The best Zelda level ever

Meet Yeto. He is a yeti who wears a horse’s saddle for a hat. I don’t know why he thinks that is an appropriate hat, but that’s Yeto for you. He lives in the mountainous northern province of Hyrule, and when he’s not foraging for reekfish, he’s hanging out inside my favorite Zelda level ever, so far: Snowpeak Ruins from Twilight Princess.

I’ve been playing Zelda games for something like 23 years now, and slogging through standard dungeons like, for example, the water dungeon where you pull levers to turn on the water to different levels to make things happen, or the fire dungeon where you leap from rock to rock above a pool of lava, has gotten quite tedious. Even playing from inside a giant fish or tree doesn’t quite do it for me any more. A level I recently played involving magnetic boots and enormous swivelling electromagnetic cranes, which probably would have made my jaw drop as a kid, scarcely evoked an arched eyebrow of mild interest. I mean, that’s not even the first time that Link has walked on the ceiling, for Pete’s sake. I felt like I’d seen it all.

Then the other day I played this level, and my heart surged with game-playing joy.
I’ve always been partial to snowy levels, but what I particularly like about this one is that unlike most Zelda dungeons, it’s a “real” building: an above-ground building on a recognizably human scale, i.e., with furniture and walls, rather than a collection of vast polyhedral underground caverns. This real-building feel was also more or less the case with my previous favorite level, the Forest Temple from Ocarina of Time.

Snowpeak Ruins is a European-style chateau that’s fallen into disrepair, inhabited by two friendly abominable snowpeople who hang out making tasty soup in the kitchen and warming themselves on a divan in the foyer.
While Mario for some reason visits haunted houses, hotels and asteroids all the time, I don’t think there’s been a major level of a Zelda game before that was just a haunted house rather than an abandoned temple/dungeon/cave, and it’s quite charming to see the two yetis hanging out in their dilapidated home.

The atmospheric details of the level are terrific - almost every room’s rafters have holes in them that snow’s drifting through, and the snowy stone courtyard reminded me of being in the Festung Hohensalzburg. I also like the way that you approach it, which is after a fun but not too difficult snowboarding ride across a snowy mountain.
The whole thing - the restrainedly realistic (for a Zelda game) architectural design of the chateau, the fact that the level is not an evil ancient ruin but a friendly couple’s house, the snowy setting, the very cool weapon you get halfway through - I love it all.

I’m not done with the game yet, but I doubt that the upcoming levels will be as charming or memorable. I’m already kind of ticked off by the Temple of Time level, which combines three of the most tedious and frustrating Zelda level design chestnuts: The remote-controlled stone statue, the escort mission, and the time-worn technique of “backtracking through the exact same rooms all over again only with a new item so that some things are slightly different”. Bah. Snowpeak Ruins has very little cliché about it, except for an icy sliding-block puzzle and the fact that the enormous swivelling cannons you see mounted at several points throughout the castle are not, as it turns out, entirely decorative.

While I have great warmth in my heart for Yeto, I should mention that his beloved matryoshka-shaped wife, Yeta, is also a congenial host, although she has some issues with memory loss and susceptibility to evil magic. But I forgive her.