elements, most notably the richly detailed background art and the excellent musical score. 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. 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. 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. Visually and aurally, it’s top-notch, but it doesn’t measure up where it counts: content." Some reviews lambasted even the game's visuals. 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). In Computer Gaming World, Scorpia called it "a mediocre product at best" and added that "anyone waning a taste of the real thing is better off reading Le Mort d'Arthur. NowGamer gave the PlayStation version the final verdict of "dull and painfully S-L-O-W." Internationally, the game's reception was less negative, but its review scores were still mostly average, including 3/5 in Génération4 in France, 50% from Gambler, 60% from Secret Service and 65% from Świat Gier Komputerowych in Poland, and three out of five stars in PC Player and 61% from Videogames in Germany. 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. References External links Chronicles of the Sword at