Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore is a newly announced game that takes inspiration from two of the worst, most heavily ridiculed Zelda games of all time, Link: The Faces of Evil and Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon. Arzette is a 2D side-scrolling platformer funded and published by Limited Run Games, a company based out of Raleigh, North Carolina, whose primary focus is the preservation of video games on physical format by selling limited runs of classic and obscure games primarily through its website.
Limited Run recently held its 2023 Summer Games Showcase, an event wherein the publisher announced several new projects mostly centered around its game preservation efforts. It announced collected editions of Jurassic Park video games released in the 1990s as well as a physical release of the Gex trilogy.
In addition to reaffirming Limited Run’s commitment to game preservation during its 2023 Summer Games Showcase, Limited Run also announced a new game being published under its banner, although it might not look like a new game, which is the point. Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore is a spiritual successor to the Zelda CD-i games that have become infamous for being the most tonally incongruous Zelda games ever made. On top of that, they are often considered some of the worst video games ever made.
Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore aims to take a formula established by two universally panned Zelda games and turn it into a game people might want to play. Based on the trailer, Arzette faithfully sticks to the Zelda CD-i aesthetic, right down to the hand-painted backgrounds, early-1990s platformer mechanics and an absurd full-motion animated style of cinematic that’s a dead ringer for the art style of the CD-i Zelda games. Only this time, under Limited Run, it’s all being done intentionally, to honor the legacy of a notorious set of games, and with tongue firmly in cheek.
Back in the 1990s, Philips Interactive Media published Zelda games for its ill-fated gaming console, the CD-i. The games were Link: The Faces of Evil, Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon, and Zelda's Adventure. The first two were primarily 2D side-scrolling platformers interspersed with laughably bad animated cinematics that have become legendary among gamers for all the wrong reasons. Neither game was developed by Nintendo, and therefore is not part of the proper Zelda canon. They are anomalies that Nintendo has all but disavowed. Arzette is being developed by a one-man development team known as thedopster, who made a name for himself by remastering the infamous CD-i Zelda games in 2020.
Arzette: The Jewel of Faramore will be available later in 2023 for PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
