The latest trailer for The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom has unveiled a plethora of details about this increasingly captivating game. Notably, it confirms that Zelda will finally be able to engage in swordfights. Additionally, it confirms what we had suspected since the very first trailer, which is that the princess will venture through the mysterious rifts that have appeared across Hyrule and discover a distinct dimension. Parallel worlds have been a recurrent theme in Zelda games ever since 1992’s A Link to the Past, inviting players to explore the Light World and Dark World, two inverse manifestations of the same map. Later, Ocarina of Time allowed players to toggle between Hyrule’s past and its future, and in A Link Between Worlds, one could slip from Hyrule to its mirror world Lorule through cracks in the walls. Now, we know that Echoes of Wisdom‘s alternate dimension will be the Still World. Here, the landscape has been fragmented into floating chunks in a void, and the people who have been sucked through the rifts, including Link himself and the King of Hyrule, are preserved as stony, gray statues, frozen in place. It reminds me of a singular moment from an earlier Zelda game, one of the most arresting scenes in the entire series. I’m thinking of Link’s journey to the undersea castle in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker.

[Warning: Spoilers for The Wind Waker follow.]

At a crucial moment in The Wind Waker, Link is taken to a submerged castle that has been frozen in time. He can explore the throne room that was under attack by an army of moblins at the moment it was frozen. Pillars, caught in mid-topple, hover in the air, and guards and moblins are preserved in desperate poses as they clash swords. Everything is grayed out, as if carved from stone by a sculptor. This is where the Link of The Wind Waker retrieves the Master Sword. It’s later revealed that the underwater realm is actually the kingdom of Hyrule that was flooded by the goddesses to contain Ganondorf when he tried to seize power. The people of Hyrule fled to the mountaintops, becoming the island denizens of The Wind Waker‘s waterworld.

That’s the lore, but you don’t need to know it to feel the power of the scene. A lost world, frozen for centuries, is a potent image from fairytales as old as “Sleeping Beauty,” and the scene’s very lack of animation and interactivity, in a game as lively as The Wind Waker, gives it an even more awesome and haunting quality. Also, the depiction of Hyrule Castle recalls the classic medieval fantasy iconography of Zelda, particularly Ocarina of Time, in a game that otherwise noticeably lacks it. Is Echoes of Wisdom‘s Still World a deliberate echo of this great moment? I wouldn’t be surprised if it was, but either way, it’s tapping into the same rich veins of atmosphere. It’s a world far beneath your feet, where people have been turned to stone, and time doesn’t seem to pass, yet everything is falling apart. Some things do move in the Still World – it has dungeons that seem to be populated by shadowy foes – but the vibe is unmistakable. I’ve often wished I could have explored the whole of that frozen Hyrule under the sea. In Echoes of Wisdom, I might get to do something like it.