6. Fable Meets Lovecraft
The
Fable games are Peter Molyneux's substitute for buying a sports car for his 45th birthday. He clearly has ambitious, innovative ideas, but the games he wants to create are similar in scope to the ones you dreamt up as a kid - "I want the game to be like Grand Theft Auto but in space, and you can go to every planet, and every planet has its own economy and society. Oh and the player can turn into a dragon." The latest game,
Fable III, is essentially the same as its predecessors, but this time around you get to be King!
So, what's so disturbing about Fable III? Well to be honest, Fable III is still a Fable game, so I could pick about ten things off the top of my head that are weird. The games are set in a world where the inhabitants have the social skills of a Sim. Why does it matter if I save the world if I can fart out a rendition of
H.M.S Pinafore, and become the biggest social darling since Mr Darcy went to beach without his shirt? But uncanny NPCs notwithstanding, Fable III is just too generic low fantasy to be anything close to creepy. Which all changes when the
player visits Aurora. This Eldritch Abomination is The Crawler, the primary antagonist for the second half of Fable III. Its inclusion in the game's events isn't foreshadowed in any way - even though such a lurking threat explains the actions of the previous tyrant king Logan - so when the character ends up stranded on a desert island and is forced to travel through a 'rather ominous cavern,' I was fully expecting to encounter yet more Hobbes or Hollow men. The build-up to encounter The Crawler is fairly atmospheric, with the player discovering diaries written by the now dead explorers which describe the place as home to 'Darkness Incarnate.' And when you actually do encounter the creature, it's a completely different kettle of fish to the game's usual gallery of light hearted monsters; whilst, at worst, they savagely mock the protagonist, The Crawler's dialogue is extremely grim, and more psychological in nature, for example: "The light you bring will die. The light inside you will die. All that you are will die," and "We will snuff out every last light, smother every breath from every mouth, and stop the beating of every heart." It's like
Hannibal Lecter guest starring on
Mister Rogers' Neighbourhood.