The game, originally titled King Arthur: The Quest of The Fair Unknown, is based on Arthurian legends and uses a point-and-click interface. It has received largely negative reviews.

The Story Behind Chronicles of the Sword

The final game is contained on two discs and was released on February 23, 1996 in North America and on May 31, 1996 in Europe. According to Synthetic Dimensions, they have discovered "that there are few known facts, but plenty of mismatched half-truths, so the game sets out to detail a hitherto unheard part of the story." In a mid-1994 version of the game, as shown to the Edge magazine, the player character was the titular Fair Unknown (Gingalain), sent to a Welsh castle to rescue a queen. The game was advertised as using professional voice actors, but their names were not publicly disclosed.

The version publicly shown at the ECTS '95 was titled Chronicles of the Sword. Chronicles of the Sword was ported for the PlayStation because of the ownership of Psygnosis by Sony, and released in June 1996 in Europe and in November 1996 in North America. Upon reaching the castle, the player had to battle various enemies, including a giant serpent (here with a backstory related to the Questing Beast), a pair of mages, and a few undead skeletons (sword fights against an enormous snake and the skeletons are actually featured in the final version, towards the end of the game in Morgana's castle).

How Chronicles of the Sword Plays

Once in Morgana's castle, Gawain gets captured and is sentenced to death, but manages to escape after defeating a giant snake. She swears vengeance while he returns to Camelot as a hero to join the Order of the Round Table. It also includes a few action game elements in the form of simple combat sequences that are interactive only on the Regular difficulty level and are automated (shown as cutscenes) on the Easy setting.

The game, originally titled King Arthur: The Quest of The Fair Unknown, is based on Arthurian legends and uses a point-and-click interface. Merlin then handpicks Gawain to be instrument of Morgana's destruction. With the ring on, Gawain finally goes off on the journey to rid the world of Morgana, who has hidden in a forbidding fortress on the island of Lyonesse.

Why Players Still Load It Up

PC Zone called it a game of "a couple of nice puzzles and some lovely graphics - but little else," as the story "is dull, consisting of some medieval stereotypes presented in a fancily-rendered environment." T. Bob Strauss wrote in a 1996 review in Entertainment Weekly that Gawain "moves with all the speed and vitality of a knight in a 500-pound suit of armor" and the "jerky computer-animated characters might have looked impressive a decade ago." According to Game Informer, "not only are the graphics completely lame, but the character interface is slow and boring." Several reviews especially criticised the "pixel hunting" aspect of the gameplay (forcing the player to examine all of the screen while looking for something to interact with). Game Informer, whose review stated that "point and click adventures don't get much worse than this [...] two disc menace," even gave the PlayStation version an award for the worst video game of 1997.

Liam McDonald of PC Gamer wrote: "Synthetic Dimensions has created some of the best-looking visuals yet seen in a traditional adventure game, but they forget to put a meaningful story and game into them. But the positive features only manage to distract you from the fact that the game is confusing, frustrating and—worst of all—excruciatingly dull." Art Angel of GamePro described it as "so slow it should have been a simple animated movie." While he praised the voice acting and the clean cinematics, he remarked that the player character's slow movements and the excessive precision required in the point-and-clicking make the game dull to the point of being almost unplayable. Some international reviews were more positive, like in the cases of Germany's PC Games, Spain's PCmania, and Serbia's Svet Kompjutera, who gave it unusually good ratings of 74%, 88%, and 79%, respectively.

Chronicles of the Sword — Frequently Asked Questions