Chris Crawford, 2023. Play online.
The first thing I noticed about this experience is that it comes wrapped in claims and disclaimers. Crawford calls Le Morte D'Arthur his magnum opus. He describes it as “an interactive storyworld with genuine artistic content.” He also says:
It's not a game. It's not interactive fiction. It's not a puzzle. It's not action-packed. It's not fun. If you're a gamer, you'll hate it and should not play it. If you like interactive fiction, you probably won't like it.
Having played to a satisfactory ending, I respectfully disagree with much of this skeptic-repellent. I am a gamer who enjoys interactive fiction, and I liked it just fine. It definitely is interactive fiction as I know it. It is action-packed, or at least adventure-full. We could quibble about “fun” but it is entertaining by design.
It's also clearly Art, in the sense that it's attempting to convey big ideas about leadership and purpose and meaning. I love work this ambitious. Is it good art? I think it is. Not so much an innovation in form, but a large, well-executed work that mostly realizes its ambition.
If I approach the game on my typical interactive fiction terms, not its own, it's a 9 out of 10 for me. Here's what I look for in interactive stories:
Are the interactions fun and/or consonant? Yes, quite so - sometimes both! The story presents a series of choices, and conversations; many of them “performative”in the sense that as a player you are adding color to the situation rather than steering the action. The story tracks some global traits so that you gradually shape the main character, and while the experience is largely linear it does branch a few times based on these traits. If I have a complaint about these choices, it is that sometimes they are too narrow - the story drifts back and forth a bit on how much control I have over the character of Arthur, and more than once I wished for other options.
Does it try something new (mechanically, narratively or thematically)? Or perhaps: Is this work aware of its place within the medium? Yes, I would grant this on the grounds of its thematic ambition and scale. But I would
not say it's self-aware about its place in the medium. My impression is that the author wants to discover a new evolutionary branch of interactive storytelling. It's almost disappointing, then, that this piece strikes me as downright
conventional by contemporary standards. This could be a Twine or Ink piece, or even a gamebook. In form, it would be in good company with
Elvish For Goodbye and
The Thirty Nine Steps but it's longer, closer to something like
Blue Lacuna; it's has the narrative ambition of
According to Cain or
Under the Cognomen of Edgar Allan Poe but is not puzzly like those works; it's less agentic than
Pentiment or
Disco Elysium but aspires to the worldbuilding and thematic resonance of those games.
Does it include quality-of-life features appropriate to its form and scale? It's got the most important ones. It autosaves, which is absolutely essential for a work of this length, and worked fine on my phone. The implementation and presentation are a little rough around the edges - there's a focus on content over form here. The pivot to video at the end didn't work well for me because my volume wasn't up, and it only has subtitles for one side of the conversation - I reloaded the page a few times trying to catch the beginning of the cutscene.
Does it have a well-sketched setting? Very much so! This low/no fantasy Britain is a distinctive take on a familiar setting, and serves the story well.
Is the plot compelling? Easily. Helping Arthur struggle to take care of his ragtag clan, lead effectively, drive out the Saxons and find meaning in life and death was engaging throughout.
Did I find the characters memorable? They are! There's a sizable cast of distinctive characters. It takes advantage of familiar tropes, while also feeling specific.
Does the prose serve it well? Well enough. I found it a bit uneven. Better than serviceable, but the prose itself doesn't rise to “memorable” like some of my favorite authors. It mixes faux-period terminology with casual modern language, and - for me - it clashed a bit. The other big issue is that it's perhaps too on-the-nose in the end - Merlin basically spells out the theme. There's precedent for that with this character - T.H. White did the same thing. On the other hand, the pace is good - there were some smart editing choices, loading up necessary context but moving briskly to the interesting decisions. Also many of the behaviors and interactions are well-observed. It's… unornamented. Plain by design.
Do I like this? Yes, I do!
Do I admire it? I guess I do. I admire what it is, but maybe not what it claims to be? The claims and disclaimers aren't doing this work any favors. It's impressive in scope, but seems pretty conventional when set alongside the most successful interactive narrative works of the last decade.
Did it give me something to think about? Sure, it's been stuck in my head for days. But as much because I'm curious about what it was trying to do, as because the actual themes of the game hit their mark.
(Negative) Does it have enough bugs, typos, or other issues to distract from the experience? No - there are a few rough edges, but nothing that really gets in its way. My biggest issue is that it doesn't do a little more for readability with font and page layout.
On its own terms - this is *not* a game, it's a new thing and it's Art and it will make you a better person - it might be less successful?
Are the interactions in this story fundamental to the theme? Or do they reinforce it? Are they necessary to get the player to engage with it?
I think we can argue that they do reinforce the theme. Both the player's agency and their lack of agency contribute to the idea that many of our pursuits in life boil down to pointless attempts to defeat death, but living a meaningful story might be the closest we can get to immortality. I think this theme could be explored in other media, but perhaps asking the player to actually make the choices helps them engage with the theme. But what of those players who choose to play Arthur as selfish, cold, vindictive? Is the story effectively guiding these players towards the same theme?
The conversations with Merlin seem like the most direct attempt to get the player to engage with the theme, but these are also the moments when I felt most constrained by the choices the game put in front of me. In the platonic “holodeck” version of this story, I imagine the reader is mostly railroaded through Arthur's adventures, but the Merlin encounters are more open-ended philosophical debates. I almost wished these would break the fourth wall a bit more and get into the player's head - they often question decisions that the player is railroaded into, rather than the player's choices. Not an easy thing to solve, but very much one of the challenges this work is trying to address!
So I'm not sure it breaks as much new ground as it wants to, but independent of any question of structural innovation, it is a towering addition to the field. I want it to get the digital equivalent of a finely-bound collector's edition, and a lot more readers.