Zelda: Breath of the Wild players have worked out how to beat enemies with a chicken

The Legend of Zelda fans have turned a recurring Easter egg from the series into a surprising new battle tactic.

Many Zelda games feature the "angry cucco" secret - where if you make Link attack a chicken (in the Zelda universe they're named cuccos) then eventually a whole flock of its friends will fly down and rapidly peck Link to death.

This feature has never been much more than a joke - an unexpected consequence for picking on a poor chicken - until Breath of the Wild, that is.

The latest Zelda game once again features the angry cucco secret - but this time players have worked out how to use it to their advantage. Instead of Link being the one pecked to death, holding a chicken and being attacked by an enemy now causes the game to register it as the attacker.

The result? Once again the cucco flock descends - but attacks your enemy now instead. And not just the one enemy - the flock pecks apart every enemy on screen. Brutal.

The following GIF comes from a video by videogamedunkey. Let's watch:

Breath of the Wild is a deeply systems-based game, where it feels like almost everything can affect anything else. It also has very few loading screens - so you could potentially go to a village or farm, find a cuccoo, and carry it right up to the hardest enemies in the game in Hyrule Castle... Now there's a video we'd like to see.