It’s been weeks since The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom released, but players are still discovering tons of amazing secrets, Easter eggs, and lore tidbits throughout the game. His one of the most intriguing and huge of these secrets has to do with the depths, and it took players until recently to fully reveal how deep the rabbit hole is (heh).
WARNING: This article contains major spoilers for Depths’ layout and location. If you haven’t explored a good portion of the map yet, read on at your own risk.
Early on in Tears of the Kingdom, we might start getting hints about what’s really going on in Depth. For example, you might notice that deep light routes seem to correspond to the location of shrines on the surface, and that their names mirror the names of the shrines in reverse. In other words, the Mayachin Shrine on the surface of the earth is the Nichayam Light Route in the depths. Neat, right?
But it goes much further. In fact, Depth literally looks like a dark mirror above, with all its major locations and landmarks corresponding to those on the surface.
a Recent Reddit Threads has cataloged many of these similarities, and IGN was able to confirm them to be true. For example, the Surface Goddess Statue corresponds to the Deep Negotiator Statue, and the City corresponds to the Grand Mine. Surface forests are deep groves, and surface Leviathan skeletons line up with dark skeletons below. The similarities are striking. Some Redditors have suggested that at least some boss locations are consistent between the two maps.
In addition, the terrain also appears to reflect itself. High mountains on the surface look like deep valleys with mines deep inside. Do giant walls that keep hitting underground tats hinder progress? They tend to line up with rivers and other bodies of water above ground. Basically, to navigate the depths, you can use your surface map to note shrines that correspond to light routes that light your way, and generally avoid rivers that impede your progress.
The level of detail here is truly incredible. This means that Nintendo created the “Dark World” version of Hyrule as essentially a link to the past, but underground rather than through a mirror. It’s a really amazing secret once you figure out what’s really going on.
If you need a little help getting to the depths in the first place, check out our guide on depth quest camerawork. A guide to getting there.
And for all your help with Tears of the Kingdom, check out our Tears of the Kingdom walkthrough and our guide to getting through Hyrule. In fact, you can start here.
Rebekah Valentine is IGN’s Senior Reporter. you can find her on her twitter @duck valentine.
