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After playing The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom for about 90 minutes, my main takeaway is that Princess Zelda finally being the protagonist of a Zelda game is maybe the fourth or fifth most interesting thing about it.

That's not to say Zelda taking center stage after a few decades of being a damsel in distress isn't significant or awesome — because it is both of those things. But Nintendo's latest mainline Zelda entry (surprisingly launching only a year and a half after Tears of the Kingdom) is experimental in more ways than just giving players a new pair of shoes to step into.

With what seems like a refreshing mix of classic Zelda design and modern Zelda mechanics, Echoes of Wisdom might have a little bit of something for every type of Zelda fan.

SEE ALSO: Nintendo is shutting down 'Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp' — but you'll still be able to keep playing Tri to keep up Trampolines are great. Credit: Nintendo

As announced in the June Nintendo Direct, Echoes of Wisdom is a new 2D Zelda game that uses the same tech and art style as the 2019 Link's Awakening remake. My demo involved most of the game's opening bits, up to and including the first dungeon. While I didn't get to see the entire opening of the story, it seems appropriately Zelda-y.

Basically, some evil purple magic stuff has started taking over parts of Hyrule and stealing citizens away to another realm called Still World. Link, the brave swordsman who has starred in every Zelda game up to this point, is nowhere to be found, so Zelda herself has to save her kingdom.

She'll do so with the help of Tri, a fairy who joins the franchise's legendary pantheon of magical blobs that help the player throughout their journey.

Tri's got more tricks up their sleeves than just shouting "Hey! Listen!" over and over, though. Tri turns into the "Tri Rod," a magical staff that can store "echoes" of inanimate objects and live enemies Zelda has encountered, which Zelda can then, in turn, summon back into the world whenever she pleases.

You got your 3D Zelda in my 2D Zelda You don't wanna go in there. Credit: Nintendo

All of that has been known since Nintendo first showed the game over the summer, so my time with the demo was spent mostly looking for the things we didn't know.

After sleeping on it, I think Echoes of Wisdom is a hybrid between what Zelda used to be and what Zelda is now. In other words, it seems to be taking the more structured, puzzle-based overworld and dungeon design from old Zelda games and giving players a mechanical toolset more akin to the last two comparatively freeform entries: Tears of the Kingdom and Breath of the Wild.

Perhaps the game opens up after a while (in fact, I'm almost certain it does), but what I played was not anywhere near as free-roaming as those two games. Like a classic 2D Zelda, the map is made up of small screens that each feel like a small puzzle room to solve on the way to your destination.

There may be enemies to kill or a treasure chest to find, or maybe just a cliff you need to figure out a way to climb. But the point is that this isn't a game about traversing wide open expanses.

The twist, of course, lies in the echo system. A traditional Zelda game would hand you an item in the middle of a dungeon and structure the rest of the dungeon around that item. But here, Zelda is capable of conjuring tables, beds, trampolines, and even live enemies whenever she wants.

There's a hard limit of four or five summons you can have on-screen at once, but there's no cooldown on the act of summoning an echo itself. If you want to spam tables, you can spam tables.

This means there's a lot of latitude in how you solve any given puzzle, but not too much, from what I played. For instance, when I wanted to climb from one level to another, and a ladder wasn't available, things like tables and trampolines are always useful. There might be some kind of fun, tricky way to achieve the same goal by summoning enemy snakes, but puzzles feel like they're designed around a specific subset of your available echoes and not necessarily all of them at once.

Beds are also super useful, it turns out. Credit: Nintendo

I played the game's first dungeon and pretty much immediately noted that it felt more like a regular Zelda dungeon than anything in Breath or Tears. Small, self-contained rooms contained bespoke, clever little puzzles that were often easy to solve using echoes that were conveniently placed in or near the room. It harkened back to old Zelda for me when I saw a fire-based echo and then the next few rooms revolved around using fire to solve puzzles.

Of course, combat is a thing here, and that's where enemy echoes come in. You can conjure enemies you've defeated before and they'll work on your behalf. A new lock-on targeting system (seriously, they put Z-targeting in a 2D Zelda!) makes it easy to command your echoes to attack specific enemies, and each one is useful in different scenarios.

Zelda also gets a magical "Swordfighter Form," with which she can basically just play like Link and use a sword for a while. It's meter-based and seemed pretty limited from what I could tell, so you can't just live in Swordfighter Form. You'll have to learn how to fight with echoes, too.

The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom: Final thoughts

Overall, I came away more impressed with Echoes of Wisdom than I anticipated. Creatively solving puzzles using echoes came to me pretty quickly despite it being unlike any other Zelda game.

As much as I love the last two gargantuan open-world adventures, the idea of a smaller, more traditional (but still very weird and unique) mainline Zelda right now sounds downright lovely.

I just can't wait to see how wild the puzzle design gets in the second half of the game.

Like any other dating app, Feeld isn't perfect. Feeld users have complained about bugs, fake profiles, and bad behavior. What the "dating app for the curious" has going for it that others don't, however, is the plethora of kinky and non-monogamous users. This makes it perfect to partner with Dr. Justin Lehmiller, fellow at Indiana University's sex research center the Kinsey Institute, for insights about sex, gender, and kink.

In a new survey of 3,310 Feeld users aged 18 to 77 from 71 different countries (including the U.S., UK, Canada, and the Netherlands), Feeld and Kinsey research fellow Lehmiller found that Gen Z in particular has both traditional and kinky desires.

SEE ALSO: Predictions for sex in the future that some will love — and some will hate Gen Z fantasizes about monogamy...

In another broad sample of people — 4,175 Americans aged 18 to 88 — Lehmiller found that 81 percent of Gen Z reported fantasizing about monogamy, while 44 percent said they fantasized about it often. Gen Z was also least likely to fantasize about being in an open relationship; 62 percent said they'd have that fantasy, and only 18 percent have it often.

For older generations (there wasn't much difference across boomers, Gen X, and millennials), 71 percent fantasize about monogamy and 23 to 27 percent fantasize about it often. Meanwhile, 75 to 80 percent of these generations have fantasized about an open relationship, with 31 to 32 percent fantasizing about it often.

Among Feeld users (the app calls them "Members"), monogamy was the single most preferred relationship type among Gen Z. For millennials and Gen X, non-monogamy was most preferred, and for boomers, it was friends with benefits.

Feeld and Lehmiller theorized this could be because older adults have more experience with monogamy — and since humans are drawn to novelty, they want something new and fresh. For Gen Z, though, that could very well be a relationship with one person. Many came of age during lockdown, meaning they have less IRL dating experience and are less confident daters. At the same time, Hinge found earlier this year that Gen Z is more "romantically idealistic" than millennials. In the survey of over 4,000 Americans, however, nearly half of Gen Z reported that they were single.

Young people are having less sex, too. In the same survey Lehmiller conducted, the median number of times millennials and Gen X reported having sex in the last month was five. For both Gen Z and boomers, the median was lower: three times. Over a third (37 percent) of Gen Z reported having no sex in the last month, considerably less than 19 percent of millennials and 17 percent of Gen X who reported the same.

...but is also pretty kinky

While they're fantasizing about more traditional relationship styles (and not having much sex), Gen Z is apparently getting kinkier as well. In Feeld's survey, Gen Z members were most likely (55 percent) to say they've discovered a new kink since getting on the app. That number dropped to 49 percent of millennials, 39 percent of Gen X, and 33 percent of boomer users.

SEE ALSO: KinkTok is rife with misinformation. Here's why that's dangerous.

Gen Z was also most likely to report having BDSM fantasies (56 percent) according to data by both Feeld and Lehmiller, compared to 52 percent of millennials, 31 percent of Gen X, and 12 percent of boomers. Feeld contributed this to the proliferation of porn as well as the lack of sex education as a possible reason for this, along with the mainstreaming of kink (like the Fifty Shades series) and less societal kink shaming overall.

More research is needed as to why Gen Z is seemingly kinkier than older generations in some ways, while not actually having much sex. Perhaps it's not only due to porn but also the wealth of information online about different types of sex, such as on KinkTok. At the same time, it can be difficult to find someone IRL who shares the same desires as you — and also difficult to push through the awkwardness of IRL encounters. Fantasy, however, is easy.

No matter the reason, Feeld will surely keep us abreast with the latest sex and kink research.

Stephen Colbert mocked Trump's rambling style of public speaking during "The Late Show" on Tuesday.