There's a straight-ahead fantasy adventure - albeit one with a story that I struggle to recall - and then there's the billowing, picaresque cladding that surrounds it, full of optional quests, lavish in-jokes, haircuts, emotes, tattoos, one-button fighting that is really three-button fighting, moral choices and devastating consequences. When I think of Fable, as the roar of immediate memories recedes, I inevitably think of something that feels like two different, perhaps opposing, designs for games.
It's all part of what makes it so rich and so fascinating, and what allows a series about exploring cliches to become so singular. PR froth, angry forum posts about missing acorns: it's all part of what Fable is. At times, it might seem like half the appeal of this series is the talk around it. Conceptually, it is a thicket, albeit a lovely one. In truth, nothing about Fable is actually that easy. But even to reduce the series to rote matters of accessibility is a surprisingly difficult trick to pull off. Given current tastes, Fable may linger retroactively in your memory as a kind of anti-Dark Souls RPG, a series that, from Fable 2 onwards, could have been marketed with the strapline, "YOU WILL NOT DIE". None of these questions are easy to answer, and in the early days of 2018 they may be particularly tough. (This magical stones joke is particularly good.) What an astonishing studio this was, so willing to follow its own instincts, so eager, seemingly, to trust in its own voice. Why did Fable work so well in the first place? To load up the first Fable is to lose Lionhead all over again. In a game so full of moving parts, so driven by whimsy and - perhaps - by accident, what single piece of Fable is absolutely indispensable? In which part of Fable does Fable truly live?Īnd hidden within these questions is another. Then, I started to think about the task of bringing a series like this back to life with a new creative team and in a new era. Most of all, I remembered a house I once bought where the previous owner, thanks to a brilliant glitch, lived on long after I had killed them, partially stuck in one of the upstairs walls. I remembered the moon peering down through sickly grey murk above bogland, where a monster covered in bracken and moss stood up to his waist in mud. I remembered setting off, barefoot, on a summer's day to a distant island where a cog-driven door emerged from the side of a hill. When I heard a few weeks back that a new Fable game was underway with a new developer attached, I experienced a rush of fond memories so vivid, playful, silly and heartfelt that I almost wobbled on my feet for a few seconds. By extension, there was no oak tree that would have erupted from it.
A lovely idea, isn't it, that a game would be both so reactive and so poetic, that a game would really notice you and afford your presence a degree of lasting importance, that a game would see your involvement with it as a chance for it to grow? But of course there was no acorn in Fable. Years later, after a long life of consequence and heroism, you will return to the place that you planted that acorn and a huge oak tree will tower overhead. If you plant the acorn, green shoots will emerge from the earth. Let's face it: Fable's easy to the point of being obsequious, isn't it? Or maybe it's choosing to measure itself in ways that go beyond mere difficulty? It's no surprise, then, that with all this discussion churning around it, the world of Albion is so often defined by a mechanic that it doesn't even contain.Īs a young child, the story once went, you will find an acorn. It's hilarious - oh, the burping! Or maybe it's just juvenile. It's a shallow RPG, or maybe it's a canny and satirical examination of RPGs in general. Fable is one of those rare, fascinating game series upon which nobody can really seem to agree about anything for very long. Good and evil is barely the start of it, frankly.