The next Zelda game isn’t out yet, but eagle-eyed players are already finding all sorts of cool easter eggs.
Yesterday, we brought your attention to some of the references and callbacks that Breath of the Wild makes toward older Zelda games. Today, we bring you a discovery made by neoGAFFER RagnarokX, who noticed that the symbols found throughout the Breath of the Wild demo were actually Hylian—and that often, these hieroglyphics spelled out actual words.
Zelda fans have actually been hard at work at translating Breath of the Wild’s Hylian to create a cypher, and while they haven’t figured out every single letter yet, most of the alphabet is there, as you can see in this image by the Zelda Wiki:
RagnarokX says that this was all figured out using a teaser that Nintendo released earlier this year. “A GAFer noticed a pattern and figured out the text said THELEGENDOFZELDA. That gave us T, H, E, L, G, N, D, O, F, Z, and A,” he wrote in a neoGAF post. From there, it was a matter of using those letters to figure out the rest of the letters. For example, if a text chunk seemed to form a specific word but was missing one letter, then it could be deduced that last letter would be whatever would logically complete that word.
As RagnarokX notes, Breath of the Wild will often tell you exactly what you are looking at or using using Hylian:
But the Hylian messages aren’t just utilitarian. Nintendo has actually hidden jokes within Breath of the Wild using Hylian, including this old-school meme that flashes by when Link uses a Sheikah Slate:
Ha.
These are just a few of the things the Zelda demo hides, for more translated words check out this thread on neoGAF.