Fabledom PC Review
Summary: Develop your town into a fairy tale city and expand your realm via love or conquest.
4.3
Town Tales
Fairy tales are fabulous for taking us away to magical places and imaging a world of fancy and wonder. Fabledom runs with that notion of a magical land filled with mystery and folk lore and tasks you with building a city in the midst of it all.
To give a quick idea of what it’s like… imagine a cross between Sim City and The Settlers (I might be showing my age there). Perhaps with a splash of Quest for Glory or King’s Quest thrown in for good measure.
You start with a few citizens and some supplies and must build housing and some resource gathering structures such as a farm and foresters cabin. As you develop your town, more citizens will want to join (as long as you keep things appealing enough). As your city grows you unlock new buildings and features to add to make your town even more appealing to prospective newcomers. After a certain point you will gain access to a hero whom you can send out to explore the lands. Scattered about the map in different areas are little fairy tale elements, you might come across a witches hut or a traveling salesperson might offer to sell you some magic beans. Exploring these locations or options can lead to new items or structures that you can use to further enhance your town or hero.
But it’s not all town building and exploration… there’s also diplomacy. On the wider map there are other towns and you can interact with their leaders. You can take an aggressive stance or you can even woo your neighbour (it’s up to you which gender you pursue which is a nice option). To really develop your relations with your neighbours you will need to perform tasks such as sending a bunch of flowers… which in turn requires you construct a flower farm and harvest enough flowers to send. Nothing too stressful but it keeps you busy and can shift your focus from making sure your little town is growing nicely, to putting a rush order on a given resource in order to flirt with your love interest.
But it’s not all love and flowers, you can also develop your military options and challenge your neighbours. Whichever approach you take nothing is overly scary because Fabledom is squarely developed as a title in the “chill” category, even the harshest of elements are presented in a cartoonish visual style that takes any overly threatening edge away completely. That intent to make this a more chill game that even the young members of your family can enjoy is only hampered slightly by the one main gripe I had… citizens running out of supplies.
Now don’t get me wrong, the game is clearly focuses on resource gathering and it absolutely should be important that you ensure you have enough of whatever resource your people need. The problem I had is that I started getting messages that my people were starving despite my screen clearly showing I had plenty of food. I tried turning options in my granary on or off which seemed to have no impact. I watched one of these starving citizens as they worked at the farm as I wondered why they couldn’t just take some of the resources from there. A similar situation popped up later with coal and to a lesser extent water. But it was the water issue that I think pointed to the culprit. I suspect that your citizens need to be within a certain distance of the resource in order to be able to use it. This means you can’t build a coal hut on one end of your playing area and expect a home on the opposite side to have access to it (certainly not before your roads get developed enough to allow faster travel). This in and of itself isn’t strictly an issue… it’s just I couldn’t find any point during the tutorial that explained this would be an issue and given it tends to present itself only after your town has started to get quite big… it makes redeveloping a nuisance.
Final Thoughts?
If you can work around the resource supply issue… this is indeed a nice chill little game. It’s not overly deep or taxing… but it’s kind of nice watching your little town grow into a thriving city and the little fairy tale elements here or there just add another bit of charm to it all. It’s not terribly expensive but it’s not a huge game either so it’s about the right point (but if you’re not sure, just wait for a sale). Certainly worth a look if you want a city builder that’s a bit less stressful and has some mild fantasy elements.
About the Author
Chris O'Connor Father of four, husband of one and all round oddity. Gaming at home since about 1982 with a Sinclair ZX Spectrum. Moving on to the more traditional PC genre in the years that followed with the classic Jump Joe and Alley Cat. CGA, EGA, VGA and beyond PC's have been central to my gaming but I've also enjoyed consoles and hand helds along the way (who remembers the Atari Lynx?). Would have been actor/film maker, jack of many trades master of none.
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