Dear SHELPSHOT,
I read your magazine all the time! My name is Ashley and one day I hope to write about the greatest and latest games too! I play games with my older brother Mike and usually tell him how to solve all the puzzles. We mostly like Xexyz and Harvest Moon, but our absolute favourite is the Legend of Zelda series. We’ve played every Legend for every system there is except for the ones on the GameBoy Colour. Every year, we go back and play through an old one just because they are just that good!
This last year, I found something while playing The Twilight Princess Zelda that I thought I should tell you about, since your magazine likes secrets and I think that this one is a doozy. My brother was busy at school, so I was playing on my own and got up to the Snowpeak ruins. I was just about to continue on with a quest when I moved to the edge of the mountain and the way the camera turned surprised me. I was shocked that I could see out over the mountainous horizon!
Even though I played this game with Mike a bunch of times before he had never stopped to look out over the mountains like this. I had a quiet moment of reflection not just on the story of the Twilight Princess game, or really any other games I’ve played; but I reflected on the analogues of all games I’ve experienced with the life I’ve lived and the people I’ve lived it with. It felt like, for one moment, that I was really alone at the apex of the snowpeak, and that the mountain range I looked out over was made up of a myriad of possible pasts and futures--most of which I would never experience, but many of which I had the sudden understanding of how they were directly possible to achieve. I could almost plot a path across the pixels to some utopia of existence I had always suspected was there, but that I had never dreamed to know. There, atop the snowpeak, I felt my humanity laid bare--as though I were both completely empty and a compounded vessel of all things in the universe, simultaneously.
When Mike got home I showed him the level but couldn’t articulate the feeling very accurately. We kept playing though and beat the game in only one more sitting! Can your Expert Game Counselors replicate this secret? I’ve tried it again since, but the feeling is not as intense and seems fleeting. I’m going to try not to play the Twilight Princess again for a few years, and maybe when I finally go back through it, it will feel new and strange again! Love the new Magazine!
Ashley Megan Hill
Melbourne, VIC
Dear Ashley:
Good find! After a mini marathon of gaming, the Licensed Professional Video Game Counsellors here at SHELPSHOT have been able to replicate your secret! We can confirm a drawn out sense of euphoric wholeness when taking pause at the Snowpeak in Twilight Princess.
The presence of moments of protracted melancholy or rapturous reflection can become pronounced around particular portions of certain games, creating unintended anchoring points that provide an influx of insight into the unconscious mind! Taking a fifteen minute break every hour is a good way to minimize this effect, which comes about through a state of mind similar to lucid dreaming.
These pockets of epiphany usually come in the quiet moments after a particularly dark dungeon or in the calm quiet right before a new leg of a journey. The nature of intended actions in games actually integrates a sort of surrogate experience in your mind, so maybe you feel like you are in two places at once: on your sofa and on Snowpeak! Thanks for writing, and for the letter art!
Can you find other moments of elongated ephemera in your games library? Write in and let us know!
