Link: The Faces of Evil

Link: The Faces of Evil is one of two action titles made for the CD-i thanks to a license letting Philips use characters from The Legend of Zelda universe. Unlike Nintendo's own games, this one has a side-scrolling view: Link hacks his way through caves, rocky passages, and villages on the island of Koridai, collecting potions, lamps, ropes, and other gear while trying to stop the wizard Ganon from imprisoning Princess Zelda. The individual stretches are linked by a map of the island the player travels across between locations, and many of them require returning with a newly acquired item. Combat relies on precisely timed sword swings that can also be aimed up and down, and the game is unexpectedly harsh: enemies have long reach, platforms tend to be narrow, and death comes quickly.

Visually the game rests on hand-drawn backgrounds and animated cutscenes, whose rough animation and quirky voice acting became the most-quoted part of the whole project. The audio makes use of the CD medium, so the music is recorded rather than synthesized, giving the levels an unusually dark, almost brooding atmosphere. The controls, however, run up against the hardware's limits: the CD-i controller was designed more for navigating multimedia catalogs than for fast action, so sluggish response and imprecise jumps complicate even otherwise simple passages.

Reviewers received the game coldly, and along with its sister title Zelda: The Wand of Gamelon, time turned it into a byword for a botched license. Over time, though, an opposite view has also emerged. Beneath the clumsy controls hides a surprisingly large and honestly designed action platformer, with exploration, item collecting, and hidden shortcuts, that with a better gamepad could have held its own alongside typical productions of its day. Today it's worth trying mainly as a curiosity and as evidence of what Hyrule looks like without Nintendo's oversight, with the understanding that it's more a historical experience than a comfortable one.