In The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, finding Koroks was rarely all that hard. You’d lift up a rock, and one was there, waiting. You’d push a stone into a gap in a circle, and wow, a Korok. Sometimes they’d give you a little task, like following a white flower as it teleported from place to place, or shooting a balloon with an arrow. Of these tiny tasks, my favorite were the little block puzzles you needed to use Link’s Magnesis power to solve.
For these brainteasers, you’d come to two sets of metal blocks, sometimes on the ground, sometimes jutting out of a cliff face. One would be slightly different than the other, so you’d need to lift a nearby metal block and position it on one so that it mirrored the other. Easy peasy.
I really enjoyed doing these. When you first encountered one, you felt kind of smart for figuring out how to use Magnesis to mirror the other structure. But, once you saw enough of them, you could figure it out almost immediately. It required a little bit of thought, but just simple pattern recognition, no higher puzzle-solving brain activity. That made them a comfortable thing to encounter as you explored. BotW had plenty of WTF moments as you traveled through Hyrule — dragons, those big stone swords, Eventide Island, a bunch of dead Guardians on a long-abandoned battlefield, the Lord of the Mountain — so a cozy little activity was a nice diversion in between the surprises.
It was a little disappointing at first that Tears of the Kingdom didn’t bring them back. But, it turns out, Tears of the Kingdom does bring them back — sort of. In Hebra, at the bottom of the Tanagar Canyon you can find the Mayausiy Shrine within the Forgotten Temple. This is an important location for laying out the lore of the game, as this is where Impa goes to research the massive glyphs that appeared in Hyrule at the moment the Upheaval began. It’s also important because, just as the glyphs point to the past, so too does this shrine. Titled “Building Blocks,” the shrine takes those Magnesis puzzles and blows them up to a grand scale.
Instead of manipulating little iron blocks with Magnesis, the Building Blocks shrine asks you to manipulate huge, sedan-sized blocks with Ultrahand. And, because it’s in a shrine where you can’t lose any necessary objects, Building Blocks can give you more complicated configurations to play with. Instead of single steel blocks, it can give you an L-shape and one that’s like two L-blocks smooshed together. And, the reward for finishing it is a Light of Blessing which, for my money, is much more valuable than another measly Korok Seed.
I’m glad the Koroks are back in Tears of the Kingdom, especially since Nintendo has given them more involved activities to do. I love pulling a Death Stranding and hiking across Hyrule with a Korok in tow to get my paltry reward. But there’s a part of me that still sort of misses the Magnesis puzzles, so it’s nice to see them brought back in this way that’s both small and grand at the same time.