Zelda mod makes Tears of the Kingdom look like an old-school Nintendo DS game

Since Tears of the Kingdom arrived last month, Legend of Zelda fans have spent an incredible amount of energy relentlessly exploring the picturesque plains of Hyrule and enjoying what they have to offer.

Some players have been dedicating most of their time in the game so far to building and sharing an array of interesting contraptions that can unleash waves of destruction, help solve platforming puzzles, or make it easier to get around, while others have been trying to scythe through quests as fast as possible.

If you’re someone who’s already craving the chance to spice up your adventures in a big way using mods, but don’t want to have to deal with a seven-foot tall Purah or wait until the game’s randomiser is finished, a recently released mod might be worth taking a look at.

Have you ever wished The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom looked like and old-school Nintendo DS game?

The mod in question is simply called ‘DS Game’, and is the work of modder -kestrel-. Some of their previous projects for Tears of the Kingdom have helped offer you a chance to enhance its soundtrack or listen to a sick remix of the original tunes on offer.

This time, they’ve decided to create a reshade preset for the game that’ll do its best to convince you that you’ve travelled back in time to the mid noughties and are guiding Link through his latest adventure while hanging out on a school playground with your mates.

It aims to accomplish this by adding a pixelated filter to the game’s visuals that makes everyone and everything look a bit more blocky, and ramping up the saturation to really bring out the colours of a game that doesn’t exactly have the palette of Fallout 3 to start with.

As a result of these changes, you can enjoy some nice retro vibes as you battle Gloom Hands, fuse together contraptions, and gradually realise that the reason you were bad at video games as a child might have been that handheld visuals were so bad you couldn’t actually see what you were doing.

Thankfully, -kestrel- says that dialogue and subtitles are still readable with the re-shade active, though you may have a harder time deciphering tooltips.

Obviously, in order to actually use the mod and spend the foreseeable future squinting at your screen, you’ll need to look into running Tears of the Kingdom via an emulator like Yuzu or Ryujinx.

Regardless of what you’re planning on getting up to in Tears of the Kingdom while you wait for its eventual DLC to arrive, make sure to follow us for a bunch of helpful guides that can aid your adventures in Hyrule by showing you how to find the secret Gerudo shop, grab a Hylian shield or unlock Skyview Towers.