Telstar Electronic Studios, 1996
Fable is one of those fantasy adventure games that I played due to its excellent graphics, an eye candy, created by a former Disney graphics artist and animator. However, the game has a few glitches that some time really annoy the players and take away the fun and excitement they are having, which also include the clumsy interface. But, despite these flaws the game story line is quite engrossing, which is additionally spiced up with humorous and good quality dialogues and jokes. In the game, you play as Goodthorpe, a young lad from the village of Balkhane, who sets out on a quest to save Fable, his home planet, by slaying four evil beasts and retrieving four precious crystal stones. These four stones are the only way to restore the peace and harmony on Fable, but easy said then done, for your quest will take you through four perilous lands, which are ice, water, mist and fire. While exploring these lands you may encounter death at many occasions and one wrong move or answer will make earn you this penalty so save early and save often is your only chance of survival.
The inventory-based puzzles are reasonably good and sometime quite hard to solve by less professional players. There is a very tedious maze to cross in the game and the worst things is that you have to go through this ordeal if you miss or forget to do something before crossing the maze. The point-and-click interface, which annoyed me a lot in this game is nothing but tiresome clicking of left and right mouse button used to close many dialogue windows that pop open on the screen. Overall, the game is quite good and I do recommend it to all adventure gamers but make sure that you play the US released version. Oh yeah, the US version because the European version had a bad and abrupt ending and was criticized by many gamers, so SirTech amended the game and added a different ending in the US version.
