Every The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time player remembers their first encounter with the ReDeads. The shambling zombie-like enemies occupy Hyrule Castle Town when you emerge from the Temple of Time and immediately freak you out, with a sudden piercing scream that freezes you in place. The new ReDeads work largely the same way, but at one point in development they were made significantly scarier.
“With this remake, the graphics are a lot improved, and so the ReDead–the sound, the graphics, and the movement–ended up being very, very scary,” producer Hidemaro Fujibayashi told GameSpot via a translator. “And the staff wanted to make this in service of making a good gameplay experience. But from our perspective, taking a step back, we felt like, let’s remember the experience that we don’t want to change, and taking that into consideration, maybe we’ve gone a step too far, so let’s dial it back.”
As Fujibayashi and fellow producer Eiji Aonuma mentioned several times in our wide-ranging interview, this project was full of younger staffers who had new ideas for how to modernize the classic, while also learning the ropes of a classic Zelda design. Those young guns may have had a different idea of what constitutes a scary moment in a Zelda game, especially if the already-spooky ReDead were made too spooky.
The ReDead have been slightly revised from their original version, with clearer visual indicators to show their gaze and a red vine-like tendril to signify your frozen state. They can still be pretty alarming, but once you understand how to beat them the new indicators make it easier to avoid their attack and strike them from behind.
Those careful details are part of why I called this version of Ocarina of Time the “definitive way to experience this all-time classic” in my Zelda: Ocarina of Time review, and why it’s currently the top-rated game of 2026 on GameSpot sister site Metacritic.
