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When a challenge arises – whether it be outright fisticuffs, the protagonist’s attempt to bribe his or her way past a guard, or simply trying to scale a mountain – it plays out automatically with an outcome determined somewhat by random chance, but more heavily by the protagonist’s stats in areas appropriate to the challenge. When someone or something poses a threat to the protagonist, the difference between life and death usually hinges on whether the player can dip into inventory for an appropriate potion before responding to the challenge, and some quests aren’t accessible at all without a little kleptomaniacal hoarding of ropes for climbing, candles for seeing in the dark, and other intuitively usable sundries that should be snatched in town shops without delay. The player’s challenge is primarily one of strict resource management and equipment acquisition. If the storyline description doesn’t make it abundantly clear, Sokara happens to be a very, very dangerous place - which is a good thing because it means there’s more gameplay here than Fabled Lands‘ text-heavy guise at first suggests. Sadly the drawback of Fabled Lands‘ nonlinearity is the fact that most of these characters slip in and out of the story very quickly, leaving the player’s desire to learn more about them undersatiated.

These episodes play out against the aftermath of a civil war in which a new regime is hunting down partisans loyal to the old Sokaran king, and naturally the player can choose which side of the conflict to join - or stay out of it altogether.

Among this land’s more interesting denizens are a band of cannibals who will happily devour the player character if the protagonist doesn’t play his or her cards right after being abducted a pack of townspeople who pose as ghosts to frighten their fellows into leaving an annual tribute they then collect on the sly and a thief who offers to let the player character join her in a heist, only to let him or her serve as scapegoat when the master of the house returns. Luckily the series’ greatest asset is its excellent narrative quality: the plethora of weird situations and interesting characters to be encountered on the streets, in the fields, and deep inside the dungeons of Sokara quickly drew me in and kept me invested in the task of searching out new quests to accept from locals. Having stuck very closely to structured JRPGs throughout my gaming life, I found the sheer amount of freedom in Fabled Lands daunting at first.

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Once the protagonist washes up on the beaches of Sokara he or she has free reign to explore this highly developed medieval realm through a destination menu system, hemmed in only by geography and whether he or she can survive a particular task with currently available equipment.

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Its plot consists of a series of short vignettes strung together in whatever order the player unwittingly walks into them.

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Cast in the roll of a wanderlust-stricken adventurer whose identity is defined by class and gender at the game’s outset, the player can now freely roam the hazardous yet bounty-filled land of Sokara without all the manual hassle of rolling dice and flipping pages.Īs the player character has only a general goal in mind – experiencing all the thrills to be found in Sokara without dying in the process – Fabled Lands is almost completely unstructured. For the rest of us who missed out, Megara Entertainment has been kind enough to adapt the first of this series’ gamebooks on iOS as Fabled Lands: The War Torn Kingdom ( Out Now, $6.99). If you were into nonlinear gamebooks or Dungeons and Dragons-style pen and paper RPGs during the mid 1990s, you may already have had the pleasure of stepping into the rich medieval world created by Fabled Lands authors Dave Morris and Jamie Thomson.