My favorite gaming experience of 2025 has not been Monster Hunter Wilds, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, or Assassin’s Creed: Shadows.

My favorite gaming experience of 2025 is not even technically a game.

It is in fact, a romhack for 1998’s The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Yet, merely calling it a romhack feels like an injustice. Ultimate Trial is an experience unto itself. Ultimate Trial is a work of art.

Developed by the aptly-named “Ultimate Trial Team,” Ultimate Trial is not simply a modification of Ocarina of Time, it is functionally an entirely new game using the Ocarina of Time engine. I finished Ultimate Trial with about 30 hours played, which is more than typically goes into an Ocarina of Time playthrough. I want to emphasize that this is a brand new experience, not a slight modification.

Ultimate Trial tells an entirely new story, albeit one that slots neatly into the storyline of Ocarina of Time. After freeing the sages, and before facing Ganondorf, Link finds himself hopelessly disoriented in the Lost Woods, with his equipment missing and much of his memory seemingly wiped. Eventually he stumbles upon Shiba’s Stronghold, a mysterious location in which the inhabitants can neither die nor leave. Unless they defeat three trials, that is.

The lord of the stronghold, Shiba, deigns to aid Link in growing strong enough to defeat the trials and regain his memory.

Ultimate Trial is, in essence, split into two parts. One half sees you exploring the stronghold’s hub world and surrounding grounds, finding hidden areas and conversing with an array of mysterious and fascinating NPCs. The other half sees you tackling the trials themselves, which are a series of interconnected rooms full of traps and enemies. These rooms are of drastically increasing difficulty, and ever-changing nature. You will probably die a lot, but when you do, you take the rupees you earned, and spend them on upgrades and new items, to make future runs easier. The Dark Souls influence is very clear, and masterfully implemented. Genuinely, I haven’t quite felt the aura exhumed by this game since my time with Demon’s Souls in 2009.

The rickety engine of Ocarina of Time holds up shockingly well in this combat-heavy Dark Souls-esque format. I always felt like Ocarina of Time’s combat controls were over-designed when compared to how relatively braindead the actual combat is. What is the point in having separate prompts for vertical and horizontal slashes, when there is basically never a reason to prefer one over the other?

Ultimate Trial puts the combat system through its paces. When you have three Keese descending upon you from above, while a Wolfos is simultaneously circling you, the difference between a vertical and horizontal slash suddenly becomes a matter of life and death. Rather than buckle under pressure, the Ultimate Trial team got everything the combat from Ocarina of Time could give, and then took a little more. It is superb.

What truly separates Ultimate Trial from other mods and romhacks I’ve played, is the professionalism of the presentation. There was a tremendous amount of work put in to make this feel like a premium experience. There is a new UI, which includes a number of quality of life features like toggleable boots. Certain enemy models are redesigned to look closer to the concept art, and a number of entirely new (and thematically appropriate) models are created to make Ultimate Trial feel truly unique.

That isn’t even touching on the majesty of the music, some of which would genuinely match the output of Koji Kondo in the original game. The stronghold theme has embedded itself into my psyche with the same fervour as the Lost Woods theme. 

The environmental design is stunning, and at the end of my time with this game, I felt the same intimate familiarity towards the stronghold and catacombs as I have for the Spencer Mansion in Resident Evil, or even Clock Town in Majora’s Mask. As you can imagine, I consider this to be high praise.

Ultimate Trial is fantastic, and if you are at all interested, I highly recommend you check it out. If romhacks are something you’ve been interested in checking out, this is a fantastic place to start. A huge kudos to the Ultimate Trial team, and I can’t wait to see what else they have in store for the continually-updated Ultimate Trial going forward.

Featured Image: Nintendo, The Ultimate Trial Team