Cadence of Hyrule is the game that's made me finally understand Zelda

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.

Cadence of Hyrule – Crypt of the NecroDancer Featuring The Legend of Zelda – Reveal Trailer Watch on YouTube

But over the last few years this easy answer has started to falter a little. A Link Between Worlds walked a very weird line, living inside the real estate, or so it seemed, of A Link to the Past, but allowing you to rent weapons and tackle dungeons in a funny order. Then Breath of the Wild blew so much of the ritual we associate with Zelda into smithereens. Gone was the stately progression of dungeons and the same old items. Instead you had a core group of skills that were with you from the first hour of the game and then you could use them as you saw fit.