Titanium Court

For a few weeks during quarantine, I did almost nothing but play The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. It’s a game that was a source of comfort for me during some of the hardest times in my life, and I sank deep into it. I spent hours running around the map aimlessly, mapping out any corner I might have glossed over. I finished every quest, found every korok seed, upgraded every piece of armor to its maximum level. In those few weeks, holed up in my bedroom, hidden from the rest of the world, I squeezed every last drop from a game that I loved.

I haven’t opened Breath of the Wild since.

Titanium Court is a game that sees me for what I am and knows what I will do if left unchecked. It holds a gun to my head and dangles a nice clean list of collectibles and objectives in front of me, daring me to make a move. And what’s the harm in one bite? One objective fully completed surely wouldn’t affect my experience that much? But I guess now that I’ve finished all the quests for this boss, I have no reason to ever fight it again. And now that I’ve bought everything from the shop, that room might as well not exist. But those are just decisions that I’m making, it’s not like those things are actually gone… right?

Once I realized what the game was doing, it was too late to stop. Just one more victory against the dragon and I’ll get a checkmark in my to-do list and a nice shiny achievement on my Steam account. Isn’t that what it’s all for? I knew what the risks were if I kept finishing objectives, lifting curses, exhausting dialogue, but I wanted to see what would happen. What would happen if I brought three eggs together, or reunited the goats, or performed some strange esoteric ritual for the leviathan? My theories weren’t enough, I needed answers.

But the game knows this. It knows that vague threats won’t be enough to stop me. Sure bad things might happen if I continue down this path, but those are disconnected from my actions. There’s no real proof that opening a jar I found on the battlefield led to someone entering an endless vegetative state. But then there’s Puck. Puck is open, Puck is direct, and Puck is scared. He tells you to leave, to stop breaking curses, stop exhausting his dialogue, stop ruining the magic. And this brings us to the Curse of Curiosity: the only curse I couldn’t bring myself to break. To do so you must fully sate your curiosity, ask Puck for every answer he can offer, and fully exhaust his dialogue. At this point in the game, you understand what this means. You would kill him, reducing him to nothing but a sprite and text box with nothing left to offer you. He would stop being a person, and would simply become a thing. I couldn’t go through with it, regardless of what answers he could have offered. I couldn’t handle the guilt, regardless of how “real” he actually was. But what made Puck so special? After all, I’ve done this countless times before. The only difference is that this time someone was holding up a mirror.