Cadence of Hyrule should not feel like Zelda. Sure, there’s Link – and there’s Zelda! – and there’s a top-down landscape of villages, beaches and mountains. There’s a wood you can get lost in and there’s a boomerang you can find. But this is an offshoot of another very different RPG series: Crypt of the Necrodancer. Crypt is a rhythm-action game and a roguelite, I gather. And so in its own way is Cadence. Link moves through the world bouncing to a beat, and he must use the beat to tackle enemies who all, essentially, come with their own weaponised dances. I understand that if I dig through the menus I can procedurally scramble the map, and I can even turn on permadeath. Not very Zelda-y really.
Here’s the thing, though: Cadence of Hyrule feels just like Zelda, and it did from the very start, despite a new character I’d never met, despite all that dancing to the beat stuff, and despite the fact that a lot of the game seems to revolve around a shovel. The weirdness goes on: you clear each screen as if it were a puzzle. You lose certain items when you get killed. But the sense of adventure, the sense of bright innocence and gentle heroics? It’s intact. Someone else has made a Zelda game. Who knew?
And it’s made me wonder if my understanding of Zelda has been wrong all these years. For a long time, the answer to the question of what makes a Zelda game a Zelda game has always been the same for me. Ritual. Zelda games take you back to the clockwork kingdom where everything has been scrambled a little but is still ultimately familiar. There’s an overworld. There are dungeons. Somewhere along the line you get given a boomerang.
Source: Eurogamer Cadence of Hyrule is the game that's made me finally understand Zelda