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Huh, didn't think there were that many new and innovative things even though the game was fantastic experience.

The two things I really liked about TOTK was the ascend ability and the rewind / recall ability. Those were pretty cool and seemed novel to me.

Admittedly, I don't play a ton of video games other than Zelda titles and the odd indie game so maybe those features are not novel and have been implemented before in other games.



Rewind was a gameplay mechanic in the pretty great 2d platformer “Braid”. There is a GDC talk about how it was implemented in 2010.

https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1012210/The-Implementation-of-...


The first game I remember having a "rewind" feature as a part of the core gameplay mechanics was Blinx on the OG Xbox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blinx:_The_Time_Sweeper


I was gonna say "Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time" was earlier, but seems it was released a year after Blinx. I'm 90% sure The Sands of Time had some gameplay feature about turning back time somehow.


> I'm 90% sure The Sands of Time had some gameplay feature about turning back time somehow.

Yep. Not 100% the same as Tears of the Kingdom—you turn the entire game clock back in Sands of Time, not individual items like in Tears of the Kingdom. But still.


There isn't a point to the game though. You just walk around jumping on shit.


What do you mean? It's a puzzle platformer.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/26800/Braid/



Oh lol I forgot about this entirely.


We're talking about Braid, not Super Mario :)


Also "Life is Strange", or "Thinking with Time Machine" mod to Portal 2.


Text adventures made against the Z-Machine had an "undo" command since forever.


interesting.


I think Ori and the Will of the Wisps did "digging through terrain to go through it without leaving a trace" before, for a high profile example.

Rewind/recall, the game Entropy Centre has that mechanic for specific objects too.

That said most of those patents also are so mundane I doubt they can be enforced.


I haven't played TOTK, but when you say rewind-ability, it makes me think about Braid. Is it similar?


In TOTK, it only rewinds a specific object rather than the whole world as in Braid.


Similar, in a much a bigger scale, but with the big difference that Zelda applies rewind to objects instead of the whole level.

Also, world state is not deterministic like Braid's levels, so entities can lose its rewindable status or have their state history modified depending on certain factors (a destroyed or lost object can't be brought back with rewind, etc.).


my kid told me that the ascend function was a development utility that a dev decided was fun and into the game it went.


I'm sure there are other, but Forza Horizon also has a rewind ability.




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