This article was originally written for TheNintendoVillage.com, a website I founded and ran from 2018 to 2021.

One of the few new features for the remake of Link’s Awakening is the Chamber Dungeons mode. Taking the place of the photo hut from the DX version of the game, players are tasked by Dampe the gravekeeper of constructing their own dungeons using the rooms they’ve already cleared.

Well, as it turns out, the idea came from Shigeru Miyamoto himself, and was ultimately what facilitated the remake. Speaking to IGN, series producer Eiji Aonuma described how Miyamoto floated the idea

“I talk to Mr. Miyamoto regularly about ‘the next Zelda game,’ and one time, he asked me if I could come up with a game that features Super Mario Maker-like gameplay, but for Zelda. We talked about how a game like this for Zelda would have dungeons, but it’s generally quite difficult to devise the logic needed to solve them.
So we gave some thought into a more approachable style of play where you have to think about how to arrange parts that already have a solution to create a single dungeon, instead of allowing players to create complex arrangements like in Super Mario Maker 2, and that’s how we created the Chamber Dungeons for this game.”

This comes on the back of something we learned back at E3, that the idea of a ‘dungeon maker’ was in motion before Nintendo decided on a remake of Link’s Awakening. It was the dungeons in that original game that best lent themselves to the dungeon maker concept and thus the game was made, rather than the other way around.

Again speaking to IGN earlier this year, Aonuma said “we think about ‘what kind of game experience can we incorporate that’s new and fresh?’ and go from there. The Chamber Dungeons were a perfect fit for Link’s Awakening… We wanted to prioritize putting forward … a new and fresh experience for fans.”

The chamber dungeons might not offer the kind of flexibility of Super Mario Maker but it definitely offers a new experience within the Zelda franchise.

Have you made any interesting creations yet? Let us know what you think of the feature down in the comments.

Source: IGN