Ocarina of Time on Switch 2: voiced cutscenes, same puzzles

The Guardian's review says the flow and structure of Ocarina of Time stay the same. You visit the same places in the same order, from Kokiri Forest to Hyrule Field, Death Mountain, Lake Hylia, Kakariko Village and Castle Town. Dungeons and temples still hide in plain sight, and the solutions to their puzzles are unchanged. The reviewer describes lighting a stick on fire and rolling over cobwebs, or using a magic lens to find invisible gaps in a crypt wall. If you played it as a child, the reviewer found the answers come back from memory. The review calls it a clever, challenging game about a lonely boy who travels through time to save the world.

The framing is what changed. Text chatter with Hyrule's inhabitants has been expanded, and the reviewer says the world feels funnier and more colourful. Pivotal moments now play out in fully voiced cutscenes, which the review compares to Tears of the Kingdom from 2023. Link himself stays silent. The reviewer expects these scenes to divide players and notes the original is still available for purists.

In the review's view, the scenes bring out drama the sparse original tale left latent. First meetings with important characters land harder, and there are pre-battle face-offs with temple bosses. Ganondorf comes across as thrillingly evil. A new scene shows young Link pulling the Master Sword from the stone and being frozen for seven years.

The review describes the original as looking like a dream: angular, fuzzy at the edges, with simple but evocative colours. The remake is described as not so much realistic as hyperreal. The reviewer says it is clearer and easier to navigate, and more beautiful to look at, with playful musical touches. The melancholy of the original remains, according to the review. The Guardian frames this as an ambitious remake rather than a light-touch remaster: the latter brings old games up to modern graphical standards without fundamentally changing them, while a remake tries to make the work stand alongside modern masterpieces. The review places Ocarina of Time in the second category.

If you never finished the Nintendo 64 game, the review suggests the same puzzles and the same route through Hyrule await you, now with voiced scenes and expanded dialogue. If you know it by heart, the reviewer's own experience was that memory supplied the solutions, and that knowing what happens next made the remade moments more exciting to watch. The trade-off is the new cutscenes, which the reviewer expects some longtime fans to resist. The original remains an option for anyone who prefers the sparser telling. The review appears on The Guardian's games section, dated 4 November 2026, and covers the Nintendo Switch 2 version.

The review gives no price and no release date beyond its own publication on 4 November 2026. It does not state a UK price, a download size or a frame rate. Those details still need confirming before you decide to buy. What the review does establish is the shape of the package: the same world and puzzles, expanded text, fully voiced cutscenes and a hyperreal look on Switch 2. The reviewer's verdict is that the remake is a dream come true, and that the melancholy survives the update. Whether the voiced scenes work for you is the question the review leaves to players.