As the title suggests, this hack doesn’t really give you a clear indication of what it’s doing at any time. I’ve managed to make it through the light world and am now wandering around through the dark world trying to figure out exactly how to move forward, as there are supposedly two paths, but I haven’t been able to figure out exactly how that mechanic is supposed to work… I know that following Zelda and the ‘rebels’ is supposed to be harder but there is 0 direction given to the player to indicate which actions affect your choice, other than one off easily missed dialogue from NPCs.

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For example, if you complete the first dungeon as normal for a zelda game, you find out later that all of the ’skeletons’ you were murdering were political prisoners and their children being used as cannon fodder by the ‘evil empire’ Hylian guard. The ‘correct’ way to proceed and collect the first pendant is to return to Kakariko and choose one of the 5 or 6 available bomb spots to use your one available bomb to open up the correct path to the pendant…. Thankfully I was playing on emulator and using save states, otherwise there are multiple places to softlock before getting the boots and access to Tower of Hera to farm bombs off the hardhat beetles, unless I just totally missed something.

I really like the idea of having moral choices in a Zelda environment but it is not implemented well here. There are little to no indicators letting the player know whether to complete a dungeon as normal or to look for alternate paths, or whether following one path initially locks you out of the other path entirely or if it’s possible to complete objectives from each path on a single playthrough. I’m assuming you get locked out of the opposite pathing, as I collected the first pendant from the rebels and was unable to complete the Tower of Hera as normal due to the big key chest not opening. I had to search the rest of the map for the location of the red pendant since there was no in game direction letting me know one way or the other. Until the author releases a walkthrough or someone completes a Let’s Play, no one knows.

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In addition, all of the rewritten dialogue badly needed an editor. I’m not sure if English is not the author’s native language but the setup and delivery of all of the dialogue is nonsensical at best and outright confusing in most places. Random townsfolk will go from telling you what a POS your character is to trying to say how much of a hero you are in the same breath. It’s jarring and takes away from the experience. And while I appreciate the socialist and anti police state rhetoric, much like the ‘moral dilemma’ mechanic, it is very poorly implemented and makes 0 sense contextually in the game.

I’d like to see the author polish the dialogue up and implement some more in game pointers to indicate the morality of choices available to you, since the idea is interesting. In the current form though there isn’t really any reason to recommend this hack. It doesn’t add anything new to the vanilla zelda experience and struggling to figure out what is going on and where you need to go to complete the current objective is just not fun. I’ll be keeping an eye out for updates but until then I’d pass on this one.