Fabledom somehow passed me by, but darn if it isn’t leaving early access in about a week and a half. May 13th (unlucky for some) will see this fairytale kingdom city builder launch into 1.0, after a comparatively short but successful early access run on Steam. It looks very sweet, and reminds me of a kind of Foundation meets Lakeburg Legacies – at least based on the trailer, which puts an emphasis on it laid back and idyllic citybuilding, and love.
The people of Fabledom are called Fablings, and the trailer also implies, slightly unkindly, that they’ve been able to cultivate such a lovely way of life by being Hobbit-y dipshits that everyone else just avoids. As such, while everyone else does war and politics, the Fablings get to grow pumpkins and keep sheep and have lovely flower gardens. There is also some amount of war, because you can have an army, but the trailer also says that love is one of the few things a Fabling will fight for.
This is where it made me think of Lakeburg Legacies, a town management game where the only way to get new people into said town was state-enforced dating and marriage. Prospective partners for your singletons turned up with a number of skills and you could shoot for a good match and hope for marital harmony, or just bus in a terrible partner who could hunt well, or whatever you needed. In Fabledom, though, it seems you, the prince or princess of the realm, is on the market, and your marrige can have more macro effects.
The game’s most recent update was called A Wedding In A Chateau, which introduced nobles to visit your castle and potential husbands who might get into debt, and then you have to maybe cover his debts by skimming from the woodcutters or miners, reducing their output for a while. This is kind of a cool way of handling a marriage (bit Crusader Kings-y, maybe?) in this kind of strategy game. I like the idea that you can be married to a shithead that actively creates problems to you. Who knows, maybe they can add buffs sometimes too?
Around that of course is the usual building and resource gathering and supply lines, and what have you, but also some fairytale goings on with ogres, and a giant beanstalk. News ed Edwin said it made him want a Shrek townbuilder. You can enter an ill-advised royal relationship for yourself when the game is out on May 13th.