The Legend of Zelda series is fond of stories about the inexorable and obliviating passage of time. Somebody should make one about growing so old, stupid and exhausted that you can’t distinguish original Zelda games from romhacks of those games. Romhacks like Indigo, a “full game replacement” for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, set 15 years after the events of Majora’s Mask. It’s got a couple of public demos, and is playable on PC via static recompilation – the mechanical translation of the console code into C code that runs on other platforms, not to be conflated with genAI porting.

Reader, the membrane between the past and the world of imagination can be thin. I squint at the below trailer and I ask myself: didn’t Ocarina of Time always have some kind of festively purple mushroom kingdom? My eyes dim and my vestibular system writhes in protest – I come close to falling out of my chair. But then, Indigo throws me a lifeline in the shape of Link With A Beard. Link did not have a beard when he first graced the N64, and that was absolutely to his credit. I’m enthusiastic about Indigo on the whole, but Link With A Beard has a distinct 70s porno energy. You can almost hear the funky bassline. Anyway, watch the trailer before I ruin it any further.

Indigo will feature “new items, enemies, bosses, maps, and story,” according to a project download page. The premise: after averting the destruction of Termina, and having apparently given up tracking down his fairy friend Navi, an older and Obi-Wannified Link has become a hermit living in the mountains of Valana. But then Tael, a fairy from Majora’s Mask, arrives requesting that Link help him find his sister Tatl, who vanished during exploration of a long-dead Deku Tree.

It sounds pretty sombre, as Zeldas go, but then I see Link’s beard again and start to giggle uncontrollably. I just… cannot get my head around the beard. Everything else looks amazing, though, and good old beardless Link does feature elsewhere in the experience. Maybe it’s just a phase.

When will Indigo be done? Why isn’t it done already? As the devs put it in their Youtube blurb, “please stop leaving these kinds of comments, it doesn’t help us magically work faster.” In the meantime, I guess you could maybe play that official Ocarina of Time remake that’s due out in November, but perhaps I can entice you with one of these Zelda-like PC games instead.