom in Beach Cave instantly tests your puzzle-solving abilities. But for a lot of players, it’s hard to put the pieces together.
When you enter Beach Cave for the first time, after escaping the castle and getting your first few Echos, you are greeted by a few enemies you need to defeat before coming across a weird wall with rocks sticking out and three perfectly placed boxes standing between you and a Piece of Heart container.
You aren’t Link, so you can’t use a bomb or a downward sword strike to break the boxes this time. Instead, you need to use the skills you have obtained up until now to break the boxes differently than you are used to.
How to reach the Piece of Heart in Beach Cove under the three creates
Unlike usual Zelda games, where you can throw a bomb or use your sword to break simple wooden crates, you can’t do that in this game.
Instead, you have to use your brain and, dare I say, wisdom to use the various Echoes at your disposal to break the crates differently. It took me a few attempts to get the pieces together, as you have such a small amount of Echoes at your disposal when you get to this section.
You need to position Zelda above the boxes and then drop something like a Boulder echo or a Stone echo from a height. Gravity then does the rest of the work as the boulder crashes into the boxes below and breaks them to get you access to the Piece of Heart container. When you drop one boulder, you need to hold the ZR button to cancel all Echoes in your area and then drop another two boulders until you destroy all the boxes.
You can then reach the Piece of Heart and finish this first of many puzzles.
It might sound simple, and like me, you might think you are stupid for not thinking of this at first, but as Zelda games up until this point have all been about Link and his arsenal, switching how your brain thinks about puzzles in Echoes of Wisdom is vital for overcoming a lot more difficult challenges later on. The game does a good job of challenging you, and depending on how many Echos you have collected in comparison to other players, there are different ways to go about each puzzle. Everyone can overcome a puzzle in a different way, which makes the game that much more interesting.
