Fabledom Early Access Impressions – A Foundation Worth Building On

Fairy tales have captivated humanity for as long as people have sat around the hearthfire and told each other stories. From Cinderella’s lost slipper to the child-eating Abiyoyo, narratives of magic and monsters are ubiquitous across the world — and developer Grenaa Games is looking to capture that magic with their upcoming city builder Fabledom. Set to release in Early Access on April 13th, Fabledom looks primed to stand out in the genre, thanks to both its fairy tale setting and its focus on inter-kingdom romance and warfare. I got a chance to try the latest Fabledom build, and while it’s far from complete, it’s also clear that Grenaa have worked hard to create a fun, playable, and bug-free base from which to iterate.

Much of Fabledom, especially the first hour or two, will be eminently familiar to anyone who’s played other recent city builders. All the usual stuff is here: you start by building houses to ensure you can accept new citizens — er, “fablings” — then work on collecting basic resources, which allows you to tech up to more advanced resources and structures that your citizens begin to demand as your population grows. However, Fabledom offers some twists on the formula.

For starters, the standard peasant housing is modular, and there are 7 different attachments you can add to the plot of land you assign each homestead. These modules can provide food or desirability to the home, but also serve to add variety to the visual appearance of your neighborhoods. Currently, you can only place 2 attachments in each homestead, but given that you’re able to create a larger plot of land than 1×2, it seems likely that there is more planned for this mechanic in future updates.

This modularity is present in other buildings as well: rather than constructing a forester’s station to replant trees, you simply add a forester attachment to the lumber camp. The second tier of housing, townhouses, require a “condominium”. This building serves as a hub for the nearby townhouses, employing workers and allowing you to expand the development. It’s an intuitive system, and I found that having a lot of the construction options be concentrated in hub buildings made it easier to find what I was looking for.

Equally easy to use is the game’s work management system. While I enjoy city builders, I’m not very good at them, and my attention to detail in particular isn’t great — it often takes me years (in-game) to discover that a key building or service isn’t functioning (usually because the person assigned to it died). So naturally, Fabledom’s overview page felt like my very own administrative fairy godmother. It’s incredibly easy to use this page to assign workers to buildings, and it’s equally easy to see how, and what, all of your fablings are doing at any given time.

Like many city builders, Fabledom actually has citizens walking around to perform tasks, so logistics come into play — if you place your stockpile across town from your industry, the poor fabling working the stockpile will have a lot of extra walking to do. Placing your wheat farm next to the mill, and the mill next to the bakery, dramatically cuts down on travel time and increases productivity.

Which matters, because you’ve got to prepare for winter. Although it isn’t something like Banished or Frostpunk, where a few mistakes means your whole town dies, you do need to make sure you’re ready for when crops won’t grow and homes require coal to stay warm. It’s not particularly difficult to manage in the game’s current state, but the systems are certainly there to punish players who ignore the wintertime essentials.

While generally standard fare, the early stages of the game are made more enjoyable by narrator who really nails their role, both teaching you the game and cracking wise any chance they get. Combined with the game’s soothing soundtrack, satisfying sound effects, and pleasing visual aesthetic, Fabledom got me feeling real cozy, real quick. The occasional leadership events, such as deciding to help beggars or not, also show off the game’s sense of humor — one such event lead to a witch cursing my fablings, causing them all to temporarily turn into skeletons. Inspecting a citizen revealed their current mood: “Where did my skin go??”

One of the game’s selling points, and perhaps its most unique feature (for a city builder), is the relationship system: you can do the usual interactions with neighboring kingdoms like trading resources and sending gifts , but it’s eventually possible to start courting another ruler, and eventually even marry them. I was only able to try out the early aspects of this feature, but it certainly sounds promising, and adds an interesting wrinkle to the usual diplomatic options. Strategic decision-making about how to deal with your neighbors being a major consideration would be a cool way to add variety to the usual city builder gameplay, and I’m really hoping Fabledom pulls it off.

Another rarity in city builders is a good combat or warfare system, and while Fabledom’s is still early in development, I’m very excited to see where it goes. I did get to play around a bit with a hero unit — although there wasn’t anything around for him to fight — and build a few walls, which looked nice but weren’t necessary. You’ll eventually be able to declare war on your neighbors, and it will be possible for your kingdom to be attacked (hence the option to build defensive walls). It looks like defensive walls, turrets, and eventually a castle will all be available for construction, and you’ll be able to train your fablings to take up arms and defend their home.

Fabledom is definitely an early access game — the devs state quite transparently on the Steam page “If you want a more complete experience, we encourage you to wait until later in development.” But for anyone who enjoys fairy tales and city builders, and want to support the devs and/or be involved in the game’s development, Fabledom is an easy one to recommend. Not just because of it’s potential, but because of how finished it already feels.

Unlike so many early access titles, Fabledom works great out of the box — rather than rushing to finish features for release, Grenaa Games has made sure the foundational aspects of their game actually work. Given what they’ve accomplished so far, it’s a safe bet that when new features roll out, they’ll do so in a polished state. With a fresh take on a classic genre, Fabledom looks primed to become one of our new favorite city builders.