Fabledom – Review

Review 5 Minutes

It is no secret that I love a cosy game. It is much less known that I also love a city-builder. So Fabledom, a whimsical fantasy-themed city-builder, should be a happy ever after, right?

Fabledom starts you off with just a cart and a few citizens which it calls Fablings. From here, you grow your kingdom by assigning your Fablings jobs and building up your resources from the surrounding area. As you do, you unlock new things to build and attract more Fablings to your kingdom until you have the ideal fantasy realm. Pretty standard city-builder stuff so far.

The art style of Fabledom is perhaps the first big difference you will notice from others in the genre though. The wonderful children’s storybook styling of everything in-game is both adorable and joyous to take in. I have spent an unreasonable amount of time just watching my Fablings go about their day or taking in some of the wildlife outside my city walls. The brighter shades and art direction truly make this stand out from the crowd.

Each building type really does stand out from the rest, something which I often criticise other building games for not doing. It makes navigating your kingdom fairly easy which is a huge relief. When you are looking for a particular area or building to micromanage, being able to quickly locate it amongst your epic sprawl is a real quality-of-life improvement over other games with their concrete jungles.

The art direction of Fabledom isn’t where the fantasy elements stop though. As your kingdom grows, you will discover other fairytale creatures and characters to interact with. Some friendly, some less so. Although, their response to you is often dictated by your response to them.

By interacting with your discoveries, using a Hero character, you are frequently presented with a choice. Typically, these represent a choice between a short-term gain (normally the more aggressive option) versus a delayed but larger gain (normally the more friendly option). The simple choices do make big differences though.

For example, on my first playthrough, I chose to befriend a talking tree and plant a beanstalk in the centre of my hamlet. The talking tree buffed my natural resource gains because I didn’t chop him down. The beanstalk grew over several years, in-game, until I could send my Hero up to go find some valuables to retrieve.

On the flipside, dragons are a real threat just like the witches that might fly across your kingdom. These, amongst other fantastical antagonists, can cause some real damage and difficulty to your developing city. There is something weirdly fascinating about watching a dragon destroy a portion of your kingdom though. It just hits differently than a flood or tornado.

Frustratingly, it can take a long time to get things built initially though. Fablings are, shall we say, not the most driven workers. Resources can take an age to gather up enough of, and there’s no way to really speed this up outside of literally just fast-forwarding the game speed. Even then, it took me forever to get together everything I needed to start building some things that were supposed to be common elements like Townhouses. Knowing that once it’s built I can move it later takes some of the sting out of this lack of urgency but it was something I felt throughout my time in Fabledom.

Fortunately, Fabledom is incredibly forgiving when it comes to things like this. Should you lose Fablings to an attack or through any other means, more will simply turn up looking to join your kingdom at the end of each in-game month. If you need to move buildings around to better accommodate your growth, most can be shifted around with no penalty. Fabledom definitely sits in that cosy game place of low-stakes gameplay. Pretty much everything can be replaced or changed with little cost.

For some, this will be a huge relief knowing that they won’t be paying a hefty cost for misplacing a farm or store early in the playthrough. It definitely makes it much more approachable, and much less stressful, knowing you’ll have the chance to correct it later. Equally, some will find the lack of consequences disappointing. Whether you embrace the freedom or not will be an entirely personal stance but, from my experience, I really enjoyed the more relaxed feeling that came from knowing I wasn’t going to hamper myself by building something where I needed it now.

Oddly, Fabledom doesn’t take this cosy approach when it comes to natural resource management. Most resources gathered from the wild, like wood from forests or rocks from a quarry, are finite. You can mine a quarry out of stone forcing you to build another one elsewhere. Admittedly, you have to mine for a while but it struck me as a very genre-traditional approach to resource management in a game which chooses to ignore many of the others. It did introduce an element of forward planning that simply isn’t needed elsewhere in Fabledom.

When it comes to dealing with other kingdoms in Fabledom, it does go back to its cosy roots though. If you are the sort of person who finds combat in these sorts of games to be a burden, then you may be pleased to hear you can pretty much ignore military might here. While you may need some defences for the aforementioned fantasy foes, you won’t need them to protect yourself from other monarchs.

In fact, it is fairly easy to keep everybody happy with the occasional gift or just a friendly message from your messengers. Of course, you can pursue a relationship with another leader, eventually leading to a marriage and an alliance should you wish. If you change your mind about your romantic partner later, you can also easily switch to another paramour. In fact, your relationship with other factions has little to no impact on your status with the rest.

Should you feel like leading a more battle-hardened nation, you can do that too. You can develop your military might and wage war on the neighbouring nations. Don’t expect any in-depth real-time strategy here though. It’s simply a matter of building up your military units and sending them off to war.

Much like the freedom to move your city’s pieces around, it will be up to each person to decide how satisfying they find the consequence-free relationships in Fabledom. Not having a barbarian nation knocking on my door and drawing away my valuable resources was certainly a refreshing breath of air. Being able to focus on my designs for the kingdom, and not protecting it constantly, was quite enjoyable.

Ultimately, Fabledom is a cosy playground for you to create your own fairytale kingdom. Everything is developed and created with that goal in mind. The game doesn’t want to stop you in any way from magicking up the design and vision you have for your castle, city, and nation.

The pace of Fabledom is very relaxed, just look at your Fablings moving in-game, and some may find that more frustrating than others. It is not supposed to be a challenging game like many city-builders; Fabledom wants to feel like a fairytale world. Less Grimm, more gleam.

Overall, Fabledom is a fun city-builder which never gets boring to watch work. The amount of options you have to build the kingdom and castle of your dreams is impressive, and the more cosy feel to the entire thing takes any real stress out of your playtime. If you want to create your happy-ever-after world, without the weight of the heavy crown on your head, then Fabledom is absolutely where you want to be. Just keep an eye out for cyclops.

Fabledom is a cosy playground for you to create your own fairytale kingdom

Fabledom is available now on PC through Steam.

[GameOrNought was provided with a Steam code for review/content purposes]

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