Breath of the Wild player discovers that Guardians can… drown?

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
(Image credit: Nintendo)

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_drown from 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. 

Austin Wood

Austin freelanced for the likes of PC Gamer, Eurogamer, IGN, Sports Illustrated, and more while finishing his journalism degree, and he's been with GamesRadar+ since 2019. They've yet to realize that his position as a senior writer is just a cover up for his career-spanning Destiny column, and he's kept the ruse going with a focus on news and the occasional feature, all while playing as many roguelikes as possible.