Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom turns The Wind Waker’s coolest moment into a whole world

The latest trailer for The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom revealed a bunch of stuff about this increasingly intriguing game — not least of all, that Zelda will be able to swordfight after all. It also confirms what we’ve suspected since the first trailer, which is that the princess will step through the mysterious rifts that have opened up across Hyrule and discover a different dimension.

Parallel worlds have been a recurring theme of the Zelda games ever since 1992’s A Link to the Past invited players to explore the Light World and Dark World, two inverse expressions of the same map. Later, Ocarina of Time allowed players to toggle between Hyrule’s past and its future, and in A Link Between Worlds you could slip from Hyrule to its mirror world Lorule through cracks in the walls.

Now we know what Echoes of Wisdom’s alternate dimension will be: the Still World. Here, the landscape has been broken up into chunks floating in a void, and the people who’ve been sucked through the rifts — who include Link himself, and the King of Hyrule — are preserved as stony, gray statues, frozen in place.

Remind you of anything? The Still World instantly put me in mind of a singular moment from an earlier Zelda game — one of the most arresting scenes in the entire history of the series. I’m thinking of Link’s journey to the undersea castle in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker.

[Warning: Spoilers for The Wind Waker follow.]

At a critical moment in The Wind Waker, Link is taken to a submerged castle that has been frozen in time. He can explore the throne room, which was under attack by an army of moblins at the moment it was frozen; pillars, caught mid-topple, hover in the air, and guards and moblins are preserved in desperate poses as they clash swords. Everything is grayed out, as if carved from stone by a sculptor.

This is where the Link of The Wind Waker recovers the Master Sword. It’s later revealed that the underwater realm is actually the kingdom of Hyrule, which was flooded by the goddesses in an attempt to contain Ganondorf at the moment he tried to seize power. The people of Hyrule fled to the mountaintops, becoming the island denizens of The Wind Waker’s waterworld.

That’s the lore, but you don’t need to know it to feel the power of the scene. A lost world, frozen for centuries, is a potent image from fairytales as ancient as “Sleeping Beauty,” and the scene’s very lack of animation and interactivity, in a game as lively as The Wind Waker, gives it an even more awesome and haunting quality. Also, the depiction of Hyrule Castle recalls the classic medieval fantasy iconography of Zelda, particularly Ocarina of Time, in a game that otherwise noticeably lacks it.

Is Echoes of Wisdom’s Still World a deliberate echo of this great moment? I wouldn’t be surprised if it was, but either way, it’s tapping into the same rich veins of atmosphere. It’s a world far beneath your feet, where people have been turned to stone, and time doesn’t seem to pass, yet everything is falling about. Some things do move in the Still World — it has dungeons, which seem to be populated by shadowy foes — but the vibe is unmistakable. I’ve often wished I could have explored the whole of that frozen Hyrule under the sea. In Echoes of Wisdom, I might get to do something like it.