Fable
There’s a lot to unpack here. Fable is the story of a young man whose best friend was prophesied to kill a dragon, set at the moment when the best friend returns and is lauded as a hero. This is an interesting premise. Usually, we are the hero. It is far less often that we are made to dwell on the life of the hero after returning from the heroism – the most obvious example being, I suppose, the last chapters of The Lord of the Rings. And even less prevalent are the stories where we are the old friends of the hero, now forever relegated to non-hero status.
Okay, but Fable is also the story of a love triangle, for the hero is supposed to marry the sister of the protagonist, but the protagonist himself is also in love with the hero. Is the hero really in love with the sister, as his past behaviour seems to indicate, or is there some chance for a queer relation with the protagonist? And if the latter, how will the sister react?
But that’s not all, because Fable is also a story about a body snatcher. It turns out that the hero, Ronan, has not in fact defeated the dragon, and also that the Ronan who appears in the game is in some sense not Ronan. See, Ronan’s body has been snatched by a wandering soul, some guy called Jamie, who is using it for his own purposes. Prime among those purposes is… well, Jamie has been experiencing Ronan’s memories, and has fallen in love with you, with the protagonist, Kel. So Jamie directs Ronan’s body back home to strike up a romance with you. You can’t believe your luck, until you find out that Ronan is not the real Ronan; and also, that the real Ronan is still inside the body too, waiting to take back control. Meanwhile, your sister also understands what’s going on, and obviously she wants Ronan to get his body back.
That’s… a lot, as I said. It’s all original and inventive, and that’s a big positive in my book. But I also feel that all these different layers of the fiction are a bit too much for what the game then proceeds to do with them. See, after all this complicated set-up, it turns out that there is a solution to the central problem that makes everyone happy: Jamie occupies another body, of somebody who was dying anyway; Ronan and your sister get married; and you get into what seems to be a secret relationship with Jamie-in-his-new-body. That’s a bit too neat. And it leaves me wondering what the point of the whole body snatcher scenario was if we don’t end up exploring questions like: Do you fall in love with the body, or the soul, or the interplay of the soul and the body? What happens when you find out that the person you’re in love with is in fact a ruthless abuser? Could a polyamorous relationship in which two people share a body work out? Is it possible to fall in love with someone that person X is in love with when you literally look through the eyes of X? And so on and so forth; there’s a lot of stuff you could do with a body snatcher scenario, but Fable rushes to a happy ending without really asking any of those questions.
To my taste, the game also lacked interactivity, relying heavily on big texts with ‘continue’-style links underneath. There were some points with multiple links, but few and far between. This is no doubt very subjective, but I prefer a rhythm where my interactions have less text between them.
To add some important points to the positive side of the balance, the game is well-written and well-paced.
(I noticed two place where the author used an unfortunate turn of phrase, which can perhaps be edited. The first: “Stone erodes slowly. Sometimes, it takes centuries.” This is unintentionally comical in its underestimation of how long it takes for stone to erode. The second is where a character says that until now they saw life in black and white, and now they suddenly see it in colour. This simile is based on the history of photography, and does not belong in a pre-industrial fantasy world.)