It’s a very mid game.

Large area of nothingness. Nothing really to explore or a reason too. Combat is strait up discouraged. The quality of the story falls off a cliff right quick. The Zora zone has the best story and NPCs.

Crafting clearly should have been a thing, it at least a real use for gems. And cooking was under done in so many ways. The only thing you need to know how to make was the baked durian fruit.

It’s honestly a victim of the trend that existed of every game needing to be as big as possible and be open world.

And hopefully you don’t like archery, because Nintendo figured you’d need to really work to buy arrows so you can launch a few. They made sure to patch out an exploit (on a single player game) that made it easy to get arrows.

The game could have and should have been better. I know people will get mad, because people lost their minds when it came out and people dared to not give it a perfect score… but this game really felt like a tech demo… to see what they could do and see what was popular. I forced myself to beat it, haven’t touched it since.

It’s not a bad game, but not great either.

If you can’t work out how to make a cold person warm, maybe this isn’t the game for you, I didn’t even realise that was a puzzle or challenge tbh

While I find it a shame that modern Zelda games have left the formula behind, I do believe the old Zelda formula has gotten stale and that the franchise was ready for an overhaul. Before BotW the main line console games in the series have pretty much the same progression mechanics since LttP, the only exception is Majora’s Mask. Twilight Princess and Skyward sword were boring for me because they were way too predictable. I do like the openness of the new Zelda games but I get what your saying the games feel too much like a playground instead of an immersive fantasy game.

The game literally tells you you can use warm clothing or elixirs to keep warm. There’s even another method they don’t tell you, equipping an elemental weapon can change your temperature. Just have a flame blade on your back and you can survive running around in snow.

Learning where to buy clothes and how to make elixirs is not hard. Just talk to people near where you’re struggling.

Weapon durability is only a problem if you don’t exercise any discretion in which weapon you use for which situation. If you use your best weapon on weak enemies, you won’t have it later when you face stronger ones. So… don’t.

Sounds like you’re still at the Great plateau which is just the tutorial area of the game basically. You can watch a few videos on YouTube to find the easy way to get past it. The weapon breaking mechanic is really annoying at first but eventually you’ll realize that they did it so that you can enjoy all the variety of weapons in the game without having a hundred things in your stash. Exploration is one of the most enjoyable parts of this game so try to look around for the old man and he will help you.