The recent screening of Nintendo's The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake has proven a thing of existential horror for many grey-haired Zeldenthusiasts. Is that you, Link? What have they done to you, boy? Why do you look like a possessed doll? Where have all your sharp edges gone? Eek, I can see individual divots on Epona's neck.
Rest easy, traveller. Let us play the titular Ocarina and warp back to the good old days. No, not the heyday of the N64 – that three-pronged controller was an instrument of the Devil. I mean the real good old days, when Link looked like a cockroach and hills hadn't been invented yet. But oh, what's this? We have played the Ocarina wrong and messed up the spacetime continuum. We have somehow generated a version of NES-era Zelda that overlaps with another long-lost game, Namco's 60-floor maze RPG The Tower of Druaga – itself a huge influence on the original Zelda games. It appears that Prince Ganondorf has been abducted by the evil queen Zeldaga. That harridan! Time to go questing for some keys.
…all of which is my probably annoying introduction to The Tower of Zeldaga, a browser-based retro mash-up from website, game and chiptune creator Osmose, which you can play for free here. I never tried The Tower of Druaga, so for me this is just a fairly long, challenging, and engrossing Zelda dungeon. "Each room hides a secret," the developer promises. Some of them are pitch black, leaving you to figure out both enemy locations and the contours of the maze.
The trickiest of the lot might require you to rip open the game's guts. "[T]he hardest puzzle in the game is something I'm both really proud of and afraid that no one will ever solve without help or datamining," Osmose writes on Bluesky, "but the la mulana devs taught me that fear about difficulty is no reason not to ship so uhhhhh good luck I guess". (La Maluna is also worth a pop, by the way). The developer has, amongst other things, anticipated people trying to cheat using browser dev tools.
I love mash-ups like this, however gimmicky they can be, and I like the faint grotesqueness of Zelda colonising one of its big influences. Do you know of any similar games? Here's the Ocarina – please distort and meddle with gaming history as you see fit.