Grenaa Games’ popular cosy city builder is now available on PS5. The game launched back in May on PC and console owners can now sit back on the couch, grab a controller and watch the days pass by as their small settlement slowly grows into a thriving kingdom.
Fabledom isn’t your traditional town simulator. Instead of focusing on the pressures that come with running a town, the game wants to be a cosy experience. This means there’s no violence, the game’s pacing is intentionally slower than usual and the typical failure mechanics have been left out. Fabledom may take weeks to grow into a kingdom but the ride there is always met with peace and tranquility.
You start Fabledom with only a few Fablelings to manage. These are peasants that are born to work and work they shall. After placing down a few roads and building a few houses, a settlement is born with a farm, stone quarry and a decently sized population. Already from the start, I enjoyed how quaint this all felt. There’s no pressure to expand beyond this scale at all.
This pacing allowed me to focus on the smaller details of my settlement. The building feature in Fabeldom also boasts quite a lot of detail. I could manually place down structures in a garden, for example. This meant after placing down a house, I could build a backyard and choose the various structures that decorated it. Be it a washing line, outhouse or a few benches etc. It adds a bit of freedom to typical building mechanics.
Each peasant has needs that grow as the town expands. Their happiness rating is also based on how well these needs are met and their living conditions. For example, building a coal refinery next to a bunch of houses makes those people a little less happy. Regardless, there’s also room to improve their lives with decorations and other positive buildings around the town.
Fablelings don’t worry too much about how hard they work and how much they get paid. In fact, they don’t get paid at all. Whatever productivity goes on in your town is income for you to improve it even further. The further improved your settlement, the more people come by to move in. The more people who move in, the greater the population and the more you can do.
The population count acts as XP in a way. Reach a new milestone and your settlement becomes a village and then a town. The more you grow, the more structures you unlock and features become available. Again, these are all tackled at your own pace. If you don’t think you’re ready for metal yet, then you don’t need to build into it. Instead, you can focus on welcoming more people in, making sure enough food is being produced and the town is happy.
I did just that. I spent a lot of time in Fabledom refining my town and making sure the people were happy before taking on the next so-called “revolution”. The game’s slower pace makes this possible and it is rare to see in a city builder. Often, you are forced to grow at the pace of your opponents in fear that your villagers leave or become unhappy. There’s no pressure here and it is welcoming.
The only real stress in Fabledom is the winter season. Every winter, hell freezes over for a few days and food production halts. You can’t farm anything and food can only be sourced from refined structures like a bakery. This meant I always had to make sure I had enough veggies to see the people through winter. I could also rely on the flour I had to get bread made as a backup.
This system is still a bit stressful to manage as the game grows. The more people you have around, the more food you need to make. I constantly worried about building a new farm or refinery after reaching a new population threshold just in case.
With that being said, much of Fabledom is all about that chill factor. The game wants to take its time to expand and even after days with the game, I was still taking it easy. When demand arrived through timed quests, I could simply turn them down without worry. When my settlement became a town and then a kingdom, the process of getting there was relaxing and even maintaining the larger world was simple enough.
There are even some features in Fabledom that you don’t even need to look at. There’s a romancing option where you can essentially court a neighbour leader. Doing so unlocks a buff that changes depending on the leader type. Courting means meeting them, flirting with them and sending them gifts. The main game mode teaches you this through the tutorial but the creative mode lets you carry on without even touching it.
There’s also a Hero system where you can create a controllable character who can interact with structures and even climb up beanstalks to find loot. This hero is again, optional meaning you can ignore it and simply focus on your city.
Fabledom is relaxing which may or may not be for you. If you enjoy invading towns and burning down homes, this might not be your game. However, if you enjoy building a city and watching it grow from a dirt road into a bustling empire, it is.
On PS5, Fabledom runs smoothly. The game offers no graphics modes but the standard visuals do keep up as the town gets more complicated. I noticed a few frame rate hiccups once I had a condensed kingdom up and running. However, they weren’t game-breaking.
The controller support is okay. Getting around and selecting items works decently with the cursor. Menu navigation, on the other hand, can get clunky. Pressing the D-pad to navigate through the menus is difficult. It is also tough to see what button the cursor is on when you’re moving about these menus.
I guess, it works for a controller and is likely the best it could be. But I did get annoyed by the dim highlight on a button when I was trying to get around. This was an issue especially when navigating the game speed and visitor welcome tab.
There’s also a nasty bug where all button input stopped working a few times throughout my playthrough. This happened after I unlocked the hero. Whenever the hero would interact with an object, the pop-up menu would bug out and I couldn’t do anything. Only completely closing down the game fixed this.
Even loading to the main menu and resuming the game save didn’t work. I also encountered a bug where some villages stopped walking and stood completely still. This wasn’t as common as the D-pad bug. I also did kind of wish the UI was scaleable so I could make it smaller. When your town grows, it gets in the way.
Apart from that Fabledom is enjoyable on PS5. Using a controller will take some time to get used to though. It is only natural for these games. The city builder provided hours of relaxing management every evening. The simple game mechanics are easy to master and the game’s visuals and sound design further add to the cosy theme.
This Fabledom review is based on a PS5 code sent to us by Dear Villagers. Fabledom is out now on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, Switch and PC.
Summary
Fabledom’s cosy mechanics and stress-free city building work well on PS5 and feel made for the couch. The controller layout takes time to master and does feel clunky at times. Thankfully, the slower pacing of the game doesn’t need you to be on top of everything all the time.
