Fabledom PC Review

Fabling kingdoms have sent their sons and daughters out into the vast world to establish new frontiers in far-off lands. Every region is lush with dense forests, mountains, huge lakes, and forgotten ruins ready to explore. Each lord and lady of a realm has their own goals, ranging from warfare to marriage to isolated solitude. And it is up to the player to decide how their new kingdom will grow.

Fabledom is the first major project from Grenaa Games. The studio appears to be a two-man team, but with no in-game credits, it is unknown how the work is divided or their past game development experience. On Steam, Fabledom has a dual publishing deal with Dear Villagers and Doyoyo Games, but neither company appears on the live build.

When starting a new session of Fabledom, players are given a random world seed comprising many different regions. They can range in size, resource input, or obstacles like mountains and oceans. However, the regions do not wind up looking aesthetically different in-game. Players can further select if they are a prince, princess, or unisex “highness”. The monarch also selects their sexual orientation for courting and marrying other leaders. The game can then also select to play in story mode or full creative mode.

Fablings are miniature humans similar to hobbits or gnomes. They live rather leisurely lives without much concern as long as they have food and entertainment. Fablings are further categorized into three classes of social order. Peasants are the lowest rung of society, working hard labor jobs like farmers, builders, or woodcutters. Commoners are a slight step up, taking on trade skills like a merchant or cook. While absent from Early Access, the third tier of people are the nobles, who will have more administrative functions.

While different social classes dont outright hate each other, building types radiate out a zone of positive or negative “desirability” based on class. This even includes the houses - homesteads and condominiums - that attract new peasants and commoners, respectively. This winds up requiring segregation between the castes and the creation of ghettos to maximize citizen happiness. Even further, commoners and peasants won’t even drink the same water, incentivizing the creation of separate wells for a neighborhood.

Players can, of course, ignore the outcries of the NIMBY strict zoning policies if they simply want to capitalize on space. After all, if the settlement can’t produce enough food to feed everyone or burn coal to survive during a harsh winter, then it doesn’t matter if citizens feel discomfort over who their neighbors are. Fablings, by their nature, are slow-moving, so it is typically always better to keep their homes and work close to each other.

In story mode, the selection of buildings is limited. But unlike other medieval settlement games, there is no large tech tree or research. Instead, new buildings are unlocked solely on the total population size. This can cause a disconnection as a new game mechanic could unlock before an explanation or introduction for them is presented.

Main quests serve mostly as a tutorial, suggesting what to build next in the region. Completing them will grant a set amount of coins. However, random side quests often do not correlate with current progress and often punish players that fail them. For example, there might be a sudden order for 25 loaves of bread to be made in 30 days, but the kingdom doesn’t even own a windmill to grind flour yet. When these goals are impossible to make, the citizens may drop in happiness and lose some currency or other resources.

That money is important, as every new building costs a sizable large chunk of cash to plan out. Often times it isn’t even the initial structure - almost all buildings require some sort of attachment to commence - like say, a house’s fenced yard or the plowed fields of a farmhouse. This winds up using both more space and money than what a player really wanted. Additionally, after a blue print is assigned, it is up to the Fablings’ AI to get around to constructing said plan.

Outside of coins, other main resources that need to be gathered include wood from trees and stone deposits. These can be further refined into lumber, bricks, coal, and more. Oddly, deposits for future patch resources like iron and prisms litter the map. Still, until their production facilities are rolled out into Early Access, these end up being wastes of space.

Once making a messenger’s guild, players can then start sending envoys to other kingdoms or lands. Despite the seed including up to ten selectable territories, only two or three other leaders will generate during story mode. Often the first met leader will be the prime love interest who will provide some kind of bonus if fully courted. This typically involves sending gifts, flirting, or going on dates. Players can also dump another leader, gravely lowering the relationship. Missions from lovers or outright spying are plans for future builds of Fabledom.

There is a main stat called “nobility” which is meant to interact with the other leaders in some way. Players build this up or lose it based on side quest results. However, in-game it doesn’t yet seem to have a practical use outside of being a way of resolving some random encounters.

Another major building is the hero quarters, which produces a single larger melee warrior. This character can be directly controlled and sent out to search the area of Fabledom. In Early Access, this can include exploring lost ruins or speaking to forest spirits. At present, this will yield some kind of resource, decoration, or temporary boon.

Grenaa Games has teased that, eventually, the hero will be able to defend the land and even be used to invade other kingdoms. Among the planned buildings include barracks to turn the more passive Fablings into harden knights and archers. The game currently has stone walls, but city watch towers will come later. While these do sound like exciting features, there just isn’t any sign that this will work well in the current live build.

Fabledom and the Fablings are incredibly slow, almost lumbering in nature. Their movement and work speed is extremely slow, taking possibly two or more in-game days to produce a single item. It can feel like the game is almost frozen during the standard speed setting. And even at triple speed, one could still be waiting 5-15 minutes for something to happen. Fabledom needs either a times 10-speed setting or a means of increasing production rates.

This comes into major contrast with how urgent some of the side quests can become, requesting a sizeable amount of resources that are just too much for the Fabling population to make on short notice. It seems that the quests are more to drain currently stored reserves and cripple players who didn’t have the foresight to invest ahead.

Creative mode unlocks every building and reduces the cost and upkeep to zero. Players can even just inject as many peasants and commoners as they want. However, creative mode lacks any form of quests and doesn’t allow access to the world map even if a messenger’s guild is made. This makes the overall experience hollow and mostly just a means of experimenting with layouts without consequences.

Default camera movement is also painfully slow, which could make some players mistakenly think Fabledom is having performance issues. Instead, one should go into options and bump up camera movement to the maximum to not feel like everything is dripping like molasses. For good measure, players may want to rebind almost all of the controls as many of the defaults are strange, like zooming with K and L or adjusting speed with F1-F3.

Fabledom is at least very pleasing to look at. All of the characters are vibrant and well-animated, giving a lot of life and personality. The one oddity is how opaque blueprints are - they are just blue-tinted versions of buildings and aren’t even transparent. This can make it seem like an entire region is built up when it has only been planned.

Fabledom includes an unnamed narrator that seems to be some sort of wizard or sage. His voice acting is serviceable but not fantastic. However, many of his written lines completely miss the mark on humor - either being stale or boarding on weirdly gross. Because there isn’t a huge amount of dialogue, the narrator winds up being very reparative, and players may want to turn him off completely in the audio settings.

Fabledom has a lot of great ideas and clearly has a superb foundation. But there are a lot of lacking features when compared to other settlement games like Banished, Patron, or Going Medieval. It feels like Grenaa Games used the Early Access release to present a pretty game, but that is still missing substance under the surface. Fabledom will be a great game when it fully releases, but that could be a year or more from now. It is a safer bet to add it to one’s Steam wishlist and track the ongoing development.

Kurtis Seid, NoobFeed
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