by Lately I’ve been testing a game called Fabledom which is currently in Early Access phase and I wanted to share my first impressions of it, as I think the game is pretty good and if they polish it up it could end up being a great title.
Fabledom is an indie simulation for the creation of a civilization and also of course for resource management (both things usually go hand in hand) in which we will have to create a town trying to cover all the needs of the people so that it is grow more and that allows us to continue building more and well… well, you know.
Everything takes place in a medieval context and the game has some interesting things such as a love relationship system (which is not too advanced in that sense in Early) and it even seems that later on we will be able to arm our inhabitants to defend our town / city or attack the others (I mean NPCs).
We can even have a hero (at least one for now) who can investigate strange areas like the cute tree that I will show you in the photo below. You can kill him or make friends with him (we’ll get an interesting buff ), I of course made friends with him, if you annihilated him I recommend you leave this blog… you soulless wretch!
Look how nice he is! Don’t even think about killing him, damn it!
In this post I will tell you a little about those things that have caught my attention and at the end I will talk about what I think could be improved. Let’s go there!
CREATE YOUR CIVILIZATION
As adorable as they are delicious.
The main premise of Fabledom is of course its best part, that of creating your town/city to your liking and adapting it to the needs of its citizens. I will make a list of things you can/should do to give you an idea:
- Create Houses : The inhabitants need houses to live, the first inhabitants that we can bring to our town will also demand a house with a garden (how clever they are), so you will have to manage your space well. Later you will be able to accommodate other types of inhabitants who will want to live in apartment blocks; they generate more money, but also require more resources.
- Create Paths : To facilitate the movement of your inhabitants. You will start with dirt roads, in my case I ended up unlocking some pretty nice stone roads that I ended up using and replacing with the dirt ones (which are pretty ugly).
- Provide them with Water : By creating a well that they must have nearby. Later you can create fonts.
- Provide them with Work : You will have some “ninis”, but the majority of citizens will have to work on something in order for the town to progress. It is important that the work catches them close to home, because if they go too far they will lose performance (because they will waste a lot of time going and coming back).
- Getting the Basic Resources : Wood, Stone, Food (we talk about this in more detail below) and Coal (in the part about Winter I explain) would be some of them. Then there are materials derived from these, such as a kind of wooden plates or stone bricks that we will be asked for in more advanced constructions. Regarding wood, it is important to place a Forestry building so that it is dedicated to replanting trees, so you will never run out of them.
- Provide them with Food : You will unlock different methods as you progress and you must make sure that you increase the production of food as the population increases (you must assign inhabitants to work on it). You can create vegetable gardens, wheat that you can later turn into flour to create bread or use the wheat itself for the Flying Pigs farm (yes, there are Flying Pigs in the game and they are very cool); this would be another building dedicated to generating food. In theory later they will add fishing, which must be quite key (I bought a piece of land with a piece of lake for nothing).
- Builders, Warehouses and Deliverymen : You will have to choose some inhabitants to carry out this type of work, something that you will need constantly. Food has its own Warehouse so to speak, which is the Granary.
- Provide them Happiness : The first thing will be to cover them with the basics such as food and water (and depending on the type of inhabitant it may require other things), but to further increase their happiness you can create buildings intended to give them a little entertainment such as the Inn or the Theater. There are also things that will bother them, such as having a Stonework nearby.
- Take care of their Health : As you progress the inhabitants can get sick, so you will need a Hospital.
And I’m sure I left something out, but broadly speaking it would be this. There are many things to do and take into account, and I have no doubt that even more things will be added as development progresses.
THE HARSH WINTER
Winter looks very nice, but it is the worst season in the game.
The game has its seasons system, the days will go by and we will end up changing seasons. I have not noticed a big difference in the Spring, Summer and Fall seasons; but be careful with winter since it is the hardest season and if you do not prepare well it is likely that you will lose some of your inhabitants.
This is because in Winter you can’t farm, so we will lose one of the biggest sources of food and since you don’t have enough food stored (the ants were right), it is likely that some citizens will starve to death.
But that’s not all, the cold will be another tough combatant since your villagers will require Coal to warm up if you don’t want their happiness to drop too much. It is quite difficult to get all the Coal necessary to cover this need in the coldest time of the year, but try at least; In my case, I have never managed to cover this aspect 100%, but anything you can help in that aspect will be well received.
I’ve played almost 10 hours of the game so far (I’m like year 8 or so) and I’m still intimidated by Winter. Oh, and I won’t even tell you about the famines that my inhabitants have suffered, on one occasion as a result of Winter, plus an event that I will mention below, plus a notorious increase in the population due to freaking out about the Blocks of Apartments… well I must have lost 20 inhabitants quietly (they died of hunger).
As your population increases, you will need a lot of food.
It took me a lot to get out of it, but in the end I got it and the truth is that it was quite gratifying to have solved it (but it took me a lot, everything is said, so be very careful). It is difficult to get out of a situation like this because as you lose inhabitants, they also stop covering jobs and therefore you produce less (and you will have to constantly re-manage jobs)… surely you will have to deal with it at some point, like this be prepared
THE EVENTS
Sans and Papyrus are now Stonecutters.
Also, events will spawn as you play (there are a lot of mini-events, but I want to talk about the big ones). As far as I’m concerned I only saw one of them (although it jumped me 2 times), which is the ” Witch’s Curse ” or something like that (which activates sometimes around Halloween and such).
When you skip you will see how all your villagers turn into skeletons (thus becoming much cooler) and even the music will become more “Halloweenesque” to create a more suitable atmosphere. The downside to this is that for I think 10 days, they will be twice as hungry, so you better have plenty of food.
It is horrifying because of what I was telling you about Winter, on top of that the event occurs in Autumn, so what will surely happen is that as a result of this your inhabitants reduce your food pantries a lot, so a harsh Winter awaits you. Oh, and if you think that when Winter passes the problems will end… nothing like that! The beginning of Spring will be very hard because the crops will not grow for two days.
THE SYSTEM OF LOVING RELATIONSHIPS
red flag. He only asks for things and gives nothing.
As I have already commented, it seems that it is not progressing too much today, so I don’t know if it will end up being something very powerful or it will remain something more subdued. Oh, and you can also make friends and even make an enemy (but that’s not available yet).
Regarding relationships, we will have to send them little letters (I call them ” Christmas “) or money to improve your friendship (they prefer money, obviously) and when things get more serious, they will ask you for gifts. I was flirting with a certain Agnes (the one in the photo, the only girl there right now; there’s a boy too, but he’s ugly as hell; I guess they’ll add more characters) and all she does is ask you for things . I suppose that all this topic will be useful later on, for now they are machines asking for attention, money and things (Agnes will ask us for the whopping amount of 150 Tulips I think I remember what it was).
WHAT COULD BE IMPROVED?
Don’t go crazy for the tower blocks like I did, start with something more humble or you will have to face a serious economic and resource crisis.
Below is a list of things that I think could be improved, some things I’ll leave out because this is Early Access and I’m sure they already take them into account, so I’ll try to mention things that aren’t too obvious:
- Spanish translation ????
- Aesthetically it looks good, but I think it could look even better. Something that bothers me a lot is that when you zoom back, a kind of fog appears (I’ll put a photo below) that prevents you from seeing the entire town correctly. I’m sure it’s an optimization issue, but it squeaks. It would also be cool if you could zoom back more as you foolishly end up with a large piece of land and it would be nice to be able to take a look at the full extent of it.
- The issue that we have to assign our inhabitants a job near their home is fine, but the game does not make managing this too easy . Many times I have had to gamble deallocating and reassigning workers to see if I can get them to fit in well. It would be nice to have a system that facilitates this management because as the population grows, this issue becomes more and more tedious.
- There are buildings that I think are missing (perhaps some already have it in mind) such as a Town Hall (it is rare not to start with a Town Hall that we can improve and allow us to manage things, an example would be to be able to manage jobs more efficiently work) in which we can manage various things and function as the center of the town. It would be nice to be able to change taxes or organize events in it… things like that.
- Another building that I think would be interesting would be to add a police station or something like that since it’s rare that all of our inhabitants are good citizens. It would be good to have a citizen control system for the well-being of all; it would be nice to see a thief running around and a policeman behind.
- A University to be able to train them in certain professions would be quite cool and that by doing so their performance in certain aspects is increased.
- I’m sure the developers will have a lot on their minds, but more events (minor and big) are needed. Christmas, Easter, that there may be fires, strong gales, tsunamis… that kind of thing.
- Let the seasons be more relevant. At the moment the change is only noticeable in winter. That, for example, in Spring the crops grow more, that some inhabitants have allergies to pollen and have to go to the Hospital or that in Summer you have to provide them with something to keep them cooler. It would be quite cool if they could bathe or go to the beach (with beach bars and such, that would be the key).
- That the Villagers have some characteristics. I don’t know, Traits, random stats… whatever; that some are more apt for some tasks than others (but that the job management system be further improved because if not, my goodness).
Here you can see more or less my town today. You can also see the subject of the fog that I was commenting on, which is quite grating to be honest. It looks like a lot of space because I just took the photo at the entrance of Winter and the crops went to the V.
And I’ll stop now because it could be like this for a long time, by being able to do many things, but obviously you have to see which of them are viable or really worth it in terms of development cost/results, that will have to be left in the hands of the study! We’ll see how 1.0 goes! The truth is that things do not look bad at all.
