Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom’s tutorial is so confusing that players are getting stuck there for hours

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom has a rather large tutorial area. More content is generally a good thing, but it can open room for confusion, apparently. Many, many players are getting stuck in one specific spot of the tutorial for hours, and it’s not even because of a hard-to-beat enemy. It’s because of some roots.

Great Sky Island serves as Tears of the Kingdom’s tutorial area. It’s fair to say it’s not your typical tutorial. While most games would settle for a rather short and straightforward intro to game mechanics, Tears of the Kingdom goes big, with several shrines spread around the island, all having a huge role to play in introducing players to the essence of the game.

One of these four shrines is the Gutanbac Shrine, which is gaining some notoriety among the community, and not even through a fault of its own. It’s not Gutanbac Shrine that is difficult, it’s getting there that Tears of the Kingdom players are struggling with.

Among the most frequented posts on the Tears of the Kingdom subreddit on May 14 was a gathering of the thousands of players that could not break the puzzle that is getting to Gutanbac Shrine, or at the very least struggled mightily before they figured it out.

The Shrine in the Snow is gated off by an imposing unclimbable ice wall, which has proved to be an insurmountable obstacle to plenty of Tears of the Kingdom players. They report hours of wandering around, not being able to figure out a way to reach the third shrine of Great Sky Island.

The best part about common gaming perils is that the community teams up to help each other out. Through struggle, players came up with a curious way to go over the ice wall. Chop off some trees, throw them on top of each other next to the wall, and climb them all the way to the top.

There’s also the much faster and easier way of climbing on the roots situated right outside the exit from the Bottomless Cave. An astounding number of players have apparently missed that option altogether, and that’s the beauty of freedom in video games. Though they could have had a much easier time, players who did not use the roots to reach Gutanbac Shrine came up with an alternative instead of giving up. It’s great to see that alternative was there to be found, and is one of the myriad reasons Tears of the Kingdom is breaking sales records.