There's a growing problem I'm having with TOTK, and that's a serious lack of context clues. Usually Zelda is TOO liberal with the clues to solve puzzles, usually putting keywords in colors, or in Skyward Sword's case, even adding little jingles when words appear on your screen. TOTK has the red letters, for sure, but sometimes it just straight up won't tell you somethiong or will leave out clues for how to solve a puzzle.

For example, I was just at one of the skyview towers where the doors won't open. There's a Rito there and if you talk to him he says "Hey, I can't open the doors. Oh, by the way, there's a cave under here to get mushrooms!"

At first, I ignored the cave instructions because it sounded more like "This is a hint on where to get more mushrooms." Instead, I looked around the outside of the tower, didn't see anything obvious, I tried to peek into the tower, but I couldn't see anything. Going back to the Rito, he emphasized going down to the cave under the tower for mushrooms. Even just trying to open the doors shows Link try to open it with nothing happening.

So I went down there, cleared out the monsters, cleared out the rocks, and got the treasures...and...nothing else. I looked around and didn't see any obvious clues.

After a good while I was stumped. So I looked online (something I'm trying hard to avoid), and it turns out the door is blocked by sticks on either side of the door. The solution is to go down to the cave, and ascend up inside to the tower, and remove the sticks.

There's no context clues as to the door being blocked. The bird never says anything other than "it won't open for some reason." If he'd said "it feels like it's blocked" that would have helped. If Link had attempted to open the door and the door opened a bit and were blocked, that's a good context clue (in the game, he pulls at the door, nothing happens). Just anything to help sell "it's blocked."

I've run into several of those now although managed to stumble into the solution after a while (or looked it up), but the context clues in TOTK are a serious weak point I'm running into.

#tearsofthekingdom