Tears of the Kingdom, like Breath of the Wild before it, is jam-packed with Easter Eggs and references to both Nintendo and Zelda history. Many of them are obvious, like the bottles of Lon Lon Milk in Hateno Village or when Link hums Saria’s song as he cooks, but others are more obscure. For instance, the Ultrahand ability is a reference to an old Nintendo toy from the ‘60s. But Tears of the Kingdom’s best reference isn’t to a Zelda or even a Nintendo game. On the way to the Wind Temple you’ll find a shrine dedicated to a famous scene from Resident Evil.
It’s called the Sahirow Shrine, and you can find it by traveling east from Rospro Pass Skyview Tower, which is the tower just north of Rito Village. If you make a beeline from Rito Village to the Hebra mountains, it’s almost impossible to miss, where it sits near the top of Corvash Peak.
As my colleague Andrew King explains, Tears of the Kingdom’s shrines are all designed to teach you valuable lessons. Sahirow Shrine’s lesson is ‘lasers are bad’. You could probably have guessed that, but this shrine does a good job of teaching you the different ways you can avoid laser beams, so when you encounter them in future you’ll know exactly what to do.
Things start out pretty easy. At the entrance there’s a single laser you need to run and jump over. Hopefully you’ve mastered the claw grip you need to use in order to run and jump in Tears of the Kingdom, but that’s a topic for a different article. If you touch any of the lasers in this shrine, the floor will open up like a trap door and drop Link into an endless abyss, so don’t do that unless you want to see your little buddy scream for his life as he’s consumed by the void, you sick freak.
The next section has a series of criss-crossing lasers you’ll dodge and dip beneath Catherine Zeta-Jones-style, then climb up some stairs and glide over a series of lasers on the floor. So far, so simple. The final challenge is where we find our reference to Resident Evil, but it might not be the Resident Evil you’re expecting.
After Ascending onto a moving platform, you’ll come to a long hallway that ends with the shrine’s treasure chest. Enter the hallway and a horizontal laser will appear at the opposite end and start moving towards you. You simply have to jump over the laser as it approaches and move into the next section of the hall. There, another laser will move towards you at chest height, so duck as it approaches.
As you enter the final section of the hallway, a door will slam shut behind you, preventing you from escaping. Ahead of you, a full grid of lasers will appear and start moving towards you. You can’t jump, duck, or otherwise dodge these lasers as they approach. All you can do is stand there and wait for death.
There’s no doubt in my mind that this is a reference to the 2002 Resident Evil movie. The progression from one laser, to another laser, to a full grid of lasers hits the exact same comedic timing that the film does. I don’t think there’s any chance this is just a coincidence. Even the grid pattern of the lasers is the same. The only difference is that touching the lasers doesn’t slice Link into 100 perfect cubes.
Three years after the Resident Evil movie, Resident Evil 4 also paid homage to the famous scene by putting Leon in his own laser beam death hallway. Instead of a grid, however, the laser wall is formed by a messing spread of unavoidable lasers. For those reasons, I maintain that the shrine in Zelda is a reference to the movie, not RE4. Interestingly, this year’s Resident Evil 4 remake cut the laser hallway. For fans of the original RE4 that missed this scene in the remake, at least Zelda was able to bring it back.
In Resident Evil 4, Leon escapes by running up the wall behind him and effortlessly backflipping over the laser wall. Unfortunately Link isn’t quite the gymnast that Leon is, so wall jumps and backflips are out of the questions. The solution is still fairly simple though. All you need to do is back up against the wall as the laser comes towards you - it won’t be able to get close enough - then follow it to the end of the hall. The lasers will turn off for a split second when it reaches the end of the hall, which gives you the opening to run to the exit and claim your Blessing of Light. Hopefully that’s the only Resident Evil reference in Tears of the Kingdom. With the way weapons break, I don’t think Link can survive a run-in with Mr. X.