Center Stage: The Dark World (The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past)

In “Center Stage,” Wolfman Jew discusses environments and level design across the games industry. They may be single levels, larger sandboxes, or broader settings. They may be as small as a room and as large as a world. Some may not even be good. But they are all interesting.

Sometimes a game has a thing that’s so singular, so impactful that it instantly cements itself in the canon. It’s miraculous for a game to have several. That’s the case with The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, which reimagined game design in ways we’re still seeing. It’s arguable that its most iconic moment comes after the fourth dungeon, when Link is transported from Hyrule Castle to the top of a Pyramid of Power. Why? Well, most players would check their map and see, to their shock or horror or amazement, that they’ve been transported to another world entirely. The Dark World is a full-on sci-fi mirror universe, a dark reflection of the kingdom of Hyrule you’ve spent hours in already. The entire map is there, just… twisted and darker. And the giant, golden pyramid is right where the castle should be, at the center. Thus the game plays its hand: you’re here to save two worlds, not one.

Image: Source Gaming. Link’s first moment in the Dark World (albeit taken in a replay some point later, after the game reset his position). The Pyramid stays imposing up until its role as the setting of the final battle.

The Dark World is as imposing as Hyrule inviting. The leap in difficulty is massive; cyclopean Hinoxes are the first enemies you see, and they can kill you almost instantly. The water looks polluted. Trees have faces contorted in pain, rocks are skulls that come to life, and everything is uglier and darker. Not in an unpleasant way, mind. It’s all quite exciting. But you’re seeing what was a fairly pleasant nation in a state of unbelievable ruin. As you go through fields filled with violent pig soldiers where once stood human knights, you’re confronted with the fact that the land you spent your entire time mastering has become scary once again.

And it really is a land. Again, the Dark World isn’t a self-contained setting but a copy of the whole map of Hyrule (missing a few small areas, mostly safe terrain whose absence forces you to take circuitous routes). It effectively doubles the size of the game by the time it shows up, and that’s not accounting for also having twice the dungeons. Part of the fun is finding all the ways the world has gone wrong, like how the southwest desert is replaced by Misery Mire. Other times, it plays with exploration by reusing and reimagining geometry. You’ll know that some places are important because their interdimensional counterparts are too, or you’ll be frustrated when a shortcut on one side turns out to be walled off on the other. There are a lot of fun shenanigans to be had with a second world that’s just the same, but evil, and A Link to the Past pulls out all the hits.

Image: Source Gaming. The map of the Dark World, something most first time players will pull up immediately. It fully copies the map of Hyrule.

Narratively, there’s also an element of drama and foreboding. As the game goes on you learn the backstory, that this was a Golden Land before Ganondorf’s evil infected it. The few non-hostile denizens are thieves punished for their intrusion or bystanders tricked into entering and warped into monsters. The buildings are destroyed, their wood rotted. And of course, this world could become Hyrule if Ganon wins. But it’s not a dead land, even if it may as well be. There’s plenty of adventure to be had. It’s also fundamentally connected to Link’s dimension; things in one world can impact the other, and several puzzles test that or the shared geography. You have to accept that for the rest of your time with the game you’re going to need to take this darker kingdom on its terms.

That’s aesthetics and basic gameplay. In a broader sense, this is a natural evolution of The Legend of Zelda’s even then-canonized house style. From the very first game, the series has always been split in two: the overworld and the dungeon. You start in a wilderness where you go as you please, find secrets, but then dive into mighty tests of logic and skill whose treasures are great. This push and pull between sandbox and set piece is the core of Zelda as a franchise. You explore, always at your own pace, before committing to a challenge. From Zelda II onward Nintendo also added the “town” as the third environment, which has quests and items, but it still connects to this relationship. It’s a spectrum of threat, openness, and reward.

Image: Source Gaming. This lonely temple is tied to its Dark World counterpart, the Swamp Palace. Only by manipulating the waterway and draining the surrounding water in Hyrule can you drain the water that blocks the dungeon.

The Dark World is a sensible if ambitious next step for this idea. What if the world was like a dungeon? Navigating it is hard, and like the palaces of A Link to the Past you need to find items and abilities to access more. You can’t explore much of anything until you get the Hammer from the Palace of Darkness, since that’s the only way to break the stakes in the eastern bridge and move forward. At the same time, it’s definitely more open after that point and mostly navigable. It also allows space-warping puzzles in which Link can jump in between dimensions, allowing him to make use of the times in which the two aren’t carbon copies. This expands that spectrum of difficulty and nonlinearity significantly, especially when areas from the two worlds interact.

You can see this everywhere, though, the twisting of the roles of spaces. Skull Woods is cut up into chunks, and you have to find the right entrances to figure it out. Desert Palace is less grand, but you still have to take one exit to access another entrance. Thieves Town is a dungeon inside a village. Some prizes in the overworld can only be reached through odd secret exits in unrelated spaces. Even Kakariko Village’s townsfolk can summon enemies to attack you, one of the only times in the series where a town has combat. Zelda games following this would walk this back somewhat; towns are almost always safe, dungeons are fully self-contained spaces, and both are generally surrounded by wilderness. This makes the third entry somewhat radical in its own way, despite having influenced this entire medium so thoroughly.

Image: Source Gaming. The alternate version of the space beside Link’s house. In the normal world it’s largely safe; here the enemies are far more powerful.

Back in 2011 during its ill-fated E3 showing, Nintendo explained to journalists that the dungeons of The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword were built as natural parts of the world. You’d flow from overworld to underground seamlessly, instead of finding the entrance to a labyrinth that mostly exists on its own. That’s… not true at all. The dungeons of Skyward Sword are absolutely self-contained from the environments in which they’re situated, like almost every other dungeon in the series. This isn’t a complaint; they’re the game’s best element. You don’t need to upend the wonderful “overworld / underworld” dichotomy. But Skull Woods defied it twenty years earlier, as do a few other places in A Link to the Past. And this second map was the biggest divergence of all for how far it went. It created an overworld that was often as dangerous and hard to master as a labyrinth or palace.

But even more than this evolution, the Dark World’s greatest legacy is establishing the idea of a double world for Nintendo. Naturally, it’s reappeared in other Zelda games. Ocarina of Time had the same world, but you visited it at two different time periods. The plots of Twilight Princess and Majora’s Mask involve mirror dimensions, though that has no serious gameplay impact. Skyward Sword has the skies over the land. Tears of the Kingdom has them too, but its Depths follow the template explicitly by making a dark, violent reflection of the overworld map. A Link to the Past’s decades-later sequel A Link Between Worlds painstakingly remade the Dark World as the fallen kingdom of Lorule. And you can see this outside the franchise, as Nintendo games from Mario to Metroid have added second worlds, remixed levels, and redone environments of their own. It’s even spread outward to other companies. For all its role in establishing “Metroidvanias,” Symphony of the Night was inspired by A Link to the Past, not Super Metroid, and that’s probably the reason behind the classic Inverted Castle.

Image: Source Gaming. While the Dark World does slowly become easier to navigate, outlying spaces like Death Mountain—home to the series’ notoriously deadly Lynels—remain perilous.

Many of these are amazing places; many of them are amazing twists. But it’s hard to beat this one. The Dark World is a fully formed space, with few shortcuts when it comes to remaking a map that was already filled with intrigue. It never feels rushed, a feeling you get from plenty of later game areas like this one. The music is great, the dungeons enchanting, and the role in the story satisfying. It even managed to add a notable amount of worldbuilding to The Legend of Zelda, which would soon reimagine itself as a mythical, intergeneral cycle of battles between Link, Zelda, and Ganon. In the canon of video game levels, worlds, and spaces, it stands tall as one of the best. This is how you make an environment that lasts.