Fable

Spoiler alert for this review: there’s an admittedly-telegraphed plot development about midway through Fable’s relatively short run time that I have to address to properly discuss it, and turning the review into a Swiss-cheese of blurry text didn’t seem like a good idea.

I try not to pay too much attention to what a game is called: for me at least, coming up with a name is usually a slow, agonizing process that ends when I can’t stand to think about it anymore, so I try to do unto others as I would have done unto me and glide right past them. That was simple enough for me to do when starting Fable: is there a more generic title imaginable for a fantasy game? But after I finished, I wound up going back to it and worrying at it like a sore tooth: a fable is a simple story leaning heavily on allegory with an instructive moral at the end, perhaps with some anthropomorphized animals along the way, but what we’ve got here is a somewhat-convoluted teen melodrama whose central dilemma appears monstrous if you apply a lens of morality rather than romance to it. Don’t get me wrong, as melodrama it’s effective, albeit breathlessly paced, but I’m not sure that the questions the title invites are to its benefit.

The game introduces a lot of characters, situations, and prophecies in its first few passages, but it quickly becomes clear that much of it is secondary to the romantic obsession of Kel, the primary character: he’s long been in love with his best friend, Ronan, who himself is in love with Kel’s twin sister (I’ll admit that being myself a twin, I found the awkwardness of this setup excruciating, but it’s all fair enough by genre standards, I suppose – there’s nothing here more twisted than what’s in Star Wars). Then Ronan suddenly gets chosen to go on a quest – this is that prophecy, it’s pretty hand-wavey – and when he returns a year later, he’s changed, most notably by seeming to reciprocate Kel’s interest this time, though of course there’s plausible deniability. There are choices through this section, mostly coming down to leaning into the flirtation or playing hard to get, which is an engaging way of playing a romance, but it does suffer somewhat by the dial being immediately jammed to 11 and staying there. Nearly every passage ends in grasping towards big emotions, and yeah, I remember being a teenager, this is pretty much how it was, but the dialogue does sometimes buckle under the load:

“Do you know what it’s like to love you?”

At once, Ronan falls still.

“It’s finally understanding that this is what the bards sing about.” You squeeze your eyes shut. “So this is how I bleed.”

In the silence that follows, you blink back open your eyes, only to find a peculiar expression spasming across Ronan’s face.

(The emotion, thankfully, is not extreme mortification).

Throughout, though, there are intimations that there’s something off with Ronan, and the first half culminates in the revelation that he’s not really Ronan – which triggers a short flashback to the (much more sedately and evocatively written, I found) quest, where a psychic parasite named Jamie brain-jacked Ronan; it’s Jamie who’s returned and is into you. Barely has he been established as a mind-possessing fiend than he turns to lovestruck idiot, though, because as soon as Kel tumbles to what’s going on, he offers to release his hold (it was unclear to me whether this guaranteed his permanent discorporation) and allow Ronan to take his body back, free and clear. The climax, then, comes down to the choices you have Kel make to navigate this situation – as far as I could see, there’s no direct “keep Ronan’s consciousness shoved down an oubliette forever” path, but you can drag out the process for a while.

Again, as melodrama, this is a solid series of twists, though I think the pacing is a bit too breakneck for each to have as great an impact as it could. The bigger issue goes back to the title: if you don’t think about it too hard, a lovelorn seventeen-year-old torn between doing what he knows is right and finally having someone who desires him is dramatic enough. But if you splash some cold water on yourself first, holy crap: this dude has just about killed your best friend, who you’ve been in love with for years, but because he seems like he’ll put out and he’s wearing your crush like a skin-suit, you’re vacillating about what to do? Unless the moral here is meant to be that the terminally horny are too depraved to think straight, it’s hard to walk away from this feeling especially sympathetic to Kel’s angst. There’s a version of the game that leans into that discomfort – it’d certainly be risky to acknowledge the terrible things he’s contemplating and explore some of the darker aspects of desire. By calling itself a fable, Fable opens the door to that reading, which meant that I couldn’t help feeling a bit disappointed that instead the game glides over these implications. In the final sequence, Ronan and his sister just pat Kel on his back and sympathize with his pain after it’s all over – I’m not sure that he’s learned anything.