Game Review – Fable
Developer: Playground Games
Publisher: Xbox Game Studios
Platforms: Xbox Series X|S, PC
Year: 2025
The original Fable was one of my favorite games on the original Xbox. That weird British humor. The morality system where you’d grow horns if you were evil. Peter Molyneux promising features that didn’t exist. Good times.
This reboot from Playground Games — the Forza Horizon people, weirdly enough — captures some of that magic. Not all of it. But some.
The new Albion is gorgeous. Say what you want about open world fatigue, when a studio knows how to build environments it shows. Rolling hills. Fairy tale forests. Villages that look like they were designed by someone who actually read fantasy novels instead of just copying Tolkien. The art direction is doing heavy lifting here.
The humor is. Present. British dry wit. NPCs who comment on your appearance if you’ve been eating too many pies. Chickens that you can kick. It’s trying to be charming and it mostly succeeds even if some of the jokes feel focus-grouped.
Combat is fine. Action RPG stuff. Melee, ranged, magic. You can mix and match. Build variety is decent. Nothing revolutionary but solid enough that fighting things doesn’t feel like a chore. The boss fights are a highlight — big set pieces with actual mechanics instead of just “hit the thing until the health bar empties.”
But. Here’s my issue.
The game is shallow. Not in a broken way, just in a “this is 20 hours of content stretched to 40” way. The main quest is engaging. The side content is. There. Collectibles. Fetch quests. Clear the camps. Standard open world padding that we’ve been doing for fifteen years now.
The morality system — which was THE thing about Fable back in the day — feels vestigial. Your choices matter in small cosmetic ways but the game doesn’t really commit to letting you be evil. You can be “mischievous” at best. It’s moral training wheels.
I wanted more. I wanted the game to take risks the way the original did. To be weird. To let me marry forty people and have them all discover each other. To let me be a genuine villain if I wanted. Instead I got a very polished, very safe action RPG with Fable branding.
It’s fun while it lasts. I had a good time. The British humor works on me and the world is pretty enough to explore. But when I finished I felt. Nothing. Which is maybe the worst thing a Fable game can make you feel.
Charming but shallow. There’s your pull quote.
My rating: ★★★☆☆
