Each line on the menu refers to a horse stable from Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, clued by “stable”, “breath”, and “of the wild” in the flavor text, as well as the title. The stable names are in alphabetical order once filled in.
If you fill in the missing parts of the stable names (e.g., DUELING _____ ⟶
PEAKS), you can then treat each line as a clue for various words from the
5x5 grid. The lengths of each word are given by the corresponding prices.
| # | Given Clue | Missing Word | # Items | Matching Words ($ = word length) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | DUELING _ _ _ _ _, 2 | PEAKS | 2 | TWIN, SUMMIT |
| 2 | _ _ _ _ HILL, 3 | FOOT | 3 | BALL, PRINT, LOCKER |
| 3 | HIGH _ _ _ _, 4 | LAND | 4 | MARSH, FOREST, MOTHER, TUNDRA |
| 4 | LAKE _ _ _ _, 1 | SIDE | 1 | LINE |
| 5 | _ _ _ SKIRT, 3 | OUT | 3 | FLOW, LINE, PRINT |
| 6 | _ _ _ _ _ SIDE, 3 | RIVER | 3 | BEND, FLOW, RAFT |
| 7 | _ _ _ _ FIELD, 5 | SNOW | 5 | BALL, PEAS, ANGEL, FROSTY, TUNDRA |
| 8 | _ _ _ LAND, 3 | WET | 3 | MARSH, PAINT, WILLY |
| 9 | _ _ _ _ LAND, 2 | WOOD | 2 | RAFT, FOREST |
Inventory words and their corresponding clues (by clue number):
| Column / Row | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | BELL | RAFT (6, 9) | TWIN (1) | SUMMIT (1) | REVENGE |
| 2 | BEND (6) | LOCKER (2) | FOREST (3, 9) | MARSH (3, 8) | WILLY (8) |
| 3 | FLOW (5, 6) | LINE (4, 5) | BALL (2, 7) | TUNDRA (3, 7) | PAINT (8) |
| 4 | AUNT | PRINT (2, 5) | MOTHER (3) | PEAS (7) | INTENT |
| 5 | LIFE | LASER | FROSTY (7) | ANGEL (7) | EQUALS |
Once you identify all the words for each clue, there are 7 cards that are not used. Their first letters spell BRAILLE and their last letters spell LETTERS.
If you look at each set of words per clue and interpret it as a Braille letter, going from top left to bottom right of the 5x5 grid, you get the answer SECONDDAY. This extraction order is clued by "scan" in the flavor text and is consistent with the left-to-right reading of Braille.
| Rows | Columns | Clue Number | Braille Letter |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1-3 | 1-2 | 6 | S |
| 1-3 | 2-3 | 9 | E |
| 1-3 | 3-4 | 1 | C |
| 2-4 | 2-3 | 2 | O |
| 2-4 | 3-4 | 3 | N |
| 2-4 | 4-5 | 8 | D |
| 3-5 | 1-2 | 5 | D |
| 3-5 | 2-3 | 4 | A |
| 3-5 | 3-4 | 7 | Y |
Examples of Braille extraction:
Braille "S":
| BELL | RAFT (6,9) |
| BEND (6) | LOCKER (2) |
| FLOW (5, 6) | LINE (4, 5) |
Braille "E":
| RAFT (6, 9) | TWIN (1) |
| LOCKER (2) | FOREST (3, 9) |
| LINE (4, 5) | BALL (2, 7) |
In 2019, Akira introduced Alison to her first video game - The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. While it took her a while to get the hang of the game (she once spent 30 minutes trying to pick a particular apple from an upper branch of a tree outside Kakariko Village), she ended up visiting all the shrines and every last korok seed.
This was the very first puzzle we wrote for Huntinality (or in life!), and we quickly thought of Breath of the Wild and the ubiquitous Beedle. We first thought about incorporating the various critters that Beedle sells, but the distribution of butterflies and lizards across stables didn’t lend much flexibility. We pulled in elements from another favorite game, Codenames, and used the 5x5 grid format to set up some word matching. (If we had more time and artistic skills, it would’ve been even cooler to write a crossover between Codenames pictures and the BOTW Inventory screen, both of which are already 5x4 grids! And if you haven’t tried Codenames pictures before, we highly recommend mixing pictures and words cards for an extra layer of both fun and dysfunction.)
We wanted to write a puzzle that combined these two games that we love. We thought about incorporating the various critters that Beedle sells, but the distribution of butterflies and lizards across stables didn’t lend much flexibility.
An earlier version of this puzzle also needed one more stable. We tried to avoid
the stable names that were too obviously Zelda and not real world concepts
(“Gerudo Canyon”, “Akkala”, etc), but this just left us with “Serenne” stable,
which we attempted to somewhat questionably clue as ____N__
(yielding SERENE). Luckily, later revisions
shortened the puzzle answer.
During playtests, our awesome testsolvers found many connections that we had
never thought of, and some of them were also less excited about certain clues
like PRESIDENT for SNOW, which we sadly removed. We ended up adding in
the prices to help constrain the word choice, but in future word puzzle writing
endeavors, we would want to remove all ambiguity and make sure connections lock
into place with more certainty. Overall, our biggest takeaway was that everyone's
brains operate differently and words are hard. Guess this is what makes word
games like Codenames fun and challenging to play!