Link’s Awakening remake lets you zoom in to see the entire island

An anonymous and inventive Nintendo fan has recreated a Game Boy classic The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening With a twist that separates it from the official 2019 remaster. The widescreen Windows remake adds high frame rate support and allows you to zoom in to see a larger area – or even all – of the island of Goholind. Nintendo has a habit of cracking down on copyright-infringing fan games, so this game may not last long, even if it’s lovingly designed and offered for free.

found X (as well as A Writing By Polygon), Link’s Awakening DX HD A love letter to the 1993 original and its 1998 color reissue. The unofficial port recreates the quirky Zelda installment with 120 frames per second (FPS) support, which the developer describes as adding “unparalleled fluidity”.

The homebrew port also gets rid of the changes of the original, which loaded a new screen every time you went to the next screen (old school Zelda style). In this version, the camera runs smoothly as Lynx cruises around the island, which we imagine will be no small task for the unnamed creator.

The zoom level, available in the in-game settings menu, lets you go to 1:1, half, or one-third pixel scale, allowing you to see the entire island at once. This is not a static perspective. Every visible area is fully activated (as in the original patch) and teeming with enemies. Without pausing to look at a static game map, you can move through the parsed scenes by swinging a sword at moblins and looking for the next mission.

The game’s developer posted a ’90s love letter anonymously, with a chance to save them from Nintendo’s lawsuit-happy legal team (for a while, anyway). 24 MB Link’s Awakening DX HD is a Free download at itch.io, but we don’t expect it to stay there much longer. Anyway, you can check out a snippet of the gameplay in the video below.