In another “you can do what now,” moment from The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, it turns out that you can make music in the game itself.
There’s a whole lot of things you can do in Tears of the Kingdom. You can ascend through anything, even if players keep forgetting. You can fuse all sorts of cool things. And apparently, you can even make music. No, you won’t find a secret harp or other classic Zelda instrument hidden in one of the game’s many shrines, as cool as that would be. Instead it’s just players doing the absolute most with ultrahand, and one of the Zonai items you can get in the game, stakes.
The main use of stakes is that you can insert them into pretty much anything else; they essentially bend physics and can be shoved into most walls as smooth as butter, letting you attach other objects to them. Useful for building stairs and other contraptions mostly, but one thing you might have noticed about them is that when you hit them they make a sound. And even more interestingly, the pitch changes depending on how far into the ground they’re placed.
As demonstrated by composer Maxo, you can produce different pitches and sounds by using laters on a tire, and then hitting the stakes. Fellow composer bran8bit took this a step further, though, discovering that attaching stakes to one another can produce an even wider range of pitches, leading them to make the only song that should be made, Megalovania from Undertale.
This is one of those things that makes you question if the devs intended for players to be able to do this, as they didn’t need to go to the effort of making the stakes have different pitches depending on how embedded they are. It could also just be a credit to player creativity, which is undeniably true any which way. I’m sure there’ll be plenty of cool things players will figure out for years to come.