Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore

I have a soft spot for games that treat the most disreputable corners of gaming history with genuine love instead of lazy irony, and Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore is exactly that kind of project. Seedy Eye Software - the name itself is a phonetic wink at Philips CD-i - spent real creative energy building a spiritual successor to Link: The Faces of Evil and Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon, two side-scrolling platformers that the internet knows almost entirely through meme compilations. The result is something quietly remarkable: a 4-5 hour action-platformer that is both a faithful recreation of a famously terrible aesthetic and a legitimately playable game in its own right. The structure will feel familiar to anyone who has touched a Metroidvania or a gated exploration platformer. You traverse Faramore's fourteen bite-sized levels as Princess Arzette, lighting five Sacred Beacons, collecting Sacred Candles to push back Daimur's darkness, and hunting down the five shards of the Jewel of Faramore. The inventory fills out gradually - bomb glove, lantern, canteen - and each new item gates off previously unreachable routes, which means you will be revisiting levels. The semi-linear design makes backtracking feel purposeful most of the time, though a handful of objectives lean on early-90s obscurity that can tip from charming into frustrating depending on your patience. Hitboxes carry some of that intentional CD-i roughness, and the initial difficulty curve can feel steep before Arzette picks up upgrades and extra hearts from completed side-quests. A boss rush mode and a harder difficulty that locks in the original CD-i control scheme are there for players who want the full punishment. The real heartbeat of the game is its animated cutscenes. Every NPC encounter triggers a short cartoon rendered with deliberately jagged pixels, elastic limbs, unhinged zooms, and voice performances pitched somewhere between committed and unhinged. The craft required to convincingly reproduce bad animation is genuinely underappreciated - Seedy Eye pulls it off with a precision that makes each scene land as parody and homage simultaneously, never fully tipping into either direction. The soundtrack, built from cheesy low-quality samples and a groovy bass-forward sensibility, keeps the whole thing humming along at the exact frequency those CD-i games once accidentally stumbled into. Hand-painted backgrounds contrast against flat sprite characters in a way that should look wrong but somehow feels right, and the colorful cast - including voice talent from the original CD-i Zelda productions - gives the world of Faramore a personality that outlasts the runtime. Where the game struggles is in carrying players who have no context for any of this. The references, the visual comedy, and the intentional jank all land harder if you have at least seen the YouTube compilations. Without that frame, what remains is a competent but unremarkable side-scroller with slightly clunky combat and a lot of level-hopping. The bosses are also a genuine soft spot - upgrade the ring to deflect projectiles early and several encounters become trivially easy. For a game this short, a little more resistance in those final confrontations would have made the Jewel-infused sword payoff feel earned rather than ceremonial. For the right player, though, none of that diminishes what Arzette accomplishes. It is a short, strange, handcrafted game that knows exactly what it is, commits completely, and ends before it wears out its welcome. The kind of game that gets made once.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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