Fable is a fairly frustrating
game. It’s got several good qualities, but it suffers from a common
game problem I refer to as “Premature Release Syndrome.”

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.

Final Grade: C-

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.