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Review
A linear story where your choices build stats to a big ending branch can be very effective in the right hands. But this one is poorly handled in a number of ways that make it hard to recommend, especially at this length.
I played this three times and then looked at the source code to see if that changed my opinion of the piece (it only reinforced it). It's sort of a morality test wrapped in a 170K-word tome of a novel that's rebelling against Hollywood presentations of the Arthur legend. Are you willing to agree with the true meaning of life and death as propounded by author self-insert character Merlin?
The misogyny and misanthropy is constant - the first time (Spoiler - click to show)rape comes up, after the enemies let the women go, their own king still doesn't give them a break; he has to immediately drag them to Camelot so they can personally tell Arthur (Spoiler - click to show)(no, don't hesitate, "TELL HIM!") how many times they were raped and how awful it was.
Even Arthur mainly exists as someone for Merlin to browbeat (er, "instruct by the Socratic method"?). At one point a 7-year-old girl dies, you can't take it so you flee the cottage, only for Merlin to show up to yell at you for your feelings and tell you that "[Death] does not contribute to the significance of a person's life. It is the conclusion of that person's life story, and is significant only as that conclusion."
And in turn Arthur is constantly looking down on the people around him. He does often have the choice to be outwardly supportive, but he still usually has a condescending inner monologue going on.
It's written "in normal American English, not Hollywood medieval English" but laced with a heavy dose of the author's preferred medievalisms. The writing is repetitive and very much on the surface, not leaving much to the subtext. For me these things added up to an affected quality that I found hard to ignore. And the characterization is somewhat inconsistent: for instance Arthur reverts from competent hands-on boss to wide-eyed naïf who's never seen a roof thatched whenever a lecture on Medieval Life 101 comes up.
The author's choice to try and force players to stick with it by obscuring the point of the work ("if you bail out before the end, you'll miss the whole point of the work. That's because good stories pull the pieces together at the end") means your choices get very little narrative feedback. Someone brings you a dilemma, you grumble and handle it, get a sentence saying who's mad at you (you already knew they would be), then it jumps days or months or years to the next scene. So it's hard to care about your choices as part of the story: they're clearly just stacking up points toward/against "did you make the choices you were supposed to?"
Later on it does pull together into a dramatically tragic ending as you'd expect for an Arthur story, but by the time you're 100K words in you've probably lost most players. And all three of the endings somewhat spoil the drama by putting too much emphasis on Merlin's heavy-handed agenda.
