Fabledom

Genre: Management Simulation

Players: 1

.

Review:

Fabledom is a Management Simulation game released in 2025 on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch. Set in a medieval fantasy land, Fabledom has players taking the role of a young prince or princess building up a small village into a flourishing kingdom, while competing with or making alliances with neighboring kingdoms.

This kingdom building is done from the ground level, building individual streets, houses, and even choosing what enhancements houses will have (such as an outhouse, doghouse, clothesline, or apple tree in the backyard). As players expand outward, they must attract, provide for, and assign jobs to their growing population, gradually enabling more and more types of facilities.

While I overall enjoyed this gameplay, I feel like it’s too complicated for its own good, with everything you do requiring a cascading series of changes just to make that one change work. Want to build a sawmill? Well, you’ll need to make sure you have people assigned to the workman’s job to construct it, the materials needed to build it, and the funds to pay for it. Those workers will go to and from their job site to the materials site and worksite, meaning this will take longer if those are farther apart. Need more workers? Well, then you need to attract people to your town by ensuring a high quality of life for your people, or reassign them from other jobs. If you do attract new people, they need a place to live. That should also be built on a road, and near a well. Those people will need food too, which must be grown at a farm and stored at a storehouse, with a granary needed to store food over the Winter months. Speaking of Winter months, citizens will need coal during the Winter, which requires you to build a coal-maker, which uses up some of the wood from the woodcutters that you’ll also need to make the other buildings. Stone is needed to build the sawmill, too, and if you don’t have it, find a stone deposit and build stonecutters atop it to extract stone, then people that stonecutters with citizens. Woodcutters need to be built near trees, of course, and if you want those trees replanted you need to attach a forester to them. All of these different resource producers transport resources along the aforementioned roads you make, and their proximity to where they’re going affects how long they take to transport. Plus, some of these resource producers, like the coal-maker and stone cutter, reduce nearby land value making citizens who live near these places unhappy. And of course, the farm, storehouse, granary, stonecutter, woodcutter, coal-maker, and sawmill must all be staffed with citizens, or they sit there doing nothing. Which means building even more houses to staff these places. Oh, and each house you build can only fit three people, with one of those people being assigned as “head of household” and unable to be used for other jobs.

That huge paragraph above… all of that, just to build one sawmill.

The presentation is another issue here. On Nintendo Switch, the game’s colorful, slightly-cartoony 3D visuals look somewhat dulled and muted, with lower resolution making things look blurry, occasional pop-in, and low-resolution shadows looking particularly ugly. This is joined by a nice, subdued instrumental soundtrack, and a bit of voice acting for the game’s narrator commenting on things every now and then.

Clearly, I have a lot of complaints about Fabledom. But just to be clear, underneath all of that is a charming, compelling Management Simulation. But oof, it sure does make players go through a lot of work to get to the relaxed experience they may be looking for here, and on Nintendo Switch it sure doesn’t look pretty. Players still may want to give this game a try, but be aware what you’re getting into, and if possible you may want to consider getting this on another platform instead.

tl;dr – Fabledom is a Management Simulation that has players building their own kingdom from the ground up. At its core this is an enjoyable experience, but this game is constantly making players jump through one hoop after another just to accomplish even the simplest of tasks. Plus, this game looks pretty ugly on Nintendo Switch. In spite of all of this, it’s not a bad game, but you have better options, and if you want this game you’re better off getting it on another platform.

Grade: C+

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