For roughly 38 years, Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda series has sold its titular princess short. Basically, her “Legend” has been getting kidnapped or running away under mysterious circumstances in ways where only a dude in a skin-tight leotard can find her, wave a sword around, and calm her down. Great message for roughly half of your potential audience, Nintendo.

That changes in a few weeks. Starting September 26, Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom will allow players to control Zelda instead of Link, and the pre-release demo lines for the Switch game at last weekend's PAX West made clear that the masses are eager for a woman to lead (insert topical political pun here).

Thankfully, we know a guy—my uncle works at Nintendo, or something—so I got to test the game for a leisurely hour in a private PAX room. I was beeped into a room with a plastic card that suggested Amazon-level clearance, and I was told not to take photos of any of the TVs. The room’s other errata were fair game: beige couches, waist-high walls of fake ivy, tall standees of the game’s monsters, breakfast burritos.

The scene was eerily quiet for a show like PAX, enough that I could hear brand-new, symphonic recreations of the Zelda series’ “you did something smart” leitmotifs. Possibly the friendliest Nintendo staffers of all time made suggestions, championed my clever moves, and, lol, reminded me not to pocket the Nintendo Switch I was playing. (They were cooler about the Mario-themed napkins in the lobby; I took a couple.)

You can learn about the new Zelda game from official YouTube videos, but even as an avid fan and Nintendo video watcher, I still gleaned quite a bit more about Echoes of Wisdom from my session—enough to convince me that its series twists are very, very good. For one, the LoZ staple of walking up to enemies and killing them has been wholly remixed, since Princess Zelda, by default, doesn't carry a sword. (She can wield steel in a pinch, though.)

Instead, your core ability as the magical princess is to copy and regenerate anything you’ve previously stumbled upon—an inventory of memories, basically. These are called “echoes,” and Zelda can spin up useful copies of hundreds of things, with only a few limitations. Nintendo wants you to try different things in this Legend, and the result feels like the most improv-theater-coach game Nintendo has ever made, where the joy is not in succeeding but in trying. 

This makes basic video gamey stuff—kill a thing, get to a place—a new kind of puzzle every time you stumble upon it. Want to cross a gap between cliffs? You don’t have Link’s grappling hook, but you can, uh, stack some twin-sized beds to create a perfect stair-steppy bridge. Need to kill a distant monster to solve a puzzle? Conjure a monster with a spear in its hand, and it'll protect you: a goblin Kevin Costner to your robe-clad Whitney Houston.

Yes, I checked: you can’t conjure a monster echo, then invite it into your bed echo. (The game is rated E-for-everyone, meh.) But you can crawl into a bed at any time, take a nap, and recover some health. Why hit the pause button when you can dream a Serta into existence?

Once I got the echo basics down, I felt like I had an oversized deck of Pokemon cards that I could toss all over, and while I could only put out a few echoes at a time, the system is otherwise unlimited enough to make it easy to try, fail, laugh, and try again. I set a giant field of grass on fire, thus burning all the little monsters loitering nearby, then put down a trampoline and hopped over the scene Michael Bay-style for funsies. When a Nintendo rep tried to give me helpful advice about one very scary monster, I instead ran away from it while constantly generating flying, homing-attack bats, which got into the big bad’s face and kept me alive. 

Sadly, the hardest issue to surmount in Echoes of Wisdom is fictional characters’ worst assumptions about Zelda. On one hand, she’s the victim of fake Hyrule Kingdom news, falsely accused by an “impostor” monarch of creating a space-time tear. On the other hand, they think she’s too feeble to be of any help, made clear by the first random dude you talk to in a village. “It’s usually nice and quiet here, but now, things are terrible—if only Link were here!” As far as everyone else knows, Link has “gone off on a journey,” as opposed to the true story: He’s been sealed away in an Avengers: Endgame-like realm called the “Still World,” and Zelda’s his only hope. But sure, go off to whatever Hyrulian equivalent of Reddit you get drunk on, you long-eared hater.

We won’t have to wait long for Zelda to correct the record for the first time in series history, and I’m already eager to play around in Echoes of Wisdom’s dollhouse-styled world. Even when I was bad at the demo, I had fun throwing down random echoes, running away when my idea bombed, and trying again. That’s more than I can say about mindlessly mashing a button to swing Link’s sword for the umpteenth time. Women of the Hyrulian world, unite!