I resume The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past somewhere in the middle of the game's fifth dungeon, the Palace of Darkness. It's been so long that, were I playing on an SNES, a harmonica solo would have been required to clear the dust from the cartridge, but since I am playing on [SPOILER REDACTED] , it snaps back to life instantly. My sense of what I'm supposed to do takes much longer to come back online. Clearly something about this dungeon pissed me off, because I am in a sub-basement staring at a locked door and the three giant, bipedal rats who are guarding it. Obviously if I kill the rats, I will progress. But the question of how to do that is — unlike the door — open.

The rats are mimics. If you move left, they move left. If you move forward, they move forward, etc. The green variety are harmless. While they play Simon Says, Link can walk right up and slash them to death. But the red variety spits fire, and this fireball outpaces any projectile Link has. Which means I have to devise some oblique angle of attack. I try my boomerang — nothing. I plant a bomb, then maneuver the rat onto it — nothing. I charge my sword, sneak around behind the guy, and unleash a whirlwhind — it is ineffective. (The greens did die to sword attacks, remember.) I fling a pot and it shatters over its head like I’m fighting the terminator.

Trying to crawl out of the solution space’s local maxima through this kind of trial and error is not exactly fun. But it is deeply compelling.

Because LTTP recognizes the psychological value of a locked door. They fascinate us. Even if we don’t know what’s behind them — it could be a broom closet — the simple fact that they’re locked suggests there is some valuable secret just behind them. A locked door is its own motivation. At times, LTTP is less a game than a Skinner box built to study this impulse. Like rats, we are run through mazes (battling other rats as we go!) relying on our automatic urge to discover what’s behind that door. When we open one, we get our cheese.

I can’t hear that jingle without a hit of endorphins. Only a few games can induce this kind of compulsion. Civilization gooses your brain stem with a similar question: “I wonder what’s under this fog?” But as appealing as it is to solve puzzles and open locked doors, it’s equally repellant to be unable to open them.

There are no degrees of success with a locked door. You either have the solution or you don’t. That means there’s no gradient between success and failure, only frustration preceding epiphany. That’s why I’ve abandoned so many Zeldas mid-stream: that ratio of frustration to satisfaction became slightly skewed.

The frustration of locked doors isn’t just a problem for the dungeons. It applies to the overworld as well. Though it’s an expansive, ostensibly open space, the overworld is a macrocosm of the dungeons: lots of locked doors. These take the form of cordons made of boulders or fences. It’s an elegant way to direct play while maintaining an illusion of openness, but it can seem contrived. The idea that Link — who apparently has the agility of a vacuum cleaner — is stymied by wooden pegs until he acquires a giant mallet is a little silly. A locked door’s meant to be an obstruction, but there are fun obstructions and spiteful obstructions. With these inexorable mirror mice, I feel like my key to my own front door isn’t working. Come on, Miyamoto: I just detonated a cherry bomb the size of a bowling ball under that thing’s feet! How is it alive?!

Wait, have I tried my arrows yet? That does it: the appropriate strategy is to line up just barely offset with the red terminator mouse. Fire your arrow, and while the projectile is midflight, dash to the left. The terminator will move to his left as well, directly into the arrow’s path. The door rumbles open — a new room awaits. Forget everything I said about frustration.

In the course of my tomb raiding, Link has recovered all manner of potent artifacts. Completing the Palace of Darkness earned me a magic hammer. Other excursions have netted me gloves which confer the strength of a giant, the miraculous hookshot, and a cloak of invisibility. To get these, I’ve heroically slashed through legions of carnivorous plants, helmeted lizards, and leaping skeletons.

LTTP, like most games, doesn't sweat verisimilitude. My favorite "don't worry about it": why is an empty glass bottle as rare as a magic wand? Four exist in all of Hyrule. These valuable bottles, which can store potions and imprison fairies, are well-hidden across the landscape.

Here’s a tip if you want an extra. When in the Light World, dive into the river just south of the palace. Swim upstream and under the palace bridge. There you’ll find the scene pictured above. Wake up the snoozing fisherman and he will give you a free bottle — the fool. He must not be aware of how precious a commodity these are.

I remember the overworld in LTTP as being huge. It’s actually quite small, taking a couple minutes to run from end to end. But secrets like the sleeping man enlarge the world — in this case literally. As you pass under the bridge, the scale shifts. The underside of that bridge is bigger on the inside than the outside.
What excites me about that hidden bottle is how gratuitous it is. Unlike the dungeons’ treasures, you don’t need it to progress in the game. It exists for its own sake, and is just one of many: LTTP is full of treasure rooms and hidden grottoes whose existence you are not at all obliged to discover. The knowledge of those secret chambers is what makes every Zelda game feel so expansive. However many you find, you’re never quite sure if there’s one you missed. In some sense, then, Hyrule’s infinitely large, full of these possible rooms.

The simple possibility of a secret makes you approach the game differently. Zelda veterans pay more attention to walls than interior designers. We are, of course, looking for those little hairline cracks which beg for a bomb to be set. Smash one pot, chop down one shrub: if you find so much as a rupee under there, it will become a full-blown compulsion. Every pot may contain a rupee, every sward of grass may hide a grotto. The game doesn’t care if we discover these or not, but it is coy apathy rather than true indifference: it knows we want to know. Every 3×3 patch of bushes must hold the truth. So the player smashes every pot, cuts all the grass, uproots every bush, satisfying an instinct to uncover the unknown. In real life, a good secret is the one no one knows you’re keeping. In Hyrule, it’s those secrets which declare their presence that we relish.