Fabledom Review (PS5) – Sprite-ly And Fun!
Fabledom is set in the fairytale world and describes itself as a laid-back city builder: think Sim City, but for fairytales. I always have really enjoyed the odd city builder and management style game, but I haven’t had a city builder in my grasp for a while, so I was very much looking forward to diving into the world of fables and creating my very own universe full of the storybook tropes of beanstalks, princesses, and thatched houses.
Spelling It Out
There are a couple of options before you go full-horses ahead and build your own Fabledom. You can choose your map, which has a variety of different terrains at your disposal. This will alter how difficult it may be to create your kingdom or what may be available to you. Different locations offer up different levels of ground, i.e. more hills, or more water means you may have to be creative or use your space wisely. You can also have the option to play the standard story, where you build your town slowly and unlock things as your kingdom develops from small town to big city life. Or you can choose to have free reign and discover everything at once and have everything available from the jump, enabling you to play as you wish. Points for replayability!
Unfortunately, I was immediately met with my first bug where it didn’t save my name and quite comically for the rest of that particular game called me ‘Princess New Player’ from then on. Like any decent fairytale, you will have a bellowing charismatic narrator, who comments on various things you will do, talks you through the tutorial and will come up with the odd quip now and then. I was on the main menu exploring and the voice made a comment about how long we had been on the menu for. It’s very tongue-in-cheek and immediately drew me into intrigue for the charm of the game.
The tutorial is mostly decent at doing a good job of explaining things from the ground up. City builders can be quite finicky to begin with, especially when it comes to controls and things to do. The story allows you to achieve goals by working through the tutorial to get a hand of the controls and layout of the game. It sets a pace that is automatically relaxing and there is no pressure to get things done quickly, like some in the genre can pressure you to feel. The maps all have a clock which demonstrates the year and your season and you’ll be able to control the pace in which you work. Pausing is helpful when you’re placing buildings or crops. Inversely, fast-forwarding is resourceful when you don’t have many tasks to complete and you are just awaiting something to unfold.
A Place To Grow Magic Beans
You start off with barren land and the kingdom is your oyster at the initial stages. You will need to place houses and visitors will come to your kingdom and if they like it, they’ll request to stay. To be able to stay, there will already need to be space for them. So building a small community that can be expanded on is your first port of call.
Like any town, it needs resources such as food, stone and wood – with class certainly existing when it comes to your kingdom. At first, you will be looking after the peasants. Hiring peasants to build, collect, and produce resources for you. Peasants can be employed for all of the labourious activities, such as lumber work, farming or coal making, ore factories etc. As your population grows, so do the buildings and resources you can implement within your kingdom. Additionally commoners, and eventually nobles will be able to come and stay. However, both require very different housing and work.
When you get up and running, which does not take long, you can watch your kingdom grow. Which opens the opportunity to visit other kingdoms and have blessings and curses put on your kingdom. In the top left corner, you will have an inventory of all the resources you currently have and it’s up to you to make sure your villagers stay happy, stay healthy and have enough resources for the ever-growing population of your town. This eventually becomes a bit of a balancing act, and perhaps where the tutorial and narration fall short a bit. At times I found that some of my villagers were unhappy.
By clicking on them you can see their recent thoughts but this didn’t really give me any clues as to why they may be unhappy. It also could be for a number of reasons, and my villagers were not necessarily working too hard as it stated they were working comfortably. It may have been due to the beauty of the village in that particular area (which you can adjust by putting in wonderful accompaniments like fountains, trees, benches and picnic spaces). However, it never told me what it was exactly that made them unhappy.
Off With You, Peasant!
When you’re not deciding where to put the party line between peasants and commoners, or placing your musical band stands, you can choose to build up an army and do missions. Every fairytale needs a hero, doesn’t it? Well, you get one here in Fabledom. Once you place your Hero quarters your hero will appear. Your villagers instantly get a boost from being in proximity of your hero because damn, royalty right?
Your hero has various purposes within your town. First of all, he can interact with various random spawns of the town. Do you have a talking tree randomly spawn in your town? Let your hero deal with it! You planted some magic beans which turned into a beanstalk? No bother, let your hero deal with it! A witch hut with crows circling? That is okay, let your hero deal with it!
When interacting with these things you will be able to choose the appropriate action for your hero to do. You can choose to fight, pay them off, or just leave them. There might also be positive actions that can be taken – I chose to keep the talking tree as it boosted my wood-making. Heroes can level up through training and going on missions, as well as having their own health and inventory. If your hero should fall in battle you are able to pay for your hero to be well again. So keeping an income in your town is important!
Along with your hero, you can train warriors and take on missions to support (or destroy) the rest of the kingdom around you that is owned by different monarchs. You can even befriend, detest, or romance any of the monarchs (princess, prince and non-conforming gender royalty). It is fun building an army, and missions over other kingdoms will require minimum amounts of warriors, archers and a minimum level for your hero to be trained at. It’s fun to see the success rate and ‘win’ although sometimes winning can mean you sacrifice your relationship with other territories. You can also romance and date your partner which increases relationships. It does give you the option to almost kind of cheat, but why would you want to? Don’t be that person.
A Frog Prince
The visuals are ever so charming, full of the bright storybook colours you’d expect when playing in a fairytale kingdom. Whilst the visuals are sweet, cutesy and charming, my word of warning is to not let that fool you. As I’ve already alluded to, the game becomes one of a balancing act of resources, happiness, population and strategy. The music is relaxing, although doesn’t change often but it’s one of those tunes that feel reminiscent of the background of The Sims. You know its there, but you’re not sick of it’s loop
I ran into almost no visual bugs, and everything ticked along as it should. I did unfortunately run into some other bugs, which I later discovered are confirmed and will hopefully be patched out in due course. Many hours into my playthrough, a lot of villagers were dying of starvation but I had 500+ vegetables in my resource. It was weird, people just continued to randomly die sometimes and there was nothing I could do about it.
I also had a blacksmith bug where, despite placing many coal makers and having an unnecessary amount of coal makers, my blacksmith wouldn’t work and would just sit casually outside. I did reload an earlier save, and it happened to work randomly but was very slow. If you’re not able to have a blacksmith you won’t be able to create a decent army and do many missions, so I was lucky to be able to check this out. Also, a very small bug was that sometimes random events would happen and these would appear near your clock, occasionally I was completely unable to click on these and missed what was happening – whether it be part of a story beat or a description of a random event.
However, one that hurt the most, and would be the only caveat to recommending this game would be I lost hours to my playthrough on two occasions, despite an autosave feature. For some reason, one of my loads started hours before where I knew I had initially saved. I had at this point only lost about an hour or so, and could tell this by the amount of villagers and some of the settlements I had put into my game. The auto-save feature I think happens after every year, which will happen after the winter season. The winter season will mean that the production of food stops and charcoal becomes important to heat your house! No bother, I thought. I can do it again and I don’t mind.
Many hours later, because credit to this game can be a very satisfying time sink, it just would not let me save. No matter what I tried, whether it was overwriting it, starting a new save or letting an autosave take over. I had to take the plunge and close it. To realise my worst fear, losing about four hours of gameplay. Hopefully, this is one that gets a patch quickly.
To sum up, despite the caveats, this is a very lovely charming city builder, with lots to do and explore, as well as create. This feels more akin to a cosy city builder than a hardcore strategy one, but if that is what you’re after then this is your game. The visuals are easy on the eye, the story beats are wholesome and reminiscent of lovely fairytale-ness and there is much to do. Fabledom retails for around £25 which might be a bit steep if you are one of the unlucky players getting the can-not-save bug. However, with a few patches under the belt, this should certainly be on your list eventually.
Fabledom is available now on PS5 (review platform), PC, Xbox Series S|X and Nintendo Switch.
Developer: Grenaa Games
Publisher: Dear Villagers
Disclaimer: In order to complete this review, we were provided with a promotional copy from the publisher.
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