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Zelda: Tears Of The Kingdom Is Already Out In The Wild And The Leaks Have Begun

Be careful around Links!

Avatar photoBy Kieron Verbrugge

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom has had a pretty bad run of leaks in the lead-up to release, but it’s getting a little out of hand now. After the entirety of its 200-page art book was seemingly scanned and uploaded to the internet a couple of months ago, now with just a couple weeks left until release the whole game is out there.

Yep, it looks as though some players out there were either shipped the game early by mistake or managed to obtain early copies illegitimately, and of course it didn’t take long for not only images of the physical game and videos of it being played to surface – it quickly made its way to pirate sites and has already been shown running on PC via emulator. A thread on the GamingLeaksAndRumours subreddit claims that a Discord server at one point had over 1000 people watching the game being played via emulator and that both emulation and running of the game on Switch consoles with custom firmware is not widespread.

For obvious reasons, we’re not going to link to any of the leaked footage or files – but if you’re patiently waiting for the game to hit shelves and aren’t keen on seeing spoilers we’d absolutely recommend muting keywords, or staying off social media altogether, or throwing all your electronic devices into the nearest body of water. Whatever works.

We recently got a (legitimate) chance to play Tears of the Kingdom for ourselves, saying “…it’s clear that Tears of the Kingdom is going to go to a whole new level in terms of what an open-world Zelda game has to offer, not only taking to the sky and below ground, but also allowing you to use your imagination to build almost any vehicle or weapon.”

You can read that here or watch our (again, legitimate) spoiler-free gameplay footage on our YouTube channel:

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom releases on May 12th for Nintendo Switch.

Amazon has all three as well as the standard and Collector’s Edition flavours of the game available to pre-order, as well as the new Link Amiibo:

THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: TEARS OF THE KINGDOM PRE-ORDERS