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
Senior writer

Austin has been a game journalist for 12 years, having freelanced for the likes of PC Gamer, Eurogamer, IGN, Sports Illustrated, and more while finishing his journalism degree. He's been with GamesRadar+ since 2019. They've yet to realize his position is a cover for his career-spanning Destiny column, and he's kept the ruse going with a lot of news and the occasional feature, all while playing as many roguelikes as possible.

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