Gather around my loyal subjects and let me regale you with a fantasy tale of how this old gamer loves a city builder or two. In fact, it was my review of The Settlers on Switch that helped put What’s It Like on the map. There’s something so satisfying about setting up supply chains and orchestrating a perfect symphony of production, economy, and military strength. I was under the impression that Fabledom was going to provide a more “light” experience similar to a basic Sim City clone, yet like any good fable, there are twists, surprises, and the occasional monster bug that needs slaying. What’s It Like? Gather some wood, make some coal, and make sure you have enough veggies for the winter as we review Fabledom on Nintendo Switch.
Fabledom by Greena Games puts you in the boots of a King or Queen of a randomly generated land and tasks you to start building a small village, and turn it into a bustling hamlet. That’s about it to start with, so you get started unpacking the supplies your denizens, or Fablings came with, and get going. It can be a bit slow-paced to start with, but eventually, you will start welcoming new Fablings to your Village and hit milestones that unlock new rewards and increase your tech tree which in turn allows you to build more complex systems and even welcome in different citizen classes who can fulfill different roles. You can even welcome powerful hero units to participate in random quests that appear sporadically on the map, usually offering both monetary and cosmetic rewards. I even managed to grow a beanstalk and sent my hero to explore, he passed his quests and I was able to build a Golden Goose pen in which I could sacrifice grain for gold.
This is where the surprising depth of Fabledom comes into play, as you have to balance staffing facilities, housing, supply chains, and of course, Fabling’s satisfaction, hunger, and health. Food won’t grow in the winter months, so players need to be diligent with setting up supply chains and storage to get them through a bad season. While it all seems a lot to manage, the game slowly and carefully introduces mechanics as you go along to help you solve these problems as the pop-up. The game also gives you quests to achieve like stockpiling a certain amount of food or donating wood to a cause. These quests usually provide decent monetary rewards to fill your coffers and expand on your town with new buildings.
Building is rather simple with a simple place/rotate structure but there is a twist as the game features customisable building in the sense that you can add extras into a house such as an outhouse which increases housing desirability, or an apple tree to help provide food without relying on farms. This can also be set to auto for those looking to just plop a building down and move on, but the option to customise is always a welcome one. Once you have mastered building you also have to master diplomacy, by sending a messenger out to neighboring kingdoms in which you can woo or war with, creating strategic partnerships. It works similarly to Civilisation 6’s system, allowing you to send gifts and supplies, and eventually set up embassies and even marry fellow rulers! Fabledom manages to include complex systems that are easy to use, or sometimes ignore if you feel like you want to play at your pace, and sometimes, it’s just wonderful watching your town sprout up into a bustling city.
As mentioned, like any fable told, there are challenges that you as the player may have to overcome to enjoy Fabledom on the Nintendo Switch. Firstly, the graphics look a little basic, as they have been obviously reduced to get it to run on the switch. While you can still see the grain shimmering in the wind, taking a slightly closer look will reveal crude two-dimensional sprites that are very rough around the edges. The same goes for trees and foliage in the game. There are a few performance hitches when moving about town as well, and autosaving tends to hitch the system for a good few seconds, but while you’re frozen in place, the game still reads your inputs, often flinging your view to the other side of the map, leaving you to find your way back. It wasn’t game-breaking for me, but I can see it being frustrating for most players. Then we have some major bugs like my UI disappearing, forcing me to reload a save in which my UI came back, but my cursor disappeared, forcing me to exit to the home screen and restart the game. This major bug only happened to me once, but it really broke my immersion in the game and I was really invested in that particular moment.
Aside from the bugs, the game still does a great job of world-building, and dulcet whimsical piano tones whisk you away into this fantasy land. For my City builders looking for accessibility options, there are no specific options for accessibility. You can, however, turn off the film grain look and remove the vignette, helping with visibility. You can slow your cursor speed, and pause game time if you need to take a moment to think about things, instead of reacting on the fly. As always, I recommend further research to see if Fabledom is for you.
Fabledom is like a rough-cut gem. There is a lot of value and enjoyment to be had here, but it’s a little unrefined and may have some sharp edges, but if I’m being honest, it’s exactly what I wished the Settlers to be way back when I started this channel. Its fun, casual, yet surprisingly deep management systems allow you to play your way, and it’s incredibly satisfying to see your burgeoning village, develop into a large city. It may have some graphical issues and the autosave pauses, but it still does an amazing job of drawing the player into this amazing city-builder game that has almost everything you could ask for. All it’s missing is an update or two to smooth it out, and then we could all live happily… ever… after…
So, What’s it Like? Fabledom like Civilisation, crossed with The Settlers.
In the interest of full disclosure, a review copy was provided by the publisher, but this doesn’t influence my score.
