An adaptation of the Fabled Lands gamebook series: travel through a fantastic world, amassing skill, wealth, and fame, while avoiding sudden death. – [Author’s description]
[Windows/Mac/Linux Download (with illustrations)]
[Windows/Mac/Linux Download (without illustrations)]
Note: Open flands.jar to start game.
Oh, I have the first two in paperback. Interesting…
I used to have a few adventure books, but this is a sandbox collection, rather than a focus on narrative. It’s Skyrim, but on paper! 🙂
This is pretty fascinating stuff.
Fabled Lands has more interesting things going on in a few pages than Skyrim does in the entirety of its bloated, risk-averse 6 gb carcass. Amazing how well-constructed the sandbox is, and this adaptation lets you actually sink your teeth into it sans all the pageturning.
I really like how quickly your fortunes can shift in this game, it’s not afraid to present you with death, loss of property, and horrible donkey curses. You tumble through a narrative where failure is just as interesting as success, if not more–something game devs still haven’t learned 20~ years after the fact. Get shipwrecked, turned into a monster, sold into slavery…so much cool stuff going on.
Overall, I feel Fabled Lands is caught in an awkward middle. It’s not detailed enough (lacking context and degrees of freedom for the player) to have control or sense of purpose, and yet the book itself doesn’t really have a direction either.
To be more detailed is impossibly arcane for non-mathies (and just a bad idea), to be simpler would necessitate a narrative force.
Agh, it sucks. Part of my issue with it is the reliance on dice rolls as opposed to intuiting on the player’s behalf. You could argue this is impossible, a meta-element befitting a roleplaying scenario, and I’d agree.
And yet the Mario series of books (can’t believe I’m doing this) has a good take on this idea. They’re much simpler in scope, obviously (but it helps with context), but their take on ‘player freedom’ is interesting. Basically each major decision (not the minor ones which often involve clue hunting) is determined by a puzzle. Solve the puzzle (often multiple solutions, some leading to items) and change the story.
I dunno. I feel like somewhere in Fabled Lands, there’s a missed opportunity for player character design and interaction. But I played a lot of it, so whatever that means. Man, I used to ‘play’ books like this all the time. 🙂
Wow, first time i really got into a text adventure. And that’s awesome!
Note that the download is not Windows-only.
Oh, didn’t catch that, fixed! Thank you!