All around the Temple of Time were bizarre statues, and they’re also present in the ruins around the second shrine. As Link approaches, one of those statues comes to life and focuses on Link. If he doesn’t get out of their line of sight, they shoot him with a laser that, with three max hearts, is a one-hit kill. This is where my first run ended. Although I assumed the statues were Beamos at the time, they’re something new called Guardians. There are a total of three active Guardians in the area for Link to avoid as he makes his way to the shrine, which is in a completely walled-off area of the ruins so he has to climb the wall to get there.
The Ja Baij shrine has the Bomb Trial. This adds two new runes to the Sheikahphone, remote bombs in two forms, sphere and cube. Link can have one active bomb at a time, and there’s a cooldown between exploding a bomb and using the next one. They make sure to have one puzzle work better with a cube bomb and one work better with a sphere bomb, but I don’t really think there was anything that couldn’t be done with either. The remote function is a nice new twist (although Remote Bombs first appeared in Minish Cap, and the Cane of Somaria had a similar use), and the last couple puzzles involve waiting for a bomb to get into place before detonating it. Link collects a second Spirit Orb from the monk.
The next two shrines are in the mountains. The path I took up to them leads northwest from the Shrine of Resurrection. As Link gets higher up in the mountains, cold begins to become a factor – if Link keeps going, he’ll take damage from the cold. Right before it starts getting cold, Link comes across a Bokoblin camp with a cooking pot. There are a bunch of Spicy Peppers in the area, which when cooked form a meal that gives Link cold resistance. With that, Link can climb up until he comes to a river. Now, I had a feeling the river was going to be too wide and too fast to swim across, so I saved before trying it, but I forgot one thing: cold water will kill you faster than cold air, and the peppers don’t help. There’s a bridge Link can use to cross the river, but the first section is missing and needs to be replaced by a metal plate using Magnesis.
The next shrine is the Keh Namut Shrine, which houses the Cryonis Trial. The rune for this trial is Cryonis, which creates a pillar from water. (The name and that it’s made from water make me think it’s ice, but it’s not at all slick.) The obvious use is to help Link cross water and climb to higher places than he can get on his own. The trial highlights two other ideas: placing the pillar under things to lift them up (a gate to open it, one end of a board to create a ramp) and to block attacks from the mini-Guardian in the shrine. Once he’s gotten through everything, Link gets the third Spirit Orb.
On the way to the next shrine, Link comes across the old man, who gives Link a Warm Doublet to make cold weather easier to take. Otherwise, there’s not much to note before the Owa Daim Shrine. That shrine is the Stasis Trial, and even though there’s two slots for runes left, there’s only one given here. Stasis can freeze objects in time, stopping a spinning bridge long enough for Link to cross or a ball rolling down a slope so Link can get past. Its effects on stationary objects are even more interesting: If Link whacks them with his weapons, they’ll stay where they are because of the time freeze, but once time starts back up, all that kinetic energy activates at once. Link needs to do this to knock a boulder out of his way to the monk, who gives him the fourth Spirit Orb.
It should be no surprise by now that the old man knows Link’s completed his task and comes paragliding in to talk to him. He’s almost ready to tell Link everything, but has one final task: to find him again. As a guide, he says to look at the map and imagine the shrines as a quadrilateral. He’ll be waiting where the diagonals intersect [1]. At this, he vanishes into blue light – hardly the first sign there’s something supernatural about him, but definitely the most blatant. Looking at the map, the lines cross at the Temple of Time.
Link warps back to the Shrine of Healing to head back down to the Temple of Time. There’s a Goddess Statue there (it was there before, but now it’s glowing), and when Link prays to it, it offers to take the four Spirit Orbs in exchange for a heart container or a stamina upgrade. I don’t know if it was metagaming (there’s no way they’d let me screw up my game by giving the Orbs to the statue instead of the old man) or knowing the old man doesn’t actually want the Spirit Orbs, he just wanted Link to prove himself and/or get the rune abilities, but I took it up on the offer and got a heart container. Once that was done, the old man called down to Link from the roof, asking him to find his way up.
Next: Introduction and story.
[1] These aren’t the exact words; he says to imagine an X between the shrines. I prefer more precision.
