This is a 3rd person cartoon game with very pleasing graphics.

Your character, Goodthorpe, is a callow youth who's sent on a perilous mission to help save the world. Sounds pretty standard, right? Well, actually it's not. This is one of those stories that's a blend of old-fashioned fantasy elements mixed with some fairly wild science fiction elements. In other words, you're not on Earth, your on a far distant planet that has been destroyed by a titanic struggle between aliens and your ancestors.

One of the weirdest problems this game has is in how your character dies. Death lurks literally behind every rock in this game. I really don't have a problem with that, but no one at SirTech bothered to deal with what happens when your Goodthorpe dies!

For example, my character first died while attempting to cross a stream using a very rickety bridge. As I walked across it, the bridge collapsed and I disappeared into the water. I sat stupidly for moment, staring at my monitor. The water continued to flow, the music continued to play. The character on the other side of the bridge stood there silently. I waited . . . . and waited.

Nothing! No message, no offer to start the game over, no rewind back to the spot in the game right before I died, nothing. Eventually I simply exited the game and restored an earlier saved game. This happens all through Fable - Goodthorpe gets his throat slit by highwaymen, his head bashed in by an ogre, his soul eviscerated by a ghost, and his body crushed by falling stones. And whenever that happens . . . nothing happens!

And this is just the beginning of the game's "unfinished feel." More on that later.

But first, let me give credit to the game's good aspects. I do like a cartoon game, and Fable provides many interesting and beautiful areas to explore, from caves to swamps to castles and witch houses.

What I enjoyed most about Fable, however, is its deranged sense of humor. The dialog, and even the descriptions, are full of anachronistic cracks. Many reviewers were offended by this, but my friend and I laughed out loud many times. Upon seeing a really huge boulder, Goodthorpe matter-of-factly states, "That's a big friggin' boulder." Or the portentous narrator will comment on a particularly obvious visual element with a crack like "Symbolic, isn't it?" This made the whole atmosphere a bit like (for those few readers old enough to catch the reference) Jay Ward's "Fractured Fairy Tales" on the "Rocky and Bullwinkle Show."

HOWEVER. These virtues do not make up for the game's glaring problems.

I've mentioned the death problem. Next, the characters. This game is full of characters with which to interact. Unfortunately, not a single one of them is interesting, all of them are as two-dimensional as the game's graphic format. Conversations repeat tediously, and the characters merely seem to be serving as talking props.

Also, Fable has one awkward interface! The game uses a technique of "close up windows" for many characters, inventory items, and other objects. Manipulating inventory objects with characters and the environment gets extremely tricky because of this. Many times we thought we were stuck, doing the wrong thing with the wrong inventory item, only to realize we hadn't manipulated this stupid "close up" window in the correct way yet. This caused a lot of frustration.

All of these complaints pale, however, in comparison to the worst aspect of the game: STORY. Fable begins with a very promising backstory setup, one which really piqued our interest. However, by the end of the story the issues had become so confusing, and various sides in the conflict so muddled, that I lost any sense of purpose. What's even worse, however - much worse, in fact, is the unbelievable ending to the game. There simply isn't one! Evidently when the game was released in Europe the ending raised such howls that SirTech went back to the drawing board and created a new one.

Not! The game makes absolutely no attempt to tie up the epic loose ends of the story. It simply . . . stops! It's as if SirTech thought that flashing the words "The End" on the screen constitutes an ending. Sorry to inform you, SirTech - it doesn't!

I'm used to disappointing endings in adventure games (that's a whole other article!), but this one takes the cake. It made me angry. Angry enough to think twice before ever spending my time playing a game from this team again.

PROS: Nice cartoon look; out-of-left-field humor will appeal to some.

CONS: Inexcusably bad ending; clumsy interface.

CONCLUSION: Not a "must play" but diverting if you're twiddling your thumbs.

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS:

486/66, 8 MB RAM, 2X CD-ROM, SVGA, mouse, sound board, DOS; Windows 95

This review is copyright Ray Ivey and Just Adventure and may not be republished elsewhere without the express written consent of the author. Republication of said review must also contain a link back to Just Adventure.