It's kind of embarrassing. After playing tons of Tears of the Kingdom, I've only now just noticed something that was kind of staring me in the face:
The Depths are the inverse of Hyrule.
Let's back up.
The first Zelda game I was ever really aware of was Link to the Past, though the first I played was Ocarina of Time. I got my N64 in 1997, only a year after I had gotten my SNES, so the two systems for me more or less overlapped - I'd buy used games from Funcoland (by the way, if you're young and don't remember Funcoland, imagine a cool little indie game store where they have a ton of consoles with the latest games running in banks along the walls so you can try them out, only as a national chain. Sadly, they got eaten up by Gamestop) and so, for example, after finding Samus to be my favorite Super Smash Bros. character, going back and picking up Super Metroid.
In A Link to the Past, the concept of it is that you have both the Light World and the Dark World. The Light World is your classic Hyrule, with Hyrule Castle at it center, while the Dark World is a once-beautiful Golden Land that was corrupted when Ganon seized the Triforce of Power. The Light World has plenty of enemies, but the Dark World is everything turned up to greater levels of spookiness, and has Ganon's Pyramid of Power in its center. The game uses these two worlds cleverly for some puzzles, where you might need to swap between them to get past barriers. It also divides the game into two distinct segments - the first part in which you have three dungeons to complete in the Light World, and the second part, in which there are I think eight dungeons in the Dark World (three of which occupy the same spots as the Light World ones).
Ocarina of Time would repeat this idea in a different way. The two versions of the world are separated instead by time, with Child Link going through an era in which there are problems, but overall Hyrule is at peace, and Adult Link in a world in which Castle Town has been utterly devastated and Ganondorf has destroyed Hyrule Castle and replaced it with his ominous floating fortress. Various parts of the world are different, like Zora's Domain flooding over or Lake Hylia draining.
Subsequent games didn't so much do this "two versions of the world" thing, though they did typically divide the main quest into two main phases, usually collecting some group of items from the first few dungeons and then a separate set of items from later ones. One could argue Skyward Sword had two versions of the world in the Sky and the ground level, but in practice this mainly allowed them to turn the ramp-up to the dungeons on the surface something of dungeons themselves (ironically the last game before Breath of the Wild was maybe their most restrictive, least open-world entry).
Anyway, given that Tears of the Kingdom largely reuses the same map from Breath of the Wild, I guess I wasn't thinking too much about this idea of a parallel world.
In fact, Tears of the Kingdom has three layers to its world - the surface, which is, again, mostly the same as it Breath of the Wild, and then the Sky, which is a bit more like Skyward Sword's sky area, having only a relatively small surface area of isolated sky islands that are tricky to get to, and then the Depths.
The closest equivalent to the Depths I can think of in other games I've played is The Maw from World of Warcraft's Shadowlands expansion - specifically in its first patch, before the Maw was made a little less hostile.
The Depths are taxing - there's no civilization to be found here, and it's hard to see. One of the biggest goals in exploring the Depths are to find the various Lightroots. Not only do these act as fast-travel locations, but their light both allows you to see farther (Brightbloom Seeds are a consumable and collectable resource that you can toss around the place to get reasonable lighting in a small area, but hte Lightroots are both permanent and have a far larger radius) and their light will cure Gloom, which prevents you from healing hearts that are affected. The Lightroots are also the only way to fill out your map - until you can get those giant beacons of light, you can't really see the overall layout of the surrounding area.
While perhaps not as hard-limited as the Maw was in WoW's 9.0 period, it'll take a while in Tears of the Kingdom before you can really afford to take extended trips to the Depths.
The Lightroots have odd names, but I realized only recently that the names are familiar if you spell them backwards. In fact, they are all the names of Shrines on the surface of Hyrule.
This has actually come out as a huge strategic hint for me in figuring out where Lightroots might be - if I look at my surface map and find a shrine I've discovered, I can just look directly below it and place a beacon and I'll find a Lightroot. I don't believe there's a similar connection to the ones on the Sky Islands, but this is still pretty helpful. Likewise, if a Lightroot is found in the depths, you can infer that there's a shrine above it on the surface.
Naturally, my interpretation here is that the Shrines and Lightroots are likely connected. The shrines seem to be a kind of purification and recycling system for magical power - taking evil magic and transforming it into healing light magic. And I think that the output, essentially, is in the Depths, pumping light into this place of darkness.
This realization about the connection between the Shrines and the Lightroots, though, led me to realize something else that had been staring me in the face:
The Depths are an exact inverse of the Surface.
I think the first thing that I realized was that you could find Bargainer Statues beneath all great goddess statues - the ones in the wellsprings of Wisdom, Courage, and Power, as well as the one in Hebra Canyon. But then you look at the Shrine/Lightroot connection, and then you look at the topography of the Depths.
The thing is, while the Skyview Towers give you a pretty enormous swath of the surface map - there are only like twelve of them - your map of the Depths requires pretty diligent Lightroot-hunting to get a big view of it.
But now that I've done a fair amount of that, the truth is revealed: the Depths' topography is the exact inverse of the Surface. Wherever there is a tall mountain in Hyrule, there's a deep pit. Where there's a canyon above, there's a giant ridge below.
This has led me to wonder something:
The Depths can be reached simply by diving into big holes in the ground - the "chasms," as the game refers to them. These take you through a pretty solid chunk of earth surrounded by gloom before you fall down into the Depths.
But what if that seemingly physical relationship is masking something bigger? What if we're actually traveling across dimensions?
What if the Depths is The Dark World?
Naturally, there are big differences here. The Dark World, for example, is a shadowy reflection of the Light World, but is physically similar. Death Mountain, for example, is a mountain in both versions (I also think it's uniquely called the same thing in both worlds. Both have a spooky woods, but the Lost Woods in the Light World is the Skeleton Woods in the Dark World.)
Still, it's not like Hyrule looks the same in Tears of the Kingdom as it did in A Link to the Past (while Death Mountain is still roughly in the northeast, Kakariko Village is almost exactly on the opposite side of the map). Zelda games tend to reimagine the world significantly between entries (with the Tears of the Kingdom probably the biggest exception when compared to Breath of the Wild).
The Depths even has its own weird skybox - a kind of brown-gold haze.
What is interesting, though, is that unlike the Dark World, which seems to, at the point we get to it in Link to the Past, be fully saturated in the dark sensibilities of Ganon, the Depths has evidence of less evil elements, like the various Zonai mines and processing centers, and the decidedly true neutral Bargainer statues (which, again, are placed in a position equivalent to the goddess Hylia on the Surface, suggesting that the Bargainer might be essentially the primary god of that realm. (The fact that a Bargainer statue speaks to us through a Hylia statue on that plateau where we wake up in Breath of the Wild raises all manner of disturbing questions.)
Unfortunately, the Depths is a little thin on detail. Compared with the surface world, it's pretty homogeneous in terms of aesthetic. Other than Zonai constructs and Yiga clan bases (appropriate to see them there given that the Yiga sigil is an upside down version of the Shiekah one) it's kind of all just gloom, desiccated/petrified trees, and gloom-empowered monsters. I could have imagined a version of the game in which the Depths were more fleshed out as a kind of mirror world to the Surface, but I think that they might not have been able to do as much with the sky islands.
Still, conceptually I find the Depths to be kind of fascinating.
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