King Arthur II - An Hour @ RPS

Rock, Paper, Shotgun spent An Hour With King Arthur II, which was recently released on Steam and other digital vendors. Here's a snip:

I knew almost nothing of it going in, so I wasn’t expecting the roleplaying element to be in the form of a choose your own adventure book. Between Total Waresque battles, you’ll explore plague-ridden villages and demon-infested dungeons and make consequence-fatted decisions about how to handle the situations you encounter, leaving a trail of human triumph or tragedy in the wake of your attempts to best aid the land as a whole. If Commander Shepherd was the son of a King, was tailed at all times by a huge army and never left the British isles, (s)he’d be this guy. Except you see none of these grand tales of monster-troubling and (optional) peasant genocide.

Instead, you’re presented with oddly small text boxes, with a selection of decisions that usually bear an icon hinting what sort of alignment and faith (and thus eventual perks) they’re likely to nudge you towards, and that’s about it. I’m in two minds: the sleazy graphics whore mind thinks ‘but that’s not very exciting, is it?’, while the shrivelled mind that still remembers how to read, think and imagine offers ‘you are actually reading this stuff, thinking about how it affects your sense of right and wrong and who’s going to profit or suffer as a result of it, rather than just clicking through it. Go you!’