The Guardian sentinels in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild can drown, as one intrepid player discovered earlier this week.
apparently_guardians_can_drownfrom r/Breath_of_the_Wild
Reddit user AKArein lured a Guardian to a river and somehow sent it tumbling head first into the, well, not exactly bottomless, but reasonably deep water. To be fair, the Guardian did a lot of the work by trying to climb a sheer cliffside despite not having thumbs – rather, presumably not having thumbs. The Guardian drowns shortly after taking a dip in the river, so they've apparently got lungs of some kind, so who's to say they don't have thumbs as well?
Of course, there is another reasonable theory: the mechanical Guardian shorted out after being submerged. They can endure the rain just fine, sure, but so can smartphones and you still wouldn't chuck yours in a river. That said, the drowning theory is way more fun because it allows for fan art of a Guardian wearing floaties on all its legs.
The best part is that AKArein wasn't actually planning on drowning the thing. After seeing the Guardian in the water, they said in a Reddit comment that they were planning to "make the physics system break down in some way" using Link's stasis and cryo tech. That's the Breath of the Wild community in a nutshell: years later, they're still breaking things in new ways while trying to break things in other ways.
Case in point: one Breath of the Wild speedrunner has conquered the game in just 25 minutes. Now that's a schedule that Zelda, who had to watch me throw boomerangs and burn mushrooms for 80 hours, can get behind.
