Return of the Sword

The legends surrounding King Arthur loomed large to the medieval mind: as the so-called “matter of Britain”, they made up one of the three primary literary canons of the Christian world, using an idealized world of chivalry to reflect on humanity’s weaknesses and the pursuit of the divine. Today, of course, the social milieu of the original stories is quite foreign to us, but there’s still a fascination in the tragic fall of Camelot, a mythic frisson from coming close to a strand of culture that’s so old, and meant so much. So I was excited to learn that the eponymous blade in Return of the Sword is Excalibur; your nameless protagonist is tasked with recovering it and returning it to the Lady of the Lake, tying off a loose end in (some versions of) the myths and participating in the cycle of death and renewal to which they allude.

I was less excited that I didn’t learn this from the blurb or intro text of the game, though, but rather by reading an unprepossessing letter that was in my starting inventory; you need to check out the optional lore documents to reveal that the artifact you’d been commissioned to find for the batty coot who hired you is fricking Excalibur! Said coot, the memorably-named Jedediah Strangeblossom, gives you the job because you did a solid for his friend, who’s got the still more implausible name Ezekial Throgmeister: this, I think, is a reference to the author’s 2022 IF Comp entry, The Alchemist, and in fact Return of the Sword shares more than a few similarities to that and other games he’s made. It’s written in the author’s custom system, for one thing – it’s retro-looking but fairly solid, with a robust parser, some nice though unnecessary bells and whistles like custom macros, and one longstanding foible which is that you need to take items out of containers before you can examine or otherwise interact with them. For another, it boasts a magic system that seems a close cousin of the one from 2023’s Have Orb, Will Travel, aping not just the memorize-from-spellbook-then-cast system but even the names of particular spells. The structure also echoes the hub-and-spokes designs of those other games – here there’s an underground chamber with a dial that allows you to pick one of five different standard adventure-game settings to teleport to (a castle, a cave, a church…) once you unlock each with a different plot-token coin. And the puzzles, which are a mix of codes, object manipulation, and spell-casting, are all old-school in design but vary from bluntly telegraphed to fiendishly recondite, just as in those previous entries in the loose series.

While I generally had a good time with the Alchemist, and thought there were some high points in Have Orb, Will Travel, Return of the Sword worked less well for me. Some of this, I think, could just be familiarity breeding contempt – there’s a charm in the author’s sensibility, but it’s not my favorite aesthetic, and even for those who enjoy this stuff more, surely just referencing Adventure’s Witt’s End without an accompanying joke or subversion feels pretty stale. Some of it could be the puzzle design, which wrong-footed me enough times – as with the pin that’s clearly meant to attach two wheels, but which won’t work unless you use trial and error to rotate the wheel into the single configuration where it’ll fit, with no clues provided or even an indication of what exactly is going wrong – that I probably wound up overusing the hint system even for solvable conundrums. And some of it is surely due to the game’s general unpolished and loosely-designed vibe: there are unmarked exits, parser oddities I don’t remember in the author’s previous games (UNLOCK DOOR WITH KEY indicates it doesn’t fit, but simply UNLOCK DOOR opens it up in a jiffy), two of the four spells in your spellbook appear to be useless, and there’s a room that includes an “escritore” as part of its furnishings but of course no such thing is implemented, it’s just a typo for “escritoire.”

The biggest issue I had with it, though, is the way it squanders what could have been a compelling, elegiac premise. The cavalierness indicated by putting the backstory in a missable infodump continues to the game’s kitchen-sink fantasy milieu: besides the aforementioned Colossal Cave easter egg, you find a complex electronic scale system in a clergyman’s vestry, solve a riddle straight out of Tolkein, and have as your key nemesis not Mordred or Morgana, but instead a Hammer Films vampire. Far from being an Arthurian game, that’s just one of a dozen flavors sprinkled over the staid gameplay, with little concern for cohesion apparent anywhere. The overall effect is of an overcaffeinated teenager running a marathon DnD game for their friends – they’ve long since outpaced their prep, so now they’re just throwing any nerdy stuff they can think of into the pot. In fairness, that’s not too far off of how the Arthur stories got their start, with a variety of authors taking the basic story framework and adding various bits of previously-independent legends to create enough unmotivated crossovers, dubious retcons, and long-delayed sequels to rival the MCU. But even at their bouillabaissiest, effective writers in that tradition stuck to the key themes: this is just a mishmash, and the puzzles aren’t enough to save such a muddled narrative.