Fabled Lands - Open World Sandbox Tabletop RPG

what's up guys and gals and welcome back to the nerd castle today in the world of indie games we're gonna be taking a look at a game called fabled lands this is kind of like i don't know i don't know how old my audience is at this point but this one's kind of like an old reference so when i was a kid there was these ideas of single-player kind of finding like fighting fantasy books and what they were was uh there was one that i had for star wars for example and you bought the book and what the book had is that it came with a number of dice and you played through the book basically as a single player rpg you made a character with a character sheet just like you otherwise would have if you're playing like dungeons and dragons or shadow run or any of those kinds of games but it was basically a self-encapsulated campaign inside of a choose your own adventure book with dice and skills and like a character sheet and you basically played through it on your own fabled lands is a conversion of one of those from the 90s so like right here at the forefront of this video i'm just gonna say that if you don't like rng and you don't like reading uh this is not the game for you you're gonna wanna go ahead and pull in about face right now this is a game that is targeting a very specific very niche demographic of gamers that are probably in their 30s somewhere that grew up playing these kinds of games i did not i only had like that one star wars book that you could do it with where you were like a jedi or whatever and you would go on jedi council missions and stuff like that but i am aware of these like i knew that they existed but largely i didn't really participate in them because i had d and d groups and stuff like that so i didn't really need to today we're going to take a look at the game and i'm gonna try to give you my first impressions and thoughts the game is out in 1.0 now they finally finished their early access as far as i understand it this is like a one or a two-man operation so this was made by like a very very small team uh but we're gonna dive on in and we're gonna take a look at it and we're gonna see what things can be done better what things could be done worse what things it's doing right so on and so forth and we're gonna do that for about 25-30 minutes if after watching this you wanted to check the game out for yourself i've got a link for you down below in the description i think it's on sale right now the normal price i think is about 20 for this game and so anyways let's go ahead and start it on off the links down there along with my twitch stream and my discord in case you wanted to swing through live at the beginning of the game the first thing we got to do is pick a character and one thing i actually think this game does really really well is the art this is a really pretty game like it's got a lot of good eye candy in here that makes the whole thing kind of pop i guess and my guess is that's probably what's going to draw a lot of people to the game is just the presentational style so we get to pick between a couple characters here we have the warrior andreal we have the mage shallower we have the priest ignacious we have the rogue grey malkin and we have the wayfarer varkung and then we have the troubadour estario and it's up to you which one you want to play i've spent most of my time prepping for this video playing as the warrior uh i feel like the warrior has really really let me down in a lot of ways um i i feel negative feelings when i look at the warriors so maybe we'll try something different here today i do like the idea of playing a wizard or maybe playing like what does the troubadour do so he's got really good charisma he's not that great at fighting he's okay at magic he's not that good at sanctity he's not that good at scouting if you're wondering what these are these are basically bonuses to your dice rolls the game more or less functions on a 1d6 or a 2d6 system and if you don't know what that means in the case of one d6 it means that you're rolling one six sided die trying to get the result that you want and then these things add on to it basically to give you a higher chance 2d6 means the same thing but you're rolling two dice with six faces in order to get the result that you want so our character is clearly really good at charisma he's not that he's okay at magic he's okay at thievery he's terrible at scouting uh he's pretty miserable at sanctity and he's like not that great at combat either i would say maybe we try out the wayfarer possibly i mean he does start out with a grizzly bear that hangs out with him like what's not to love about a grizzly bear so maybe we'll try this guy out i'm gonna go ahead and we'll just name him uh splat how about that we'll keep it oh my god i'm not on home row right now my life is a glowing husk of flaming wreckage and slag all right so anyways we have splat we can customize this guy a little bit if you want him to look like a certain way i'm going to give him more of a robin hood vibe right here it looks like we can also customize our bow i kind of like that one the best right there reminds me of the bow that i had when i was a kid kind of looks like that mine was made out of like fiberglass though but you know kind of similar as far as the items go oh those are the things on our pouch i guess i'll go with the little dagger like the little dirk right there the skein do although skein do goes in your sock anyways and then we can also pick oh look at that we can have little burbs that sit on our shoulder yeah sure dude why not we'll get the blessing of athena right here and we'll have a little outlet on our shoulder we've also got to pick our we've got to pick our difficulty i would pretty much recommend that everybody play this game on explorer you need to understand that this is an old school rpg in all the best and all the worst ways those two things are not mutually exclusive so if you've ever played first edition dnd or you've ever played a d and d you'll know exactly what i mean when i bring that up what i'm saying here is that life in this game is very untenable it hangs on by a very thin thread you're gonna die a lot if you play this game on classic mode and so before you go into classic mode you should just understand that like this game is going to kick you in the shins hard permadeath is enabled you can actually die and have to start over from like the beginning of the game there are saves but if you haven't saved in a while there are some events that are so bad that you might as well have killed your character so on and so forth this is not a game that's going to be for the faint of heart i guess is the disclaimer that i would put at the beginning of this this this is a game that is not going to pull punches and really kind of legitimately hates you so anyways explorer mode it basically gives you a flat plus one to all of your stats you get a lot more hp so that you're a lot more resilient and honestly that i found that playing on explorer the game is much smoother and when you face setbacks in explorer mode they are equally as bad as like classic mode but you recover from them easier just because you've got a lot of bonuses and things like that whereas recovering on classic mode can be very very difficult however because they've kind of like arranged this such that classic is like the middle difficulty i think most people are going to jump in on classic on their first run and they're going to find out the hard way that this game hurts we will play on classic today just because like i i think that's where most people are going to begin their journey but my recommendation is that if you are not familiar with fighting fantasy games you are not familiar with tabletop games that are actively out for your blood and want to slit your throat play on explore mode i bet you'll have a better time there's also a hardcore mode you can play since everything in this game kind of boils down to dice rolls i don't know if i would ever play iron man mode because like one bad dice roll can basically kill your character permanently but it's there it exists just in case you wanted to you know grind your tooth enamel down to bloody nubs i guess uh we'll go ahead and start out in classic mode and get this thing popping okay so i am going to skip this entire block of text right here batter to bedraggle you lie gasping for breath until you hear someone walking along the shore towards you wary of danger you lose no time getting to your feet confronting you as an old man clad in dirty loincloths his eyes have a feverish bright look that is suggestive of a mystic or a madman well what do we have here friends he says he's talking to somebody next to him but you're pretty certain he's alone looks like a washed up adventurer to me he says in an answer to his own question all wet and out of luck uh excuse me you shout above the hubbub in an attempt to grab the old man's attention he stops and stares at you is this the isle of druids yes it is i see that you're from afar land so it's up to me to welcome you to harkuna but i think you may have much to do here as it's written in the stars that someone like you would come destiny awaits you my friend follow me he heads off down the path into the hills you can see some kind of stone structure atop one of them all right let's scour the remnants of the washed shore you find a small vial holding a reddish concoction and you bless your good fortune when you recognize that it is a healing potion there we go all right so we will explore the island on our own because he's kind of like a very brief tutorial uh but this is the game right here this is what the game world looks like and honestly i think it's very very pretty i think it's a good looking game and they did a good job with kind of the watercolor inspired pastels and making the place look really really nice i think the character portraits look really nice i like the character designs as well unfortunately that's about as far as it's going to go this game contains like zero animation and like zero motion uh basically what's going to happen is you're gonna move your character to locations and they're just gonna kind of lifelessly slide along the ground until they get there combat works the exact same way you lifelessly slide around on hexagons and then like the pieces just kind of bump into each other and make a noise to imply an attack or dealing damage it's one of those things that i think this game could do just monumentally better in order to make it more immersive it's like instead of having the game piece slide along the map why didn't they have it like hop and tick like somebody's moving a board game piece basically like tick tick tick tick and then you get there you know like there's a bunch of things they could have done i think to inject really that board game playing by yourself in your room choose your own adventure flavor to the game and just it's not there but anyways for right now we can go into the forest you can really only move to things that are adjacent to you because the game is not on a grid sometimes it can be kind of hard to figure out what's adjacent and what isn't but anyways if it's lit up and it's labeled with kind of like one of those little banners or scroll works right there it means you can move to it the trees are packed leaning against each other as if in conference whispering quietly amongst themselves birds twitter in the distance and slivers of sunlight lance down through the musty gloom as you proceed along a forest track you think you hear a rustling in the bushes and later you spot a figure darting through the trees or was it your imagination an animal snuffling around right behind you makes you spin around but there's nothing there we got to make a scouting role luckily we're good at scouting so we have a pretty good chance of succeeding here there we go and so we've succeeded at scouting you struggle deeper into the forest until you come to a thick wall of impenetrable thorn bushes circling it you find there's a break in the hedge but it is filled by a large tree to your surprise a face forms in the trunk and speaks in a woody voice none can pass be gone human okay um what if i'm a really nice guy it doesn't matter we fail what a load of rotten leaves the tree says anybody can see you're as bad as the next team and in fact i'd say you're probably a lumberjack get lost um i mean we can attack the tree i don't know if it's gonna go well but we can do that like it may end really really poorly for me apparently i have five range and i can attack from here so maybe i'll do that who has the lowest hp there we go we'll fire an arrow at you so the game uses an ap system it appears as though there is some animation on the archer i've been playing the warrior and really the warrior like there's like a slight movement of the piece and then like a and then the enemy takes damage it's actually kind of lifeless but i am glad to see that there's arrows being fired right here from my archer at least some of the other characters have some interesting things going on they're gonna move up on me for right now i think i'm gonna summon my animal companion i don't know if he's gonna be helpful but off we go with a bear i guess look for the bear necessities okay he did two damage fair enough we'll end his turn the boar is going to move up we can't attack the tree i'm gonna move back to here and i'm gonna take an attack of opportunity just to kind of like get a little gap in between me and him and then my bear is gonna attack again and we'll end his turn i didn't know really what the boar was gonna do oh we got a minimum damage roll so the tree didn't die lovely okay so the tree is apparently down we did five damage right there i would like to see like damage numbers or something going up instead of constantly having to watch the the enemy boars health bar over here ow i've been struck you're out of ammo can we just like default attack is that a thing that we can do it looks like i can attack with my fists i don't think that's gonna go very well though then again i get to punch a board at death which i think is really gonna exacerbate the legend of my character we're a little bit scuffed we could be in better shape stop i surrender yells the tree you may pass in view of recent events it says begrudgingly it then uproots itself with a great tearing sound and shuffles out of the way there you go you can pass you walk through the thornbush gate and beyond you find oak trees whose branches are so big they can support the homes of many people well hopefully they're not that upset about me whooping their guardian welcome to the city of trees says a woman dressed in the druids garbs the city's been built amidst the branches of several mighty oaks ladders run up and down the trees to houses that perch like nests in the branches you are not allowed into any of the houses but the druids allow you to barter at the market i would like some arrows i didn't realize that i was operating under limited ammunition here uh yes all the arrows in the world except i need to save enough to heal myself so i guess i'll buy five arrows that's fine and then i'll have enough to heal when i go to town there are full shop interfaces i think these are done very tastefully i think they look very good they kind of remind me of the old menu interfaces for like world of warcraft or like older games like that i think it looks perfectly fine all of the icons are presentable they look like what they are supposed to be i would recommend that our character get an offhand weapon that we can use to smack an enemy in the face just in case but for now we'll probably wait it out until we have some more mun muns dude we're a little bit broke uh we can go to the druids leader you are brought before the leader the oak druid a bearded fellow with with earth and leaves all tangled up in his hair he asks you to perform a service for him take this oak staff to the willow druid in the forest of larun the sacred grove where he lives will be hard to find but i'm sure you can do it the willow druid will give you something to bring back to me and when you return with it i will make your techniques of tracking in your wilderness lore even better okay well we've picked up the druid stick i guess so there it is i will carry your stick with great effect to faraway lands my friend off we go to the town all right so inside of towns i'm not going to read all this stuff over here but anyways inside the town there's a number of features that you can interact with most towns kind of have these features uh you can go to a stash where you can put your stuff sometimes you have to buy a house in town in order to do that this game does incorporate like property ownership just in case you were wondering we can go to the inn and we can get ourselves healed up right there which is why i saved the money it's usually one dollar per health that you restore in case you were wondering what the conversion rate looks like right there we can go to the temple and inside the temple i think we can get a job over here the shrine is set in a wooded grove let's talk to the priestess i guess the priest is dressed in silken robes and wearing a wreath of oak says i have need of an adventurer for arcane reasons involving secret mysteries of lacuna i need the tusk of a boar a werebore in fact if you hunt him down and bring me its tusk i will teach you how to be a better scout everybody wants me to be better at scouting all right well let's go see if we can find the boar off we go into the woods last time we were so repugnant that we got attacked by a tree hopefully it goes better this time [Music] i failed my scouting role unfortunately you realize that you were completely lost in a magical forest and you wander around for days barely able to find enough food and water you lose health lovely [Music] actually it might be the coast that we need to go to for the wereboar let me look yeah i think we got to go to this coastal area to find the where bore yeah there it is uh so as you can see we roll dice and things happen if we roll a two to a five we end up getting attacked by a highwayman so on and so forth uh we rolled a four so we are attacked by a highwayman two brigands leap out of hiding and menace you with their swords one is behind you one is in the front give it up they advise money's not worth getting killed over run a third brigand who would remain hiding in case you made a break for it leaps up and loses an arrow which strikes you and you lose a stamina but we've got to make a scouting role to escape and we did make the scouting roll you lose your pursuers and continue on your journey uh most of these events are repeatable that's one thing that i actually find to be a little bit jarring about the game but that's kind of hearkening back to the fact that this is drawn directly from a book is that like i found hey we got the wereboard that we needed for our quest nice a werbor and ornate armor comes thundering out of the undergrowth near the road with a raised spear there is no chance of retreat or surrender in this battle okay let's take it let's do our thing i'm going to summon my bear that way i can maybe create some form of gap to like live and block him off i am going to fire an arrow at him unfortunately it looks like we rolled a three and we needed a roll of five okay well there you go the bear hit him for two hp so that's kind of nice and we just struck him for a little bit more the bear is now down we spent a lot of money killing that wereboar right there but like hopefully it's good enough the creature's armor is too heavy to suit you but you can take a hunting spear in his tusk grab your acquisitions and continue onwards so there's the trophy tusk right there and then there is the spear the good news here is that gives us an offhand weapon that we can equip just in case we run out of arrows which seems exceedingly likely given the fact that we have no money and like this game is kind of stingy with how it rewards you when you're on this initial island like we killed the wereboar but he didn't drop anything like vendorable or whatever like we could take back the quest item and we'll get like a plus one to our scouting but what we really need is like three dollars to heal ourselves they do tooltip stuff so it will tell you roughly where you need to go in order to get quests done we'll go ahead and drop this off with the priestess the priestess is wearing the skin of a wolf and covered in red paint welcomes you gleefully at last the tusk the ceremony can go ahead she rewards you with knowledge so we've gained plus one scouting what does a blessing cost 25 okay i can't afford that i'm too poor there's nothing to explore here so i think what i'll do is we'll go to the obsidian stones and we're gonna start kicking off let me close that down real fast i need to figure out where we need to go this is the world map as it stands right now uh you can go to all of these places it is open world there's nothing stopping you from once you land on the mainland from just walking off in a direction and seeing what happens and honestly that's kind of the best way that i would describe this game like you really they shouldn't call this game fabled lands they should call it roll dice see what happens because that's really kind of how the game transpires and usually what happens is you wind up beating bloody and brutalized in a ditch but like sometimes it works out sometimes maybe but anyways back over to here let's go and step through an archway i don't know where we need to go to uh looks like in order to drop that off with the druids we need to go to yellowport so maybe that's where we'll start out is we'll go to yellowport from here if you step through an archway you can go to yellowport marlock or wishport let's go to yellowport you step through the archway and immediately the symbols on the stone glow with red hot energy your hair stands on end and your body tingles a crackling nimbus of blue white forest engulfs you the sky darkens and thunder and lightning crash and leap across the heavens suddenly your vision fades and everything goes black see what i would have liked to have seen right there from that animation is like they put so much work into just like this static art for the game like what i would have liked to have seen right there is actually like lightning coming down striking your character fizzling out along the ground and then your character like falling down basically like it's just a couple more frames for each character that like would have increased the immersion of this experience because it seems like that's what they're going for by like tenfold but instead everything's kind of static and unanimated and i just don't know if i'm a fan of it when your site returns you find yourself at the gates of a large city set on an ochre-colored river a vile stink of brimstone permeates the air you wrinkle your face up in disgust and gag involuntarily welcome to yellowport says a passing merchant okay a bunch of flavor text right here apparently this place is all about like farming sulfur or something and everything is yellow and so it's stinky like egg farts okay that's all you need to know about yellow port and we do need to figure out a way to get ourselves some money and most of the quests in town are going to be too difficult for us so like let's maybe set off i'm gonna save my game too in case we die because there's a pretty good chance that we're gonna die there like there's there's a non-zero chance that we're gonna wind up dead let's head on down the riverbank because we gotta drop off this stick uh we've got to take an event so that's basically the structure of this game is that you move to a tile you roll dice to see what happens something good happens or something bad happens and then you roll the dice again on the next tile as you make your way from location to location uh these stay static so like every single time we come to the stinking river it will be these same four events i honestly think that like the implementation of a day night cycle with a set of four events that only happen from like eight to twelve o'clock from like one to five o'clock from like six to ten o'clock so on and so forth would have made the game a little bit more robust and a little bit more variable but it kind of is what it is it's a translation of a book uh we rolled a one so we got stung by an insect stung by a large insect you are now stung so our coun our combat has been nerfed by -1 feels bad all right what's over here the main road between marlock city trefoil and karen beru is well maintained with regular guard posts the sikharians are nothing if not efficient now we rolled a four it was uneventful i'll take that over getting stung by another woodland creature uh let's go up to the road tavern you join the much traveled road that connects trefoil and car on beru uh the traffic mostly consists of convoys and troops and supplies and we can't really do anything here so they wanted me to take this into the forest of laroune i guess i'll do it the forest of laroune is a mighty swath of densely packed trees a slice of primordial nature in the middle of a busy industrious saccara you thread your way through the ranks of trees and in places the forest canopy almost blocks out the sunlight completely you are wandering in deep shadow haunted by the cries of creatures of the forest you are on a quest to take the oak staff to the willow druid we've got a 72 percent chance of succeeding we succeeded you come across a forest glade birds twitter in the trees the woodland animals frolic playfully about in the middle of the glade stands a mighty willow ancient beyond reckoning the trunk is hollow okay and the wooden door has been set into the entrance and you step into the glade we've got to roll a nine or higher with a plus three sanctity now we failed your mind is blasted into numb confusion by the protective spells that guard the grove you wander off aimlessly into the forest and get lost for days you don't even have the wit to eat and drink feels bad so we have failed that quest unfortunately uh and it has dumped us out on apparently the other side of the forest all right uh we don't have any money and there's really nothing for us to do here so i'm gonna travel back and maybe someday we'll make some cash uh the road is blocked by wagons and supply convoys a troop of soldiers forces its way through the throng the men bang heads indiscriminately to clear people out of the way uh we are mistaken for a beggar you are mistaken for a beggar and get 10 shards from a passing priest well at least something good happened to me thank god let me go ahead and i'm going to rest until i'm fully healed that's the duration of what i can do with my money and then i don't know [Music] the forest again hey we finally made the scouting roll it took me four or we made the sanctity roll it took me four or five tries like these events don't go anywhere uh which leads to kind of like the circular gameplay of just repeatedly banging your head against roles that you know you can make because you've got a 60 chance to make them and just taking the consequences the good news is that i got mistaken for a beggar like five times while i was walking down the road so now we have money too so that's pretty cool when in doubt pretend like you're a beggar i guess you are pious enough to be allowed to enter the sacred grove you step in and knock on the door if i was pious enough to carry the staff couldn't they put like a sigil or something on it that protected me from the wards i don't like these druids man these druids these druids are dubious these are low quality shabby druids a kindly old druid opens the door and greets you yeah he's real kindly he only puts mind melting wards on his door uh you hand him the staff thank you he says an oak staff hey interesting message to be sure he hands you 50 bucks his payment and a willow staff saying take this to the oak druid in the city of trees on the isle of druids i'm sure he will reward you as well thanks again okay apparently they communicate through the gifting of sticks i've been banged on the head unfortunately you get banged on the head by what i don't know by whom indescribable just banged on the head that frequently happens while i'm driving down the 80 i just randomly get clunked on the head and have no idea what happened that's a thing that transpires let's go to triffwa and see what we can do here hey we found a sword nice dude something that i can sell for money and maybe make my character better so i stopped just sucking because we suck we're not very good all right let's go to the shop and we will sell the sword we've got a hundred and ten dollary dues to play around with now i need arrows first and foremost yeah hit me with like a hit me with like an eight stack of arrows there we go i need ammunition for the road apparently there's oh i thought it was a i thought it was a bullet for a gun i got excited for a second uh we wanted armor is there any armor in here am i even wearing armor i do i have a leather gambeson on so we do have armor at least that's something so if you're wondering how you make your character better you buy these scrolls down here and these scrolls like make your character like better at stuff they give you like a bonus basically based on what you have equipped there's lots and lots of books for like magic spells and stuff like that i i just didn't know like people are probably curious about how the advancement works because there's no like xp meet or anything but it does say that we're rank one over here oh yeah i have sting fever how do i get sting fever off me i've been stung uh 75 bucks to get the sting taken off of me 30 if i become the follower of one of these gods apparently there's maca which is the god of disease we've got elnir as a god of the sky and kings okay apparently he can't cure me of my sting boo-boos though what's this other guy over here alvir and valmir they're the king and queen of the waves okay and then like what are these guys right here tyr and i the god of war uh maybe i'll become an initiate of the god of the sky sure becoming an initiate of el nir gives you the benefit of paying less for blessings and other services that the temple offers it costs you 60 bucks to become an initiate ain't that the way it always goes you can't that's like they they always give you the first thetan reading for free man every single time i don't know if i want to pay 60 bucks to become a member of a cult so i think i'm gonna just kind of like move along there's a trade guild apparently i can stash my money here given the amount of events in this game that rob you of your entire purse probably not the worst idea in all honesty oh but you can't pick a number to put in that's really unfortunate uh they should definitely add that it should just say deposit shards right here and then withdraw shards and then you get rid of all these other options other than go back and then you click on it and a little dialog box pops up and asks you how much you want to put in or take out confining it to stacks of 100 is kind of an odd decision i'm guessing that's from the 90s game book would be my estimate um i do need to how much is it for me to go back to the isle of druids 15 bucks all right back to the isle of druids we go hopefully not to get mangled by any trees or wereboars oh i've got to do another scouting role fair enough there we go we found the city of trees to the druid uh you give the willow staff to the oak druid thank you he says a willow staff i see as a reward the druid lets you train with the city of trees best hunters and trackers okay so we've gained a rank our hp has been permanently increased by two we just healed up the max hp and we got a whole bunch of scrolly boys so we've got an archery scroll we got a weapon scroll oh i only got to pick one oh no dude well i thought i got to take all of them it does say choose one of the following items curse me in my inability to read literacy yet again you have cost me it's all good we've got the bow so like the bow scroll is not the worst thing to take when you're effectively a ranger so like that's fine could have been worse luckily what i do like about the scrolls is that they give you a bonus to pretty much like everything of the type so with a bow we get 30 critical hit chance it's not bad 30 is pretty beefy unfortunately it didn't give me any money so we're going to kind of take a net loss here unfortunately luckily the scrolls are really expensive uh but did i mention there's a robust trade system in this game like you can actually play this game as a trader like you don't even need to be like an adventurer you could kind of just do whatever you want um you can actually just move products around and make money that way if you really really want to we've arrived back at yellow port and we've kind of got to decide what we want to do next maybe i'll just kind of like tool around this area i don't know we got to make some money man i'm poor we rolled a 3. nothing happens well that's better than getting stung in the ball by a hornet so i'll take it hey we found another sword nice uh these repeatable events it's a really good idea to commit them to memory uh that way like if you have committed them to memory you know how to resolve them we caught a fish a smolder fish you can take the smolder fish to one of these villages here and sell it okay so the stinking river has cut its way through the high ground here on the edge of the chasm that overlooks the river lies the village of high ferris the locals are behaving strangely you watch the villagers lay out a fine feast on the village green a pig is set roasting on a spit loaves of freshly baked bread are piled beside bowls of overflowing fruit butter and cheese lastly the richest merchants of the village bring coffers full of silver what they put by the table to your amazement instead of sitting down to dine they scurry home and start closing the shutters on their windows what goes there why do you behave so oddly they seem frightened of you but one old fellow replies the banquet is for the ghosts of the travelers who lost their way in a storm and fell into the mill pond and drowned when was this seven years since they come every year on this night and if we don't placate them with victuals and treasure there's a mess of trouble how do you know that old megan told us she said she knows many things ah we'll watch for the ghosts we're a hero why not from the cover of a hedge you wait until dusk by now all the villagers are safely indoors with their shutters tightly barred as the sky is turning from velvet indigo to starlit blackness you see three pale figures come loping across the green from the direction of the mill pond they must be the ghosts seeing the banquet they utter gleeful cries and start to devour what has been out for them they're set out for them oh boy magic roll huh i was going to say unless we roll like double sixes we're not getting that one the moon rises making the ghosts glow they sit hunched over the feast like vultures occasionally stirring their hands in the pile of silver and tittering eerily i'll confront them as you stride forward they look up with expressions of luminous rage get ye back mortal one warns or i'll touch you with my grave cold hands and it'll be your dying day no i'm good they seem alarmed to see you charge forward undaunted as your first blow lands solidly and you hear a grunt of pain you know for a fact that these aren't ghosts but these are people of flesh and blood i've got bad news though oh we've got a really good hit chance nice well take that then nerd i'll deploy the bear in a second deploy tactical bear are we on the tactical bears turn we are good fantastic that guy's gonna move up i'll probably start off by shooting this guy yeah that's half his health down ow i've been struck all right tactical bear has claimed his first victim and then we killed another bandit right there so we may actually be in okay shape here oh dude you murdered my bear what does that do mark a single target you get 50 damage bonus i should probably use that hey four damage we killed him hooray for us yeah for the combat animations i would have very much liked to it like it didn't even need to be a lot of accompaniment either visually like they really all they had to add was just one still frame of your archer drawing his bow and aiming and then making the bow shot sound and then going back to this idol stance right here and like i feel like it that like simple change right there for each of the characters i think would have added quite a bit to the game in all honesty and it didn't even need to be like a high fidelity animation just like your archer drawing his bow and aiming it and then flip and the arrow comes out and then it goes back to this stance right here it's one of those little things that i really feel like they should have added you soon have laid the figures out like logs on the green they are badly hurt but alive you get a better look at them and you see that they're dusted with flour giving them a spectral appearance you summon the other villagers at first they are loathe to venture out and inspect the strangers but the fact that you survive convinces them that there's no ghosts to worry about wyatt's old megan cries a man as he claps eyes on one of the three and there's bradach the miller and lame putmar why are they all covered in flower where are the ghosts you shake your head and sight the stupidity of these yokels there weren't any ghosts it was these three all along out of gratitude the villagers give you eighty dollars you did not wait around to see what fate befalls the accomplices in theory they should be taken to the sizes in the nearest town but the feelings run so deep in this case that you suspect there's gonna be some rough justice meted out you continue your journey yeah this is one of those games that i don't really know what to say about it like because it's a one for one adaptation of a choose your own adventure rpg book and it does that well i've never played it but from what i've seen so far it very much reminds me of that book that i had when i was a kid for star wars like this game is targeting a very specific niche of nostalgia and people that enjoyed those from back in their childhood i think if you're looking for like a fail forward adventure uh you would be much better served going with something like disco elysium or something like citizen sleeper because those games i i think do most of the stuff that this game does but like better and more immersive and more video gamified however if you specifically remember those old fighting fantasy books and whatnot and you want to relive the glory days of your youth basically doing a one for one conversion of those things in digital form i think you'll probably have a good time i do think that the rng is really gonna make a lot of people grind their teeth about this one because like there is a lot like i walked around this road like four times redoing that event inside the forest until i got the dice roll that i wanted and there's not a lot of variability to the events like i would like to see multiple ways to conclude certain events instead of being forced to make that mysticism roll right there you know what i mean like why not let me use my charisma to call out to the druid inside the trunk and like just giving the player two or three options of like what skill to use when they go up to an event i think would have assuaged like some of the hurt feelings that you get from the rng because then at least prior to that you had some level of agency but i find that with this game a lot of the events directly railroad you into like one dice roll and if that dice roll does not match up with the skills that your character inherently has either baked into him or otherwise developed you find yourself doing what i did which is walking around the horn over and over and over again redoing the dice roll until eventually you blind luck your way through it which at that point it's kind of like okay well you know i'm not quite as satisfied now it's an odd game and honestly that's why i hope people don't think i'm being too heavy-handed on this one here today because my goal is not to say that the game is bad that's not the ultimate intent this is a game out of its time and so like if you grew up playing stuff like chainsaw warrior or those little single-player rpgs that were read out of a singular novel with some dice along the way or you played like first edition or second edition d and d like this game is very much targeting that nostalgia and i'm aware of how many of you go and buy games after i put up a video and so i just wanted to make that abundantly clear this is not an rpg that is seeking out to establish like large market dominance this is a game that is very much a digital adaptation of another game that was very much a product of its time and so if you enjoyed things like chainsaw warrior and whatnot and played them as they came out this is gonna very much feel like you've been drawn back into the past by that nostalgia and you'll probably enjoy it a lot but if you're looking for like a slick modern rpg with all of the accompaniment that comes along with that this is by no means that game it's just not that modern and so anyways i love the art style i love the soundtrack i think the game looks and sounds utterly fantastic i've already talked about some of the adaptations that i feel like should have been made to combat and so honestly if you're looking for a trip down memory lane this might not be a bad choice but anyways my name is flatter cat i sift through the pile of fun what's worthwhile in the world the indie games every single day so you don't have to today we had fabled lands tomorrow we will have something else thank you for the luxury of your attention and i will see you all tomorrow bye everybody

Channel: SplatterCatGaming

Views: 136,960

Keywords: fabled lands gameplay, fabled lands walkthrough, fabled lands playthrough, fabled lands review, lets play fabled lands, fabled lands preview, fabled lands impressions, fabled lands guide, fabled lands tutorial, fabled lands trailer, fabled lands soundtrack, fabled lands music, fabled lands boss, fabled lands download, fabled lands release, fabled lands steam

Id: vzVMN-VA4GA

Length: 40min 36sec (2436 seconds)

Published: Sat May 28 2022