The original game The Legend of Zelda for the NES was an instant classic, and now one fan made an incredible Unreal Engine 4 remake of it — and it’s available to download and enjoy now.

The Legend of Zelda was released in 1987 on the Nintendo Entertainment System, and now, YouTuber Lloyd Empty has finished crafting a stunning Unreal Engine 4 remake. It is released, but it’s in beta, so it will continue to evolve (until Nintendo shuts it down, we suppose, because they’ve asked others to remove their remakes before). That being said, you can finally download and enjoy the remake. It is a wonderful blast from the past, and looks and plays great.

A remake of a game is best when the game’s play dynamics aren’t altered, and Lloyd Empty’s is faithful to the core. The game’s top-down viewpoint is preserved, and the scene-to-scene transitions work the same way they did in the original. All the player interactions are also faithfully preserved, so the game feels right, moment by moment.

It’s already proved to be a hit with fellow fans. One YouTube viewer wrote, “I’ve always loved the original NES Zelda titles, so to see this feels really nice. I can tell how much work was put into this. It looks amazing,” while another added, “This is honestly a fantastic idea. Taking the idea of the first Zelda being this open ended ‘just go explore and figure it out on your own’ [game], and modernising that with some of the things introduced in later top-down Zelda titles, is a great idea for a remake! This looks awesome and I hope Nintendo does something like this one day.”

A number of early Nintendo games have been getting the remake treatment, with most using either Unreal Engine 4 or Unreal Engine 5. The results are phenomenal, but this is one of the few that you can download and try yourself.

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