Disaster Report: Arabian Nights (PC)

In the story One Thousand and One Nights, sometimes known as Arabian Nights to English speaking audiences, King Shahryar puts his wife to death for her infidelity, and believing any other woman would do the same, he begins an awful chain of marrying virgins and putting them to death the next day. However, the vizier’s daughter Scheherazade believes she has a way of ending this cycle, and on the night of her wedding, she spins a yarn for Shahryar but refuses to end it. Desperate to know the rest, the king stays her execution for another day, only for her to once again leave the night’s tale on a cliffhanger. This repeats itself for the one thousand and one nights, and by the end of her many tales, the king realizes after all this time with Scheherazade he no longer wishes to execute his wife and the cycle finally ends.

 

From this collection of tales emerged hundreds more, fiction set in the Middle East quick to borrow from the stories found within. Some of these like the Prince of Persia games and Disney’s animated film Aladdin are able to use the elements from this seminal work of Arabian fiction to build new enjoyable experiences, but for everyone who builds off the work of the past, there are those who plunder it to avoid having to do any creative work themselves. What’s more, some even go on to plunder the other works that grew out of the One Thousand and One Nights, and one such offender is none other than a game that would wear its inspiration’s name: Arabian Nights.

Arabian Nights’s stealing of the original works’s name is not only part of its lazy integration of elements common to Arabian fiction, but it makes the game a bit hard to look up. It’s not the only video game by the name, a 1993 Amiga title flagging the same searches to the point even the Wikipedia page currently has multiple false links for the 2001 PC title on the page for the older title. While this is something I will rectify after the publication of this review, it doesn’t change the fact that Youtube has many of these mix-ups as well, from incorrectly showing images of this game during videos meant to focus on Prince of Persia: Arabian Nights to having to sift through many children’s cartoon adaptations of the original story to find actual gameplay of the game.

 

Arabian Nights is hardly the kind of game you’d want to go digging for though. Built off the backs of whatever games and media had succeeded with the ideas it chose to adapt and yet not having the technical knowledge or creativity to bring these to life in a new way makes Silmarils’s game infamous for its shoddy design and unintentional comedy, at least within the circles that have managed to drudge up this otherwise forgettable title to lampoon its failures. Thanks to a friend who routinely sends me the worst titles he can find, I now find myself one of those people.

 

So now, please join me as we experience one of the worst ways to spend a night: a game that doesn’t even take place over multiple Arabian nights.

 

THE TALE OF ALI

Had King Shahryar been presented the plot of Arabian Nights in the original Arabian Nights story, it’s not likely Scheherazade would have kept her head for long. While One Thousand and One Nights is home to many ideas this game copies wholesale, it at least presented them within greater tales, while this game just rests on familiar elements and introduces only strange alterations to it that don’t help make this adventure any more interesting.

 

The game of course features a sultan completely oblivious to the machinations of his grand vizier, an obviously transparent villain who could be outed as villainous by most of the cast if they had a mind to and with letters to prove it as well. There are genies in the game, one blue because Aladdin is big and recognizable, but one is green instead perhaps to represent the fact he hosts a minigame where the screen becomes distorted in a way quick to inspire nausea. Ali, the game’s hero, is of course a pauper aiming to become a prince by marrying a princess, although he’s promised a full set of five here if he manages to complete his quest. If you started to make a bullet point list of elements typical of Middle Eastern Medieval stories, you’d end up making a list of what’s on offer here, but some cliche tales can rise above their recycled trappings to present interesting tales all the same.

 

Try and guess how this game did at that.

 

Arabian Nights’s single day of action is set into motion by the encroaching birthdays of all five of the sultan’s daughters. If they reach the age of 20 without being wed, they must be tossed out on the street for some reason, and conveniently, if the girls are out of the picture, the Grand Vizier would be next in line to become sultan. The girls all just so happen to disappear on the eve of their shared birthday, the incredibly obvious culprit ignored as instead the sultan sits around doing nothing and hopes that someone will locate his daughters wherever they might be.

Ali seems to be the only person trying, traveling across the definitely-not-Agrabah city of Akabha to battle the vizier’s allies and the cult they are members of, but there is a surprise twist to be found to this tale. At one point in the story, one of the princesses, who is perfectly healthy and could be easily returned to the palace, won’t move unless a man wins her heart with an impressive bouquet. To that end, you work with the palace gardener to get the appropriate flowers, and a cactus and fruit to go in the bouquet too for some reason. This character basically disappears after that, only to make a resurgence near the end and reveal himself as the true final boss and the man behind even the vizier’s plans. Turns out, this gardener was the sultan’s brother and was originally the sultan himself. The current sultan gained power by wishing upon a genie’s lamp, which is also how he got the five daughters with the same birthday. The gardener wants to usurp the current sultan, and even though we’re told we’re essentially supporting the illegitimate ruler, we brush past it because Ali really likes the idea of a five woman harem. Why hold the ruler accountable for wresting the power from his brother and sparking the revenge of the violent Black Moon Sect when you can just save the day and do magic carpet tricks after?

 

When it’s not cliche it’s failing at what it’s trying to do with the story, and things get pretty bad when it comes to the moments of comedy as well. It’s been said that a bad piece of media can be unintentionally funny, but a bad comedy ends up just miserable as its reliance on humor means things fall flat when they fail. Arabian Nights is thankfully not entirely dependent on its attempts at telling jokes, but they do crop up and it’s almost surprising to see what the game expects to get a laugh from. Stereotypes and ugly character models sort of exist in your direction, there’s a prolonged haggling scene where the punchline just seems to be that the haggling went on so long, and at the end of the game, it botches a joke about kissing the sultan pretty hard. Apparently the genie that changed the sultanate of Akabha so much also enchanted the sultan and his daughters to teleport back to the palace any time they kiss someone outside of wedlock, and while this is a great way to skip escorting his daughters back to the sultan, when you save him after his sudden end game kidnapping, Ali needs to kiss him. After the sultan quite nicely says he understands if it makes Ali uncomfortable, Ali plants a peck on the ruler and the punchline to the build-up of the awkward kiss is Ali saying “Oo, prickly!” in reference to the sultan’s beard. The build-up is there for something to be done, but the joke told is pretty much only going to amuse a young child at best with how tame and weak the payoff and delivery are. There is a part where Ali needs to mimic a dancing princess and they do some very wild moves during it, but the awful construction of other moments of comedy make me unsure if this was meant to be funny at all, and it’s perhaps the game’s best comedic moment!

Thankfully, the moments of failed humor can be easily brushed aside in favor of the parts where the game’s failures bring the laughs instead. I won’t criticize the game’s graphics for their overall design, they were struggling against the same limitations of the time where you couldn’t really make realistic humans yet and character faces were often flat textures on large polygons. I can, however, tell you to point and laugh at how many ways the game screws up its visuals even when you make such allowances. As soon as you turn the game on and get past the company logos, you see a bellydancing woman who immediately puts her hand through her forehead during the dance, and this isn’t the only instance of awful bellydancing found in the game.

Fountains of illusions will let you see the princesses dance, and while sometimes you get some exposition while you watch them flail about in failed attempts to be sexy with their PlayStation 1 era graphics, these can have unusual problems as well. Melissa, the blonde princess who doesn’t match the game’s setting at all, can be viewed in one of these fountains, where she starts off crying but gets up quickly to do the dance before sitting back down to cry. Other instances of these are pure cheesecake so we can’t try and give them credit by saying maybe Melissa was forced to dance here and was sad for it, especially since the game ends with a very awkward moment of Ali spinning in place as all five princesses flail and head bang at him while chanting the same compliments to their savior. This rotating camera is also used to make Melissa asking for help by letter at the start of the game unnecessarily nauseating, although camera problems are pretty much a constant in both cutscenes and regular play.

 

Some of the bellydancing women also encounter a common graphical glitch. While compatibility issues might be causing it, I did try different settings and reinstallations to fix problems, but it seems like some women, as I played, would sometimes just have gaping holes in their head so you can see right through them. Trying to confirm that this graphical problem might exist for others by watching videos of the game on Youtube, I instead found other people with their own unique problems like characters flickering in and out of existence or the sky loading in only half of the correct texture. There are guaranteed problems with character faces though, mainly Ali’s, which is asked to emote even though his features are an immovable texture.

To try and give him reactions to certain moments, the developers smear his face around like clay to try and give him a smirk or eyebrow quirk, and while him reacting to certain situations is meant to be funny, it’s clearly not meant to be because it looks so bad. There’s a part where the game shows off its awful modelling skills as well, because when you need to take a camel to a cave, the developers concoct a reason why its legs look so bad and try to weave it as in-game lore. The short-legged camel story seems like just an explanation to cover up the fact they couldn’t get the Dromedary’s knobbly kneed stilts to look good in the game’s graphical style, and here we get the only case where something is probably meant to be funny and is, but only because the player will probably see through the veneer that this design was done for a joke.

I won’t pick apart graphical issues for too long though. After all, just a few years before this game’s release people were ogling Lara Croft despite Tomb Raider’s graphics being even worse… but speaking of Tomb Raider, it’s probably time to move onto the gameplay, which, like the plot, is built off of other people’s ideas but does them even worse!

 

JUMPING

An entire header just for jumping? Yes. Even in an amazing platforming title, discussing the jumping alone probably couldn’t sustain the longest of analysis before the writer and reader would want to move on to deeper subjects, but the jumping is such a key part of what makes Arabian Nights utterly awful. I had feared this game might not be as bad as its reputation might suggest until I got to experience its jumping mechanics, and they’re a constant woe all throughout the game’s seven episode structure.

 

The first problem is doing the kind of jump you want to do at all. Ali basically has three styles of jump, one being almost completely pointless. If you jump without pressing any directions, he’ll hop in place, but it provides almost no height and doesn’t really help with level traversal. It is part of a giant slide puzzle you need to complete at the end of the game, the adventure making sure its climax is interrupted by the boring tedium of moving large tiles around to make a picture, but almost any other case where you might jump in place is better handled by getting a running start. This is exemplified most by the constant issues with ledges. If you approach a wall and want to climb up the ledge, there are merciful moments where you need only press forward to make Ali climb. However, if you want to get up on it and it’s too high to reach, you can’t just jump while standing right below it. You’ll need some forward movement to grab onto that ledge, and if you’re moving a certain way, Ali decides he’d rather tuck and jump instead of leap up. The tuck and jump is inferior to the other jumping options in both height and distance, meaning he might not be able to grab ledges you need to reach, and for long pits, sometimes you are left hoping that he’ll do his superior aerial corkscrew instead because a tuck and jump will just make you drop to your doom.

Sometimes you need to shuffle along a ledge as you hang onto its side, and here we hit another problem with the jumping. First you need to make sure you actually have the proper jump that will grab the ledge, then you need to make sure you don’t accidentally pull yourself up, which is executed by holding the jump key and forward. You need to hold the jump key to grab the ledge and hold forward to do a jump that can even grab it properly, so it’s easy to pull yourself up by accident and need to drop down to try and grab that ledge again. These ledge grab moments are much rarer than the bigger problem with pulling yourself up on ledges though. This game with awful unreliable jumps where the tuck and roll and corkscrew can’t be pulled off perfectly on cue… has precision jumping moments, sometimes with a limited time to even make the jumps! For the leaps between small platforms, you pretty much have to hold forward and jump in case you fall short with the tuck and jump and need to grab the edge of the destination, and if you release the jump you’ll drop down to your death. Once you get up though, you’ll be still holding the necessary keys to get yourself up most likely, and you’ll run or leap to your death. If you do make that jump perfectly instead though, holding the keys as the insurance policy can instead send you running or leaping to your immediate doom, so the precision platforming in Arabian Nights ends up being all about trying to react immediately before Ali throws himself to his death one way or another.

 

The game will chain multiple instances of jumps that must be done perfectly together, killing you for any mistake. Some areas just have a deadly drop, others will put instant death hazards all around to land in instead, and the sewers decide to still punish you if you land in the seemingly safe water by poisoning you instead. What’s worse, even when you’re not leaping over something that looks deadly, the fall damage in Arabian Nights is ridiculous. Ali can handle a drop of about his height, but once you get higher than that, the margins for a bit of damage to instantly lethal are practically impossible to gauge, and the game does feature moments where you are intended to drop down from a great height to enter a new area, anything less than full health causing an immediate death. Health items are surprisingly abundant so you can’t fault the game for that, but providing an accommodation for an awful part of design is not going to make the game’s constant reliance on jumping any better.

 

Tangentially related to jumping is of course the walking, and since the game uses the keyboard for movement, there isn’t the room for subtle adjustments. You do control where you’re looking with the mouse and this can both help and harm since Ali will stay locked locking in the direction you last leave your mouse while you busy your hands with keyboard controls, but sometimes its the only way to make Ali actually walk safely across something thin. There are ropes where the game turns things into a brief bit of a balancing act, but other moments it wants you to walk across small surfaces like a pipe and Ali’s movements can all too easily send him forward too much and plummeting to, you guessed it, another death. Much like the problems with overcompensating your jumps because undercompensation leads to death, fiddling with your touchy movement never feels like a legitimate challenge but instead a limitation caused by bad controls, and even though you can rebind your keys and definitely should since the game sets many useful abilities to the F keys, you’ll never feel like Ali is fully under your control.

The F keys do hold two buttons though that, without their presence, would make this game even more excruciating and possibly impossible for some players. While you can save at any time, opening the menu to do so is a bit of a chore. By pressing F5 though, you can quicksave, and with F6 as quick load, you can finally survive the awful platforming moments and properly account for the fact that many jumps will take three or so deaths before they go your way. While savescumming is a practice generally frowned upon since it interrupts the game’s flow to constantly save and reload for any little error, the little errors here lead to Ali’s unusual death where his body parts take turns exploding before you’re thrown back to the main menu to see the rotating background that spoils every character in the game, including intended surprises like the gorgon boss. The cursor on the menu even starts on new game just to trip you up after a death, but somehow I never managed to hit it even after needing to reload hundreds of times.

 

Because the jumping is so often pass/fail with a heavy leaning towards failure, pressing F5 as an insurance policy becomes more important than buttons that relate to elements like combat and interaction with the world. You’ll still want more permanent saves though in case you accidentally quick save in a doomed situation. As said earlier though, accommodations like these can’t rectify the fact that jumping is always annoying despite being a frequent requirement, but Arabian Nights isn’t actually a platformer despite its reliance on jumping. It’s technically an action-adventure game, and you can bet it messes that up as well.

 

BAD BATTLES IN BAD PLACES

Combat is a constant presence in Arabian Nights, and while you can make fighting tolerable in some games just by having one simple reliable attack like Mega Man’s buster shots or the simple whip snap of a Belmont in Castlevania, Arabian Nights decides to overcomplicate its battles by having your basic sword swipe sort of do its own thing.

 

Before we address the problems with the sword, technically I should mention that Ali can fight with his fists and feet, the melee attacks much weaker, slow and unreliable, and pretty much only ever used if you accidentally forgot to take your sword out after you did something that required putting it away like climbing a ladder. With the sword out, you pretty much slash and pray for most fights, enemies defending as they please, some even quickly jumping out of the attack path while Ali still needs to resolve the animations of the attack inputs so they can get free hits on you. The closest thing to strategy a battle may entail is defending from attacks, but the enemies sort of strike when they please so you’re not really opening up a foe by trying to search for a pattern or opening. These wild sword swinging fiestas are made even worse when there are multiple enemies in the area. The game’s tutorial doesn’t even wait for you to have your bearings before it’s already showing the worst it has to offer, tossing three enemies all at once at you so you can get used to the experience of being surrounded and hoping the hit detection allows you to score extra hits on the people closed in around you. Sometimes these crowds will have people supporting them from afar like archers and knife-throwers whose attacks are practically invisible so you can only locate the source if you see their missed shots.

Swinging wildly can win you smaller fights, but while most of the game’s enemies are bandits, guards, and other humans on the same level as you, there are foes who are low to the ground like scorpions, snakes, and… men with no lower half who push themselves around on little boards, wield two hammers, and call out “I’M GONNA SMASH YOU” in the same silly voice you’d use when pretending to be a monster while playing with a toddler. Most of your regular sword swings are sort of wild ones that aren’t guaranteed to go where you want and can sometimes start carrying you in a direction away from the fight if you do them too quickly in succession, but you also have a downward swipe that is the only way to hurt these baddies with your blade. If you’re standing completely still and aiming your view downwards properly you can usually do this motion reliably, but if you’re fighting other enemies or in a situation where you don’t want to just stand still as a scorpion approaches you, you can’t really pull off that attack and can end up taking damage because your attacks are all set to one button but dependent on weird factors.

 

 

There are other ways to kill enemies though, such as God’s gift to dealing with trouble: knives. While you can’t hurl these in a fight because getting attacked will cause you to drop anything you’re using, if a foe is far away you can nail them with these little daggers to sometimes score an easy kill. Emphasis on the sometimes, because the knives not only bend a little to gravity, but they can easily get stuck in invisible level geometry such as the space beside a pillar or above a fence that seems like the knife should just pass through. Finding hovering knives in the air isn’t a rarity because of this poor detection, but with F5 you can spare yourself from losing too many knives to the unpredictable issues.

The knives do tie into the more unusual errors I encountered during Arabian Nights though. Again, it’s hard to tell how universal a glitch can be in a game that falls apart in different ways on different systems, but one egregious problem emerged in the palace garden when I wanted to eliminate an archer and baboon from afar. I hurled the knife at them, and while it inevitably took a few tries to get around detection issues, when they did hit… an error screen appeared, the game unable to resolve the interaction. I had seen this screen before though and would see it again after. Failures to load the roars of a lizardman boss made it appear and one of the bellydancing scenes had it crop up repeatedly for reasons I’m still unsure of, but because the game couldn’t resolve the action, the archer and baboon were still there after I pressed enter to exit the error screen. These knives, which could kill an enormous subterranean crocodile boss who packs instant kill attacks with just three successful hits, would not ever be able to kill these two enemies due to the coding get confused by the situation. Many bosses are pretty underwhelming though, such as a tiger who is bigged up by the fight’s start being the cliffhanger of one episode only for the next episode to start with the only swordfight in the game that feels like it follows the pattern of defend and attack properly and is thus much easier for it.

Bombs are another tool you get for use in battle, these dealing more damage but are much harder to toss where you want them to go. Many tough enemies like the reptilian guards can be overcome by just tossing in a bomb and running since most enemies are really slow, and for bosses like the lizardman captain you can glitch him into walking in place as you hurl bombs at him and throw knives until he dies. Magic is definitely your best weapon all things considered, partially because of its flexibility and partially because magic refills are easier to find and preserve than knives. When a knife isn’t hitting an object properly or you want to deal heavy damage, get out of enemy range and start hurling fireballs. In fact, the fireball is the only reason the archer and baboon were eventually dealt with, although the fireball can hit invisible barriers as well. However, it also flies in a weird swirling way that both lets it sometimes get around the problem and other times make it less accurate. It’s still good to have another projectile alternative, and since most of the other magic spells you get are useless, it’s not painful to keep spending mana on the weakest fireball that still kills many enemies without the charge.

 

Many areas of the game have magic rings that give you extra power for a spell or new abilities, but so few of these really help outside the fireball and the magic shield. The shield is practically required for some late game bosses unless you want to spend a lot of knives and mana fighting them. The wizard, for example, will electrocute you any time your sword hits him unless its up, the magic shield allowing you to completely ignore the powers of the vizier and evil gardener, and if you do get tired and just want to run past a bunch of baddies, you can put it up and hope there isn’t a roadblock preventing the strategy from working.

 

Unfortunately, the game is pretty big on its roadblocks.

 

Levels are confusing messes of unclear objectives with many doors and strange geometry. Things do look close enough to believable if we are being extremely generous, but the problem is many areas have plenty of false doors that look like the regular doors but also feature doors that you can’t even attempt to open until you have the right key. You won’t know these doors are necessary to pass through, you won’t know which key is the right one, and the game gives you plenty of unlabelled generic keys over the course of the adventure that don’t disappear from your inventory. Your inventory is bound to get cluttered over time, and while you can dump things from it, tossing out some of the identical keys seems risky and it’s hard to tell what might have value later. The Tomb Key starts off useful for its episode but then never comes up again, but the Flute, which seems like it would be similar in its limited importance, suddenly crops up again in later areas. Your healing items usually cluster near the front automatically at least and freshly acquired impotant items appear towards the back, but unless you already know the game’s course of events, you’ll inevitably be lugging around a lot of useless stuff.

 

Some letters do give you clues on what needs to be done next, but there are plenty of areas where an unexpected random door leads to the path forward. Even worse though are cases where, instead of a random key being required, you need to search the sometimes detailed walls or twisted areas for a nearly imperceptible rectangular button on the wall that will reveal the way forward. Too many times it will feel like there’s no way out until you luck out and spot the button on the wall or absolutely tiny item on the floor that is needed to progress. Sometimes the game instead relies on puzzles as a way of gating progress, and some of these could work in a better game. There’s a part where you weave your way through hallways, hitting pressure plates as you go to open gates for a limited time. You need to jump at times in this area though, which coupled with the sometimes awkward movement requirements makes this drag on more than it should. Other points include just deciphering a riddle like the order to play some bongos or where a secret switch might be… and sometimes you’re just meant to intuit that the cutscene you need to trigger requires you to jump down the hole in the executioner’s stand where the heads usually drop through.

There are many moments you are sort of flying blind, and these are even worse in the city where you are often meant to jump onto rooftops where it’s unclear where the game actually wants you to climb up. Some rooftop runs lead nowhere, others put you at constant risk of dropping to your doom or even making it look like you’re meant to make a jump only to learn you can’t stand on or grab onto the destination, and sometimes you can even climb out of where the city is even textured. It’s all too easy in some areas to climb right out of the city and jump into the abyss, and even if you aren’t just bumbling around in hopes of finding the way onward it’s pretty easy to encounter poorly structured level design where you can stand on random parts of the side of a flat wall or see through the seams in the level. There are even parts where climbing up to these high areas or on top of walls are used to get to the right areas or items, but at least those are better than moments like the valve puzzle where you just kind of mess around with the states of the water valves until it eventually ends up being the right solution by chance. You aren’t even told the goal of the portion so you can’t guide the water intelligently, but eventually a flower sprouts up that hearsay tells me you could have just made appear by pressing the right keyboard button when near it instead. Rebinding my keys to be more natural meant I couldn’t repeat it, but shoddy design and programming give me no reason to doubt the claim either, especially when I have seen a small bit of evidence supporting it.

 

See, there are some people who still play Arabian Nights very often and even enjoy it despite its issues. Why, you ask? Well, the game does have good music, appropriate to the setting and even containing some memorable tunes that I wish I could share but the Google issues of the game name mean I have not found the music online anywhere. However, while that is the one area I will say is undoubtedly good about the game, a certain type of people who don’t need a game to be good to enjoy it have found a place where Arabian Nights can be enjoyed. The best way to experience Arabian Nights is not as intended… but by way of speedrunning.

 

A DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH?

Speedrunners are always pushing against a game’s design as much as possible to try and shave even a few seconds off the minimum time it takes to complete the game. Even the best and most popular speed games like Super Mario 64, Celeste, and Super Metroid are all pushed to their breaking point in the search of reducing the time it takes to finish them, and while you may never encounter a glitch in your regular playthroughs of these titles, speedrunners will do whatever it takes to speed things up and thus can do some incredibly unusual actions to trigger unexpected results.

 

So, what happens when, instead of pushing against a well designed game to find the small errors that can help you, you take a very glitchy game and exploit every problem that ruins the regular play? You can shear away hours and hours of play and reloading saves and finish the game in around 40 minutes.

 

Arabian Nights, when played by a speedrunner, is no longer an aimless mess with awful combat and jumps that will constantly lead to your doom. Many runners of the game have no idea what’s going on in the plot, how to solve the puzzles, or won’t even know the intended actions of certain episodes. That’s because the problems in Arabian Nights are so numerous you can skip many of these easily so long as you know the right exploits. In fact, these exploits are so numerous you almost never need to stand and fight a foe in a fair battle, the players often doing the only required fights by standing outside of the level and attacking from where they can’t be reached.

Since it’s so easy to exit the level geometry even when you’re not trying, speedrunners have found out how to do so deliberately, reliably, and constantly. Ali’s awful jump becomes a blessing as almost anywhere you can glitch it out so he can hop around in the air and find his way outside of the level, and while dropping is usually deadly, if you break through the walls and floors because their collision is poorly programmed, you can drop down to the level exit in many cases without taking that damage for some reason. Entire long slow segments of the game don’t even show their face in a decent Arabian Nights speedrun because they can be circumvented if you know the right tricks.

 

The speedrunning side of Arabian Nights is how I actually first heard of the game, but I did not look into it or attempt any of its tricks in my playthrough. I encountered many glitches on my own without trying to find them though, passing through floors and walls usually without any beneficial results, but I was scraping up against the tools people can use to completely break the game over their knee. I was definitely tempted at times to just cave and look up these skips because of some obnoxious area in the game wearing down my patience, but I did stick with the adventure and saw what the developers actually intended for you to do. It’s not really fair to judge a game based on how a small subset of people managed to create their own fun out of it though. Any game could be enjoyed if the right mindset is applied to it, and there are still definitely better and more interesting speedruns out there as well as games that actively encourage it. This accidental angle of interest is like buying a bed that falls apart as soon as you sleep in it but the screws that fell out were just what you needed to complete a personal project. I’m a person who enjoys playing awful games because of the fascinating ways you have to work around the failures of design, but I wouldn’t ever say a game that I enjoyed because of its faults was good for it. What’s more, even the worst games still have their fans among people with unusual standards. Arabian Nights may have found a second life with people looking to get something out of it, but they did so by resisting the game’s design and its intended path, exploiting the aspects of the game that stem from elements that otherwise make progress miserable.

 

Also, there seem to be less than ten people really running the game, so despite that unusual potential, even here Arabian Nights can’t find a supportive audience.

 

THE END OF THE NIGHT

Arabian Nights does haven’t a single original bone in its body. When it’s not able to rely on ideas taken from contemporary action games or the tropes tied to its setting, it continuously fails to properly execute anything it attempts. The comedy constantly fails to amuse, the locations are confusing messes with barely any guidance on the right way forward, the combat is a crap shoot, and the game all hangs on the fact that quick save allows you to survive the many inevitable unexpected deaths as you struggle to get your jumps right for the many moments where you’ll die if the game’s controls aren’t working in your favor. Excruciating at times and creatively barren, this glitchy game is just as lost on what it can do to entertain as the player is lost in its slapdash set of seven episodes.

 

…but it has good music. And since that is the one area I can undeniably praise, disregarding the surprise success of it in a community looking for glitchy messes to take advantage of, I figure it is only fair to be in the spirit of Arabian Nights for the conclusion of this look at the game’s quality. If Arabian Nights is going to lift so much from other works and rely on that name recognition to slip into the hands of potential buyers, I’ll go and take something from some similar media set in the medieval Middle East that uses the same name but retool it to my own purposes. It won’t be as good as the original and will definitely have some problems since I’m about to alter a song even though I have little musical talent, but to sum up the issues with Arabian Nights, I present to you the song Arabian Nights from Disney’s Aladdin but with some new lyrics…

Silmarils made a game, wearing a stolen name
Where Ali must save Akabha
But he fights like a chump
And he has the worst jumps
It’s awful! Controls, to blame