Included in the first Zelda: Breath of the Wild DLC are the Master Trials, a sixty level challenge where players fight enemies in search of an upgrade for the Master Sword. That’s what Reddit user Sharkystheshotty was doing when they unexpectedly stumbled into an alternate, lo-res world.
“Was on trial three on the Medium trials and flew up near the chest on the floating platform and just went through a wall,” wrote Sharkystheshotty. “Couldn’t get back in...so I didn’t make it.” Instead, they appeared in what appears to be an unused area still half-assembled in the game’s code. Desperate to recreate his happy accident and explore the minimal texture expanse for themselves, users wanted to know more about what Sharkystheshotty did right before appear in the new environment, but details were limited.
“I don’t really remember exactly where but I flew up with my glider on trial 3 on the Medium trials near where the floating chest was on the wall by the corner. Best I can do,” they said. What Sharkystheshotty did have were a handful of screenshots taken before they reset back to the main game.
Some users speculated that it might be a test area created specifically for the stuff in Trials, while others wondered if it was simply unused material that hadn’t been completely deleted from the game in the interest of not creating other bugs (a hypothesis roundly rejected by another user)
Whatever the cause, there’s something breath taking about the landscape and its smooth lack of clutter. Breath of the Wild is lauded for having a huge open world filled with strange and unpredictable things to see and do, but seeing all of that laid bare beneath an azure skybox has a beauty all its own.
Glitches aren’t unheard of in the game, but very few of them involve clipping through the geometry to reveal the game’s world in a more broken light. No doubt in the coming days players will try to investigate this particular rift between levels and see if it can’t be exploited for the purposes of speedrunning.