Well, alright.
It’s time for me to tackle the tower at Lookout Landing. I walk over, and I find Purah fiddling with the controls of the tower.
She activates the tower, and it lights up. All around the area, other towers also light up, all at once, as if on a network. A beacon of light streams out of the top of the tower, lighting up the sky.
The towers are activated. That wasn’t hard!
Purah tells me that I can update the map data on my Purah Pad if I visit the tower, and it will install the region that it has in its data banks. This will enable me to instantly travel to that tower, but also to have detailed map of the area around the tower.
So basically very much like the tower-map-fast travel system of BOTW, but updated a little bit.
Purah also gives me my glide wing back, and then tells me that they need me to go up the tower to scan the area with my Purah Pad to obtain an updated image of the terrain. So this is, I guess, why I can’t get the entire map of Hyrule all at once; I have to visit each tower, go to the top, and scan the land with the pad. There’s also map data for the sky level of the map, which is also updated. So Hyrule is effectively twice as big as in BOTW because there are two levels.
OK, so I go do that. I stand on a glowing section of floor in the middle of the tower, and it shoots me up, high into the air, all in a few seconds I’m maybe a thousand feet or more above the ground.
I’m on a tether, and the tether is like a data cable or something, the pad sends the data down the cable to the base of the tower, below.
After that, I’m free to fall, dive, or glide back to earth.
I’m very high up, and can see a long way. As I’m coming down, I try to look about and see what I can see.
I don’t try to move anywhere, because I want to test whether the winds will blow me about, or if I will just fall straight down; I fall straight down, right back into the hole at the top of the tower. At the very last instant, I use the glider to slow my descent, landing without taking any damage. Luckily.
I try going up the tower again, and it shoots me back up into the sky. This time, I test how fast I can move horizontally without deploying the glider. It’s not very fast, but I’m up so high that I can still manage to cover some ground. I don’t want to deploy the glider while I’m up too high, lest I run out of stamina meter and fall to my death. But maybe that works differently in TOTK than it did in BOTW for all I know. I’ll have to play around with it and test theories.
Looking around, nearby I spot a small (pond-sized) chasm in the ground not far from Lookout Landing. And not much past that, there’s a shrine. I decide to fall toward it and check it out.
I land in front of the chasm, and try to get close enough to look in. It’s pretty dark. Gloom is spewing forth from the hole in the ground, and I’m careful to avoid stepping in it. Nearby, there’s a small lean-to, with some building supplies near it. I spot a Hylian man, apparently resting in the lean-to. I go up to talk to him, and he tells me to be cautious about the Gloom, and its ruinous effects on your health. If you’re exposed it will drain your life slowly, and if you can get back to the surface, your health will slowly recover.
So, basically it’s kind of another environmental themed timer that prevents you from spending a lot of time in Gloomy areas, and forces you to hurry. So a lot like the cold and hot zones, but eeeeevil.
I continue to the shrine, and enter. The challenge is pretty simple. It involves manipulating large blocks of stone using the Ultrahand ability, and is a test of your ability to rotate and manipulate the shapes. There are two sub-challenges, and the idea is that you need to position the shape so that it will pass through a hole in the wall designed to accept the shape. This is like an IQ test for a 2 year old.
I feel like this is super simple but it’s still not entirely clear what I’m supposed to do with the shape once I get it to pass through the hole. At first I’m thinking I’m supposed to rotate the shape while it’s in the hole, using it as like a key in a lock. But that’s not it. I’m just supposed to take this long shape and pull it through an X-shaped hole, and use it as a bridge, laying it across a trench that I need to cross over to get to the next part of the shrine.
The second challenge is another block, this one is like two cubes that are welded together at the corners, creating an asymmetric shape a bit like a staircase. There’s a section of wall that I can use to position it to climb up, only it’s still not possible to climb up using conventional standard climbing techniques. It doesn’t take very long for me to realize that I can use the Ascend power, standing in the overhang of this block, and pass through the block to get to the top.
This gets me access to a chest with a potion of speed, and then I re-use the same block to get to the spirit orb and pass the challenge.
I have two spirit orbs now. Only they call them something else in this game, somethingsomething of Light or whatever. Same thing.
So that’s done. What next? Will the game tell me? Or should I just meander and screw around and figure things out?