My hot take on games like BOTW and TOTK: when the game is so open ended you can invent your own answer, the answer to every puzzle ends up being the same.

In BOTW the answer to every puzzle is “balloon”. In TOTK it’s “big stick”. In Scribblenauts it’s “invincible deadly flying rideable friendly ”. No, I don’t mean literally every puzzle, but it works often enough that I feel like I’m just wasting time if I try doing things any other way.

The handful of times I’ve actually felt creative in TOTK were when I was just messing around. Creativity is rarely useful in meaningful progression.

More traditional metroidvanias (including traditional Zelda’s) give you bits of “huh I don’t think I can get there now but clearly I’ll have some way to get there later” and “I just got this thing I wonder what I can do with it”. That kind of puzzle solving is completely absent from many newer Zeldas (BOTW, TOTK, ALBW).