Review: Master Key
Indie Zelda clones are a dime a dozen. If you really have a dungeon fix, it's not hard to find something that'll do in a pinch, but the vast majority of them also demonstrate something that sounds really obvious on the face of it, but needs to be said regardless: Making a good Zelda clone is hard. Not only do you need at least a handful of dungeons - each of which needs its own blend of theme, difficulty, puzzles, and direction - you then have to turn around and apply that same principle to the entire world. And the balance is very, very delicate! Twilight Princess has fantastic dungeons, but is rightfully dunked on for having its items be functionally useless outside of them. Skyward Sword went the opposite direction, turning the actual overworlds into a sort of dungeon prelude, and everyone hated that too. How many uses and/or upgrades should your items have, how much of the overworld should they open up, how quickly should you acquire them...the answers to these questions vary wildly from developer to developer, but most of them come to the same conclusion: There's a lot of wrong ways to make a Zelda.
Released in May 2024, Master Key takes clear inspiration from the early parts of the Zelda franchise - the game is hard, combat is both stiff and demanding, and while there are certainly puzzles to be had here, a lot of them are your Zelda 1 or Link to the Past style "push the blocks in this formation" or "kill everything in the room" fare. This is good, because along the same lines as Tunic, Master Key is a completely wordless experience. Sure, you'll get some of the basics in a cute, pictograph form (like how food heals you), but beyond that, the game expects you to just figure shit out on your own. For the most part, it does an okay job at this; it's not hard to figure out how the hookshot works, or that the mitts allow you to dig under the ground (in large part because it makes liberal use of the "now use your new item to escape this room" tactic), but it does run into some problems with items in shops. The sword in the shop is pretty clearly an attack upgrade, but what are these shoes or this rod-looking thing? Guess you'd better save up 400G and find out what the hell you just bought! I spent most of the midgame trying to find something that would let me destroy bushes and mushrooms from range, and I was very annoyed when the thing I thought was going to be a Fire Rod turned out to just be a mace that increased my sword damage.
And speaking of combat, it is...awkward, to put it mildly. First and foremost, your attack is bound to releasing the button rather than pressing it, a decision that is baffling on multiple levels and should be the very first option you change in the menu. Otherwise, it feels a lot like the combat in Zelda 1, and not in a good way. You can only face and attack in one of the four cardinal directions, and enemies tend to have no (or very little) knockback or hitstun - I cannot count the number of times I have died because I hit an enemy with a charged attack and he just kept on trucking right into me. And the enemies are really annoying to fight, generally; the facing restriction makes it incredibly difficult to hit anything that moves quickly (flying enemies, especially), and it loves to throw gotcha enemies at you. Crocodiles will hide in the water and charge you once you're in line with them, snowball and stump enemies look just like otherwise breakable terrain until you get close, and frankly, everything feels like it takes 2-3 too many hits to kill.
As for the dungeons themselves, they're pretty good! The game does its best to stick to a principle of "if you can reach them, you can clear them," and aside from a couple complaints about what "reaching" a dungeon entails, it's mostly true. This occasionally veers into Link Between Worlds territory, where the puzzles have to be designed with the idea that you only have one or two specific items, but the overworld gates you enough that the later dungeons can be a little more complex. That said, sometimes they're too complex for reasons entirely unrelated to dungeon items, such as the power plant which combines having to check 8 different computers to get one piece of a puzzle solution from each, and then also having to do a lights out puzzle to make the grid match said solution. It's not difficult, but it is tedious, something the game occasionally has a hard time remembering.
Anyway, as much as I would like to recommend it, the game suffered a death from a thousand cuts for me. I finished all four main dungeons, filled up my inventory and made it to the final(?) area beyond the initial overworld, where the combat annoyances finally piled up enough for me to call it quits. It's full of narrow corridors with enemies that are really annoying to fight, it's a pain in the ass to get around the City, and I just kinda...stopped having fun. I guess I could have dropped the difficulty to make myself invincible or whatever, but the puzzles and navigation weren't doing enough to pull me through, and I didn't see any reason to force it. If you've got more tolerance for Zelda 1-era combat mechanics, Master Key is probably just fine! But I don't anymore, and I'm comfortable calling my experience there.