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'm still thinking about that. I think it succeeds in some ways and not so much in others.

If I approach the game on my terms, not its own, 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 aware of its place in the medium. My impression is that the author has stayed away from other developments in interactive fiction in an effort to arrive at an original solution, 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 easily be a Twine or Ink piece. In form, it would be in good company with Elvish For Goodbye and The Thirty Nine Steps but it's longer, closer to 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?
• Does it have a well-sketched setting?
• Is the plot compelling?
• Did I find the characters memorable?

Does the prose serve it well?

  Do I like this?
  Do I admire it?
  Did it give me something to think about?
  (Negative) Does it have enough bugs, typos, or other issues to distract from the experience?