TL:DR: Game is not good, play Hollow Knight or GRIME instead.

This game is like a 4/10 at best, for me anyway. Designed to be a 'good' version of the infamous CDI Zelda games, Arzette: Jewel of Faramore is a 2D action platformer with an item-based progression system, somewhat like a Metroidvania. However, playing the game, I largely found progression nonsensical and all over the place. At the beginning of the game, so many things are inaccessible, but by the time I unlocked more items, I found myself unable to remember what I could do with them: the flute, gauntlet and the different color magic. There's also this quest to make your sword stronger, but by the time I completed it, all could use it for was Daimur's lair. I more or less accidentally stumbled into all the game's bosses before.

Speaking of bosses, I found them all extremely underwhelming - and this goes for the entire combat as well. Regular enemies are fine, but then you have enemies which take multiple hits, which are just annoying: especially the musquito hives. Either you use a bomb (which you may need for secrets/progression) or you wait a long time to slowly kill it with five hits plus I-frames.

Not to mention the level design often makes it difficult if not impossible to avoid these enemies. It often includes leaps of faith, too, with no way to look down to see what's below, resulting in frequent deaths. Yes, respawning is generous, but it's still annoying.

So what does this game have? Well, good controls, but considering how bad they were in the game's source of inspiration, that's not a high bar to clear. It also had a few good laughs here and there, and the sprite work is nice. At the end of the day, it seems this game was mostly made to recreate the laughs we all had when we discovered the CDI's terrible cutscenes back in the early days of YouTube Poop. But even that still doesn't always work with the game's inconsistent voice acting and its attempt to have actual drama in the story. They should have just gone full-on camp with this game, and the decision to not do that just baffles me.

Memes aside, this is a genuinely fun game that pays tribute to the unfortunate Zelda CDi games by being a spiritual successor that plays like it would if Philips CDi wasn't a terrible system and devs got enough time. Arzette is also unironically a good protagonist with how she doesn't give a ♥♥♥♥ about standard heroic bs

This review is spoiler-free.

I never found the hardware to authentically play any of the CDi games, but this game makes me wish I put in the effort to. It polishes all of the mechanics of the old Zelda CDi games that I've heard were very clunky and unpleasant before.

The combat is actually a lot more fun than I thought a game like this could achieve. Arzette has a sword that can easily cut down every normal enemy in the game, and she can pick up a bunch of items and power-ups that make combat and platforming much easier.

The one thing about this game that I dislike is the backtracking. Each level has many secrets, with many of them requiring an item or ability to access, and some of these are put right in your face at the beginning of the game while you have no way to get them. I think it's fine you need to go back into older levels to get secrets that can only be gotten with later-game abilities, but why do I always need to replay the level from the beginning? When I've already gone through the level before and need to go through the whole thing just to get a secret or rare item closer to the end, it feels like a slog. I feel like this one issue could have been remedied by allowing the player to enter the level from any teleportation scroll they used before, but it's a small issue that really isn't that important in the grand scheme of things. Besides, this fix would have made Arzette even shorter while it is already a somewhat short experience.

Other than that, I love how faithful this new game is to the old Zelda games. Some of the original staff members even contributed to it, and it shows. I haven't delved into any modes harder than normal after I've beaten it, but I look forward to playing the other modes and seeing the extra challenges that it presents.