VR Gaming

Published on February 2nd, 2025 | by Nay Clark

Fitness Fables Review (Quest)

Workout as you work out how to save a magical kingdom from falling apart! Fitness Fables is a fitness and sports game on Meta Quest developed and published by Immersion Games and released on January 30th of 2025. The game combines exercising with an immersive world and narrative that keeps you pushing through the activities it tasks you to do. There are a lot of fitness focused games that require a lot of physical activity like Dance Dance Revolution, Just Dance, Beat Saber, and Ring Fit Adventure. You can get a good workout by playing most VR games in general since they involve a lot of moving in your actual environment, but once you get tired, it’s easy to just stop playing and come back to it later. Fitness Fables takes this to the next level and using the experience Immersion Games has within the VR space, they have successfully created an addicting and fun way to keep you exercising.

The magical world of Alterterra is in danger. Magic is being displaced causing rifts to pop up in all of the different regions. The disarray in the fundamentals of how the world works has also corrupted the Guardians that rule and take care of the lands. Join the Magic Academy to help fix everything by using the Mirror Crystal, an artifact that converts your physical energy into magical energy. With the help of a blue sprite named Elara that guides you on your journey, you must squat, duck, and swing your way through 5 different biomes to save the planet from destruction.

The overall narrative is a great motivator that helps you push your limits even further. As someone that struggles with staying focused while exercising, Fitness Fables turned out to be the perfect game for me since the fascinating world is so captivating and inviting that I wanted to keep playing to not only gather collectibles, but to see how many calories I could burn. After finally stopping to rest after a long gaming/exercising session, I always looked forward to jumping back in again to see if I could outdo my past performance.

You start off by putting all of your personal info into the system, like your height, so the game can calculate your personal journey in the specific way it needs to. You can choose between light, moderate, or intense workouts as well as easy, medium, and hard difficulty. The game also gives you a recommendation based on the info you gave it about yourself, but you can still choose whatever you want. If the game gets too hard or too easy, you can always go into the settings and change them whenever you want. There is the main adventure mode to play that tells the story, daily challenges you can complete, a training mode you can do to practice specific workouts, and you can also look at your stats like distance travelled, calories burned, levels completed, time spent fighting bosses, and achievements.

Fitness Fables has 80 levels, including bonus levels and boss battles, across 5 beautiful and varying areas. You’ll be ducking under fallen trees in the woodlands of Terragon, paddling through the waters of Aquarion, and boxing through the volcanic land of Ignis Prime. You are stationed on a hover machine and it moves forward through the level while you do the different exercises that the panel tells you to do. Not doing the exercise correctly will keep you immobile and while there are ways to cheese some of the movements to keep you in motion on the set track, Elara will mention that doing the exercises correctly will net you a nice speed boost and it also adds to your combo multiplier. The better you do the exercises, the more magic is generated.

The workouts that the game has you doing feel really good and are intuitive during combat with the bosses. Gliding on skis feels very natural to move forward and rowing through rivers feels just as instinctive, but the game gets more intense with the motions during exercises like rotating individual wheels with each of your hands or making a flapping motion with your arms to glide and keep aloft. The levels feel long since you are constantly moving and getting more tired after each checkpoint, but the overall allure and charm of the game makes it feel like you are having fun rather than having to complete the fatiguing chore of staying in shape. There are collectible magic orbs that you can reach out for while you are in the middle of your exercises that unlock bonus levels if you’re up for a challenge. You also may need to stop to take down flying bird enemies that try to nab the collectibles and soar away with them, encouraging you to complete the exercises accurately in order to stop them.

Sometimes you’ll come up to a stone door that you need to get through by weaving and boxing to create magic that will thrust it open or you might have to shoot enemies down by simulating the gestures of using a bow and arrow. Fitness Fables does a good job at keeping things fresh and working out different portions of your body. You can choose which exercise you want to do during the different phases of the boss battles with the Guardians which I found to be a good idea. Instead of forcing you into doing an exercise you may not be the best at, it’s nice that the game allows you to pick what you want to do during these fights that adds an extra layer to the gameplay. Not only are you worried about completing the exercises correctly, but you also have to worry about the boss’s health as well as your health.

The game has a nice animated quality to it that is really impressive. The world feels like a living and breathing place due to all of the bright colors and radiant shine the levels have. The design of the bosses are really clean and I wish the game had an artbook so I could admire their design more in depth. The music easily draws you in with its magical sounding tunes and different audio cues for executing an exercise correctly or incorrectly are effective. The voice acting of Elara is memorable as she is incredibly inspiring and stays in a good mood.

I did have a few problems with some of the exercises during my time playing. The boxing exercise simply didn’t work for me. It seemed as if my hits were not connecting at all. It was disappointing since that feels like the most contactual workout and it just wasn’t working properly. No matter if I stepped a bit more forward or backward, I could never get it to work exactly how the game wanted it to. Paddling was also odd at times since you have to keep your arms a certain length apart the entire time. Elara will chime in that you have to keep your movements steady and be confident with how you are moving, but I wouldn’t be moving my hands or arms at all. I feel like the strictness of some of these exercises could be a bit more forgiving because being punished for not doing anything wrong can be discouraging, especially while you are trying to do something productive like exercising.

Final Thoughts?

Fitness Fables is a fun way to stay active. Progressing by exercising to produce magic to save this colorful world feels rewarding in multiple ways. Uplifting voice acting, stimulating audio design, and clever ways to keep you playing are remarkable and help out a lot when playing a game and trying to stay healthy. While the crux of the game makes you extremely tired and the configuration of some of the workouts may be a bit harsh, it never defuels your drive to keep going. Fitness Fables is a great VR experience as well as an awesome and entertaining method to stay fit.

About the Author

Nay Clark Gaming holds a special place in my heart and I never stop talking about video games. I really love all types of games and have an interest in games that have complicated stories and lore because I enjoy untangling the mystery of it all. When I'm not gaming, I unsuccessfully try to control three amazing and incredibly bright kids.

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