The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time Unreal Engine 5 fan remake is playable and looks incredible

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time for the Nintendo 64 is legendary; it took one of the all-time great top-down action RPGs from the 16-bit Super Nintendo era (The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past) and successfully translated that into an interactive full 3D experience. An open-world game before that was even a term.

With the recent release of the critically acclaimed The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom (check out our in-depth review here), the Zelda franchise is as relevant as ever, delivering some of the most immersive gaming experiences in 2023 - and on aging hardware like the Nintendo Switch.

But what if The Legend of Zelda was given the ultra high-end visual fidelity treatment with something like Unreal Engine 5? That's exactly what The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Unreal Engine 5.2 from CryZENx presents. Albeit currently in limited form with the Deku Tree dungeon from the game's introduction fully playable.

And you can download it here. Compared to the visuals from the Nintendo 64 version (which dates back to 1998), the results are stunning, with some incredible environmental detail and lighting effects on display. Due to the visual fidelity, the old-school sound effects and music from the N64 version are a little jarring. Still, this Unreal Engine 5 fan creation excels when others haven't due to the gameplay matching the style and tone of the original game.

It's an incredible showcase for what can be achieved when remaking titles from the early days of 3D gaming, and we can't wait to see how the rest of the game looks with this level of care and detail put into the development. And for those wondering, this footage was captured from the build running on a gaming laptop and not a GeForce RTX 4090-powered PC - with an AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX mobile CPU, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 mobile GPU, and 32GB of DDR4 memory.