I feel like I've fallen into another dimension, staring at the janky dotty 2D cutscenes of "Alzette: The Jewel of Faramore." It reminds me of the days of the Internet, when I thought I had reached my limit, and of games I hadn't seen for a long time. I grew up not as a Zelda CD-i player, but as a witness to a terrible cultural phenomenon known as Youtube poop.

In case you were fortunate enough to miss it, Youtube poop was a trend of heavily edited sensory nightmares that remixed old media: the short-lived 1993 Sonic the Hedgehog TV show, British children's poet Michael Rosen's work and Bel Air's Fresh Prince, are all fair game. Most of them are attacks on the senses with no rhyme or reason, a precursor to modern fried meme culture. But some, like this rap by Eggman, are absolute masterpieces.

The Zelda CD-i game was created exclusively for the Philips CD-i, which in the 90s "could do anything!" It was one of the attempts to create a multimedia machine, a strange Frankenstein-like game machine and CD player.

The game was the bizarre result of the dissolution of the Philips-Nintendo partnership; as Kotaku's retrospective review described it, "a pointless uphill adventure," it hasn't aged well.

That's what makes its spiritual successor all the more fun and puzzling. Arzetto, "The Jewel of Faramore," which was presented yesterday at the Limited Run Summer Showcase, certainly carries on the spirit of the game. There is a deep charm to the gratingly animated cutscenes, which fail miserably with fully painted backgrounds and 64-bit sprites.

Several of the original creators of the CD-i game reprise their roles: Rob Duranbay, who did the background art for Zelda CD-i, lends his brush; Jeffery Russ, who voiced CD-i Link, and Bonnie Jean Wilbur, who voiced CD-i Zelda also lend their voices to this very special nostalgia trip.

The question burning in my mind, is it actually fun to play?" Unlike other throwbacks to the classics, there is nothing worth copying from the Zelda CD-i titles. It has always been heavily criticized as an unintuitive, difficult to control, overly punishing mess of a game.

I am still stunned that this game is even trying to exist. The game exists because of the wild culture of goblins on the internet who have been sentmixing the same few janky cutscenes for years. It's the spiritual successor to a game that almost no one played, that no one liked, that manifested a shitposting, and I might just fall in love with it.

Alzette: The Jewel of Faramore will be coming to Steam later this year, but no specific date has been announced.