Fabledom Review – Building A Kingdom In Pursuit Of Love

City builders have gotten a bit too mechanically and thematically intense with the rise of survival city builders. But what if you want a city builder that’s cosy and more wholesome, but still resemble the mechanical foundations of a survival city builder?

And this is where Fabledom enters our tale. Developed by Grenaa Games, this game, previously in Early Access, tasks you to build a kingdom, but that’s not your real goal. Your real goal, as a prince or princess of a burgeoning kingdom yet to be build, is to get hitched.

Fabledom will feel welcoming to players of all kinds, from the folks attracted to its wholesome presentation to even the hardcore city-builders. The mechanical aspects seem to be a bit off at places, but overall Fabledom achieves its goal in letting players chill as they slowly build a fantasy wonderland where it all ends happily ever after.

Presentation

Fabledom uses the often used keywords “cosy/cozy” and “wholesome” in every aspect of its presentation. It’s all colourful, bright and chirpy that may come off too cutesy to some, but it’s very much welcomed sight that is sorely lacking in this subgenre. The way it embraces so strongly on these aspects is what makes the look of Fabledom really striking. The buildings you plop look beautiful as part of an urban and countryside sprawl. And, more importantly, these buildings are easily distinguished from afar.

Fabledom is a grid-based city builder, but I love how the dirt roads don’t look exactly straight and even. Home buildings can look different every time you plop them thanks to it auto-randomise what to plop in large area you assign the housing. And there’s many ways to beautify your city to make it your own.

The citizens, fablings as they call it, looks like adorable Mr. and Mrs. Potato Heads bumbling around. And sometimes you see 2D cut-outs of them populating entertainment centers should fablings not crowding that one puppet show on the street which I find particularly funny.

The world plays fast and loose with its medieval fantasy setting where pigs can’t fly (but have wings nonetheless) and kingdoms can have malls and ferris wheels. The game has weather changes, so expect to see everything turning white as winter arrives,and gloomy dark clouds when witches decide to turn every fabling into a skeleton, turing into an unexpected Halloween event.

It proudly beckons in its whimsical presentation. The art direction here is superb.

 

The audio aspects is a bit lacking. There are some music variety, but I feel like I keep hearing the same song over and over. It’s not that the song is bad- it’s giving me Mediterranean or Italian vibes due to the use of a particular instrument the name escapes me but which I associate it to that part of the world. Is’t just that it keeps playing the same song over the course of hours. And in a good city builder, you can expect players to sit down for hours upon hours.

Fabledom tries to be a bit whimsy by having a narrator. His jokes can come off weird- the first time I hear him is when booting up the game and he says something that implies he isn’t wearing pants- but thankfully he only quips occasionally and won’t repeat them.

The UI here is very mouse-and-keyboard oriented, including very small yes or no icons to click through. I don’t think this is a good Steam Deck game, or any of the portable PC gaming machines, at its state right now.

Overall, I dig how Fabledom looks and feels. It could use a few more songs on rotation but players can just whip out their own playlist. And given the small size of the development team, it’s understandable why they didn’t prioritise that aspect.

 

Gameplay

In Fabledom, you begin with picking your map, adjusting parameters and off you go to build your kingdom. As stated earlier, the main goal isn’t to build the biggest and best city in the world. Rather, building your kingdom is to serve another means, to get married.

The world map in Fabledom is filled with different rulers, each can be courted and wooed. You’ll have to commit to one out of the six available rulers, from the money-centric to the industrialist Farrah.

The main gameplay of Fabledom does play a lot like a city builder. A survival city builder even, at places. You have to build homes for fablings, ensure those homes have enough food and coal, and get the fablings to work on acquiring or making various resources and products.

 

As much as the game doesn’t want to be associated with survival city builders (it shouldn’t), I can see glimmers of it in its mechanics. The said mechanics don’t hold up to scrutiny though. I find myself scratching my head too often figuring out if I have enough food or coal for all the fablings or not. It’s not clear why my abundance of resources in storage suddenly disappears (like all the wheat stored after winter). It doesn’t help that the regular intervals where you can invite new fablings to live in is presented in such a way that you might be doing something wrong if you dismiss them outright. Fablings can starve and die but with all the notifications auto-dismiss themselves you can easily miss and not notice their passing. All of a sudden you have free space to welcome new fablings.

It was a struggle trying to keep 500 bread in the inventory, any excess bread is suddenly gone while I have 500 stacks of pork and 1000 of grapes yet not all fablings would consume this and go hungry.

The logistics and production chain side of Fabledom is a bit of a mess.

If you approach Fabledom as a relaxing city-builder, however, and you’ll start to enjoy its many strengths. The game begins with having you build homesteads in the village for peasants, and then move into building condos for a town, before topping it all off with erecting your own customised palace where all the nobles call home. At the end of a Fabledom campaign, you’ll end up with sprawling countryside with vast farms and industrial workshops, with a small yet dense town with packed housing where a giant castle looms over them all. It’s a satisfying grower game, as within 10 hours your little village becomes a kingdom of over 400+ fablings.

The way you build housing is cool thanks to the attachment system. For homesteads, you can attach a backyard with at least 2×2 size, and the extra plot can be used to build extra things like a cherry tree or an outhouse. Once you unlock towns, you get to plop condominiums where ideally you place a square plot with roads surrounding it. Town houses can be placed outside the perimeter or inside the square lot.

You can have these plots randomise all the ploppable buildings in there, giving the kingdom you’re building a less rigid look. Though for town houses, it’s less ideal if you’re not allocating a square surrounded by roads, as the randomiser didn’t take account of that and will require you to tweak individual building placements so that their entrances aren’t being blocked.

Still, it’s a pretty nifty systems,these attachments. Farms use it too. If only there are more building attachments that can unlock later in the game. Rather than have to build more coal burners, an attachment that costs less but helps bump production a bit by adding a worker slot would have been great. It’s a system that’s begging to be explored and further enhanced but as it is, it’s good.

And you have plenty of room to pretty it up just for the fun of it. There’s plenty of street decorations you can plop to enhance the beauty of the kingdom and some will see fablings interacting with. It’s cute seeing them sit at the benches on their off time.

 

Instead of a tech tree, Fabledom’s progression is tied to a multi-chapter story with objectives to complete. More buildings are unlocked as you progress through the story. And the story is about you finding a prince or princess to which you would live happily ever after with.

You can be nice (or not nice) to other rulers/potential suitors via trading or, once you have an embassy, do offworld missions. This can range from assisting them in some menial tasks or engage in some tomfoolery (what if you send fablings to take a peek at how Sir Payne looks without his helmet on?) that will affect your relationship. Hopefully you don’t plan to steal resources from your love interest.

Fascinatingly, your potential soulmate also brings gameplay changes, as they unlock ruler-specific buildings. Farrah, who’s new to this 1.0 release, has the regenerator which replenishes iron or stone sources which is handy… if the event which lets you pay to replenish your mines pop up too frequently.

Speaking of events, from time to time event pop-ups will appear, and you have multiple ways to respond to this. Some require spending coin, some require spending a special currency call nobility, and some require handing out resources stored in your inventory.

These events will regularly repeat. During the early game you’ll keep getting an event where a beggar asks for food, specific types of food. And usually I find the asking number being too much to complete which I happily take the penalty for declining that request.

Sometimes the witches will curse the fablings to turn into spooky scary skeletons (and make them consume twice the food), because ousting them outright costs so much nobility and in the early game, you only gain them from specific events.

 

There is combat in Fabledom but it’s very limited. You have a hero character in the form of Fergus where he can level up and acquire gear. You can also recruit your fablings into soldiers where they will be eternally stand in position awaiting your orders, not eat and live in an army tent until they die.

Moving the troops is like in an RTS, but moving a large army around can be annoying if you need to them to go a to a crowded part of town. You don’t go invade another kingdom, and there’s no wave-based tower horde defence or raid defence. There are encounters where you can send Fergus to meet various fairytale creatures and deal with it like an event.

 

In the broad strokes, Fabledom is good fun. It ticks my biggest city-builder test which is “can I play this game non-stop and realise I lost 2-3 hours without realising” and the answer to that is a resounding yes. The early game is fun.

It’s when you start to pay attention to how much resources you are producing, something you need in the endgame, is where I feel Fabledom stumbles a bit. There’s so many ways for resources to “leak out” so to speak.

Fablings can pull out food from granaries to store them at homes, which is fine. But then you can also have them pulled into Town Shops without you realising it. And also to Markets. And then some which I have no idea where it goes. I have plopped 20 bakeries to keep baking all the flour into bread yet it’s still not enough for a town of 400 fablings? I have 20 fishermen huts and yet fish keeps being empty from my storage? How many coal burners do I need to have excess coal for the winter, but it seems everyone seems to be fine even if some homes don’t have coal during the cold?

There’s no death spiral situation that can happen, as you regularly can bring in more fablings to the kingdom (maybe too regularly), so the biggest hurdle you have is the hard requests for specific resources.

It’s a lot to ask for a new development team consists of two people and this being their debut game, but I hope Fabledom can hone down the more nitty-gritty aspects of its city builder. There’s potential for this game to court the hardcore city builder fans if the production mechanics click better. But for now, you’ll find enjoyment of Fabledom from playing it as a relaxing, carefree city builder.

Content

A playthrough of Fabledom, following all the chapters to completion, can take about ten hours or so. And there’s plenty of things to juggle as you go through all the objectives to keep you busy.

And you can keep playing it forever, even after you finally get married. And there’s nothing stopping you to do new save again in any of the difficulty levels.

There’s plenty to build, and if you want to try out all the ruler-specific buildings that will take at least six different playthroughs, so content-wise it’s generous.

Though the repeated events and encounters will get statel on repeat play. Those are just not enough that it starts to become a nuisance even in my sole playthrough, let alone on repeat play.

 

Personal Enjoyment

I approach Fabledom from someone who have played a bunch of city builders. And I’ve been a rather tough customer- I was not a big fan of Manor Lords, the big city builder game right now in Early Access.

And from that point of view you can see why I keep harping about the game’s nitty-gritty not being as well-designed as expected. I want friction in city builders caused from me not balancing my production chain, and not for not knowing- and unable to know- something is wrong somewhere yet it can’t be troubleshooted.

Putting that aside, Fabledom is a nice breath of fresh air. City builders shouldn’t be all grim and gritty. It can be fun, inviting and approachable by fans of all ages. And not only I respect that, I love it. Not all games have to have that hardcore edge, though it certainly would have helped.

I strongly believe you would find Fabledom to be a joy if you simply play it as a relaxing city builder. There are some rough challenges that can be difficult to overcome- earning that 500 bread for the wedding took longer than expected for me. But should the game still be updated with some balance changes here and there, it’s just good fun to build and see your humble village grown to have a town and a big castle.

Verdict

Fabledom absolutely nails its pitch for a wholesome city builder. There’s plenty of opportunities to create your aesthetically pleasing town, and the story objective of having to court another ruler is brilliant and unique.

What lies under Fabledom is some good foundations for a survival city builder, but the way the logistics and production chain works makes it difficult to discern what’s wrong in any part of that chain, making troubleshooting such issues less fun and puzzling.

Still, in a competitive market such is the city builder genre, Fabledom found its niche, and may it live there and thrive, happily ever after.

Reviewed on PC based on 1.0 release version. Review key provided by the publisher

8.3

Fabledom

Fabledom absolutely nails its pitch for a wholesome city builder. There's plenty of opportunities to create your aesthetically pleasing town, and the story objective of having to court another ruler is brilliant and unique.

  • Presentation 9
  • Gameplay 7.5
  • Content 8
  • Personal Enjoyment 8.5

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