I had SUCH a good time with Arzette, and found the entire premise insanely charming. I've never played the Zelda CD-i games, but I've watched people play through them, so there's probably (definitely) things that were referenced that went over my head, but the many I did catch never failed to put a smile on my face. The entire game is clearly filled to the brim with love for their reference: getting the original voice actors, finding humor from the original plot, and the obvious amount of time put into their reminiscent art/animations. I liked all the obvious love "Seedy Eye" has for the "CD-i", rather than choosing to make the game point and maliciously laugh at it, which wouldn't have been half as fun. My biggest complaint is that the game is too short! I finished it all on my 4-hour bus trip, though it made it a short + fun ride. Honestly, the Zelda CD-i games were also very short, so it's fitting. I highly recommend Arzette: The Jewels of Faramore to fans of older games, indie platformers, and/or youtube poops, you'll have a blast.

3.5/5

Arzette is a really, really good game. It's an homage rather than a parody and I'm happy it exists this way. It shows us in an alternate timeline, the Zelda CD-I games could have been great & that there was something special about them

Put aside how they "ruin" the characters, add just a little polish & you can see how charming they could be. Make the levels more intuitive to navigate and you can see that the levels were always beautiful. And if the CD-I soundtrack just added... Actually, that was the one thing that always slapped about the CD-I games, but Arzette's OST rocks, too!

But even on its own merits the game still succeeds. It's almost like a mini-metoridvania with a level selector rather than an interconnected world, but you still get that same gameplay loop of starting out weak, getting the hang of the game, and by the end you're crushing every enemy on your path to the end.

Arzette is a short game, but well worth every ruby you spend on it. If I had to sum it up in one word it is, unironically, good.