Fable is the story of a young boy whose village was burned down, his family either dead or scattered. Rescued by a mage named Maze from the Heros guild, he is taken in and taught to defend himself and take quests from the nearby town of Bowerstone. Searching for signs of his family, he sets out to rescue his sister and mother from the clutches of Jack of Blades.

Recommending Fable would be difficult for multiple reasons. Fables age aside, the keybindings are absolutely terrible and it’s recommended you either play with a controller or make some sacrifices on what you can and can’t do. Unable to key anything to the numerical keypad, (1,2,3) I gave up on blocking, dodging, flourish, and the bow to make the game more playable. The save checkpoint system in particular tends to cause quite a bit of backtracking and you need to leave the area to a new region to make a new checkpoint. Map areas you can enter are too small and numerous so loading screens are frequent; the combat is clunky and bows take too long to be drawn, there are not a lot of armor and weapon customization options, and some skills like (magic) Physical Shield are overpowered and unbalanced.

The biggest cons Fable has however are two things, the age system and the giant hole in the storyline. If you explore Fable and take your time, you’re going to be age 60+ by the end of the game while your sister still looks 20. You age so rapidly every time a day passes and you even age while learning skills in the guild. For the stoyline, it literally does not make any sense, while I suspect this is a “go and rescue your mom and sister, again” sim considering how many times they get kidnapped, it has bigger issues such as obvious solutions and character motivations not matching the storyline (spoiler text elaborating.) Bugs are absolutely rampant, the head bobbing is annoying so you need to zoom out on your character all the way, and the guildmaster is perhaps the most annoying character in the entire game. Whenever your mana is low, he tells you this via the guild emblem you are unable to toss, and whenever there is a new quest, he won’t shut up about it, especially if you are in a minigame, he repeats “Dun dun duuun! You’ve received a new quest card” until you leave it. I ended up muting the entire game and using a playlist due to the frequency of notifications.

Fable isn’t all bad however, the graphics are fairly decent, the housing system and upgrades are enjoyable, the rent system unique, and some of the minigames are actually fun. Some of the bugs in particular are my favorite, such as the item duplication bug, which sped up the game and likely saved me about 10 hours according to HLTB.

For the story flaws (SPOILERS; obviously.): Maze was working for Jack of Blades, Jack of blades was looking for you, and Maze obviously should have taken you to him instead of the hero guild. The story explains this as, “Maze isn’t strong enough to beat him but you have a special bloodline so he wants you to do it.” But this doesn’t make sense either, as while Jack is pretty strong, so is Maze and they are of comparable strength since you end up fighting both in the storyline. Maze also has high standing and powerful friends in the guild, so it doesn’t make sense for him to not call upon Thunder, or Briar Rose, or the Guildmaster, or even Scythe. Dude has options.
Your mother. Former arena champion, is frequently mentioned to be incredibly strong, and then... gets taken out by Balverines? Is this a joke? She obligingly gives out valuable information to enemies and makes it stupidly easy to capture her multiple times during the story and does not put up a fight or draw a weapon at any point in time.
Jack of Blades. He is specifically, for some reason, looking for you. He needs your family’s special blood from your mother’s side to get the special sword but has your mother readily available as a captive, and lets your sister go after he blinds her. In the end, he uses your mothers’ blood to get the sword, proving he was absolutely wasting time the past 10+ years. The story says he needs a key of which your mom only knows the location, gets the key, and then it’s straight up never used or mentioned again. You don’t need a key to enter the chamber of fate, the sword is already in the chamber. The key is never shown actually doing anything, jack suddenly just has the sword.

TL;DR: Perhaps the positive reviews are from people re-living out their favorite childhood game, because from my perspective it has too many flaws to be decent. If you’re still interested in playing Fable, either use a controller or be aware of all the bugs when you start it.