Fable: The Journey — Journey to the Center of Terrible

Callum Petch

On September the 29th of 2012, a wannabe games journalist named Callum Petch made a three-hour trip down to London, England to attend the Eurogamer Expo — the UK’s premier videogame… err… expo. His mission? To preview as many games as humanly possible in one day. These are his stories…

“On-Rails Shooter – A game where the movement of the character is set to a pre-determined path, as opposed to a First-person shooter where movement is mostly free.”  Or, in a better fitting description for this piece, see Fable: The Journey.

No, Lionhead are not doing an extreme amount of misdirection, Fable: The Journey really is an on-rails shooter for the Kinect which makes Peter Molyneux, and the collection of journalists who he made sign a whiteboard that stated that The Journey was not on-rails last year, liars.  However, I have nothing against on-rails shooters; I still enjoy pumping £1 coins into Time Crisis machines when I’m down by the beach, and I particularly enjoyed The House Of The Dead: Overkill at home.

But, crucially, those games have a very important feature that The Journey seemed to overlook on its way to retail.  One key, important, crucial feature: they work all of the time.  Fable: The Journey does not.

It’s fine when you’re battling just one enemy, or solving what could very generously be described as a puzzle, in much the same way that injecting a pig with the blood of a 17 year-old girl could generously be described as Justin Bieber.  You cast your attack spell at the enemy and it’s likely to hit them, and you raise your arm to block incoming attacks and it’s likely to defend you.  Unfortunately, when the demo gets going, there is pretty much always more than one enemy on screen, and this is the point where the Kinect kind of soils itself and dies.  You cast a spell at the evil guy with menace in his eye, coming at you to take a big swing and it’s just as likely to go sailing off into the sky as it is to actually hit them.

This, this boss battle, should be exciting.  It’s not.  It really is not.

Furthermore, the attack spellcasting hand has to deal with three spells and rather than, say, leaving you a menu that you can select them from by hovering over the spell for, like, half a second, you change spells by doing a certain motion (you can also shout the name of the spell that you want to cast, but, thanks to being on the showfloor, this wasn’t an option at the time).  However, it simply does not work.  To cast a fireball, for example, you wave your hand in order to charge up a fireball and then push to cast, but, nine times out of ten, the spell wouldn’t actually charge up a fireball and I’d just sit there uselessly waving my hand like I was badly attempting to toss off a giant.

In addition, the demo just kept dragging on and on and on and on…  There is absolutely no pace to it whatsoever, not helped by a tutorial that took at least 15 minutes to complete with no option to skip any of it, even when you know how to play.  You hit two enemies; you can probably hit them all, but the game makes you do it 3 more times before advancing.  Further compounding the misery; this game is just f**king ugly.  Textures are barely there, enemies have very little personality in their designs, there’s a shocking lack of colour, and what colour there is is muddy thanks to the poor textures.

Jumping off this cliff is a good alternative to Fable: The Journey

And then, to cap off the whole sorry mess, the boss battle.  What should have been epic and exciting seeing as the guy I was facing literally jumps out of the ground and is about the size of 12 station wagons stapled to each other, was instead an endless, agonising slog.  All I had to do was cast endless spells at him and, occasionally, move out of the way of some rocks.  There was no feedback of whether I was actually hurting him at all, barring the endless chipping away at his health bar.  But then, a third of the way through his life bar, he summoned a bunch of skeleton mooks to back him up and that’s where the term clusterf**k comes into appropriate use.

Eventually, after about 30 sodding minutes (combined with the 40 sodding minutes I spent in line waiting to play it), I was done.  A Lionhead rep who was running the stand asked me what I thought.  I said, “It was okay.”  I just did not have the heart to tell him that Fable: The Journey was one of the most soulless, joyless, and miserable things that I had experienced all year.  It’s a mess and you all should stay well clear of it.  Seriously.

[NEWS] Peter Molyneux is Leaving Microsoft and Lionhead Studios

Nate Andrews

Peter Molyneux, one of the industry’s most ambitious and imaginative individuals, will be leaving both Microsoft and Lionhead Studios following the release of Fable: The Journey.

Molyneux revealed the news today via Twitter as well as a statement to Kotaku. “It is with mixed emotions that I made the decision to leave Microsoft and Lionhead Studios, the company that I co-founded in 1997, at the conclusion of development of Fable: The Journey.,” explains Molyneux. “I remain extremely passionate and proud of the people, products and experiences that we created, from Black & White to Fable to our pioneering work with Milo and Kate for the Kinect platform. However, I felt the time was right to pursue a new independent venture. I’d like to thank the team at Lionhead, as well as our partners at Microsoft Studios for their support, dedication and incredible work over the years.” Specifically, that “independent venture” is a new company called 22 Cans.

Molyneux is perhaps best known for his extraordinary ambition and exuberant confidence in just about everything he’s been a part of, an intrinsic personality that he carried with him throughout his time with Lionhead Studios. The promises he often made created enormous expectations for ideas and concepts that didn’t always deliver, but in a way that is perhaps a reason why he is adored by so many fans. He makes games because he is incredibly passionate about it, and there’s no doubt that he’ll continue to be so in the next chapter of his career.

[GameSpot]