Unplayable till they fix the starvation bug. That hits 3/4 way through the game and makes it unplayable a s your Fabledons just starve to death no mater what

I have a love-hate relationship with this game. There are some things here that I REALLY like, and some that I absolutely hate. Ultimately if I had to do it over again, I would save my money and skip this game. But I know a lot of YOU out there will like it more than I do, so I'll break it down for you and give you the pros and cons.

First let me describe the basic game progression. You will name your king, decide if you are a man or woman, and choose your kingdom's location from a randomly seeded map. The map will have about half a dozen other nations on it, too, but you won't be able to interact with them right away... it takes a little while to unlock the ability to send messengers back and forth. Then you are dropped into your kingdom, which has a couple of worker residents (lowly peasants) and a handful of resources (wood, stone, and food) to start with. But you have no buildings or roads yet. The game leaves it up to you which things you want to build, and how you want your town's layout to grow... but it also pigeon-holes you at the beginning with a bunch of bottlenecks in your POPULATION SIZE and your GOLD COINS that will severely hold you back after a short time. But at least in the very beginning you will be okay for a couple of seasons.

You have to build homes for your people to live in, and each home wants access to a well, some beautiful decorations, food, coal in the winter, and a some public services such as the bank, an inn, or a puppet show for entertainment. But houses don't like being close to stone or iron quarries, blacksmith shops, or lumber camps. So you will have to do some planning to divide your town up appropriately. Once you have housing built, every week or so you will have people stop by who want to move in, and you get to choose if you let them stay or not. (hint: always let them stay.) Having more villagers does a few things for you:
1. Lets you put more people to work, to get things done faster.
2. Pays you more taxes, which is the only effective way to get gold in this game.
3. Advances the size ranking of your town, which at certain intervals unlocks more buildings (like the bank, the puppet show, and condominiums for Commoners to live in).

So more people is ALWAYS good. But you need to PLAN CAREFULLY because at a certain point your original resource start to run out. Now you'll need to build quarries and lumber camps to get more stuff. But you CANNOT build anything to make more gold (unless you do a very specific side quest which gives you 5 coins every half a day or so). And ALL of your buildings and roads cost coins to build. So once you run out of coins, that's it you're stuck... unless you can invite more people to town so they pay more taxes which raises your income. However, for that you need more housing, which costs more gold to build. And most buildings other than housing will have an UPKEEP COST that deducts gold every day. So eventually you will run out of gold.
Sadly, this WILL happen at exactly the time when you REALLY need it. Because the tutorial will tell you that you need to build a hospital. You'll have maybe 12 gold left at that point, with a NEGATIVE income so it will be at 0 the next day. And the hospital costs 300 gold coins. Which you don't have and can't earn. What happens next is diabolical. HALF of your villagers will suddenly get sick and die. Which sucks HALF of your daily tax income away. AND because they died, whatever jobs you had them assigned to are no longer getting done. So now you have to wait 60 days for MORE VILLAGERS to arrive... but during that time the OTHER half of your town will get sick and die because you still can't afford the hospital.

I had to use CHEAT CODES to save enough gold to build my first hospital, or my whole town was going to die off.

After you build the hospital, you'll have an easier time since the hospital CURES your sick villagers. But you'll still be at 0 gold for a LONG TIME... waiting for enough new villagers to show up that your tax income can become positive again... then you have to save up for another few months before you can build anything useful again.

So it's just wait ten minutes, click "Accept Villagers" button, wait ten minutes... rinse and repeat for about 18 hours straight, before you are FINALLY able to go back to expanding your kingdom properly.

Meanwhile, you'll get world events - side quests basically - that you CANNOT complete until you have already won the whole game because they are NOT BALANCED, they all ask you to spend 500 gold that you can't afford, or produce 500 resources in two weeks which you don't have enough lumber camps to handle, etc. So accepting them only sucks away your Nobility points when you inevitably fail those quests.

And then the other nations... eventually you can start sending messengers to them. You can either make them your enemy for free (which I still never tried) or send them a bunch of resources to increase their friendship with you. Eventually you can pick ONE other monarch to court for marriage. They each give you a blueprint for a new building, ask you to produce X items from that building... but that's only the first step. There are FOUR steps in that process, and steps 3 and 4 can't be completed until you basically already beat the game, and their "true love effects" don't activate until you finish romance level 4.

So the game is VERY grindy for population size and gold coins. VERY VERY grindy for those two things in particular. But the other resources will build up fairly if you know how to balance your villager jobs.

Other than that, I like the visual style of the game, the buildings are all very cool looking. The characters are a bit goofy, and so is most of the dialogue, but in a "good funny" way not a "horrible attempt at comedy" way. MOST of the resources are balanced fairly well. And if you have the soul of a city planner or architect, this game lets you build and upgrade roads, build several types of housing neighborhoods, plan out how to meet your residents' needs to keep them happy... all of that is GOOD STUFF.

But the population and gold coin bottlenecks are pretty harsh. ESPECIALLY since they both happen at the same time, right before you can afford to build a hospital, which is the first time in the game your villagers will start to get sick and DIE. And when they DIE, they take their tax income with them, making you even more bankrupt. Seriously, if it wasn't for that stupid "sickness" mechanic, I'd still give this game a THUMBS UP... but still also complain about how grindy the population and gold coins feel.

Bottom line: looks nice, voice acting is silly but in a good way, most of the farming and mining are balanced and fair, ... but the population growth and gold coins feel very grindy and the SICKNESS happens right when you run out of gold for the first time so you can't afford to build a hospital and your whole town will die unless you use cheat codes at that point. And the world events are "hard mode" for AFTER you have a gigantic kingdom with everything already built... which defeats the point of doing side quests.

Truly adorable game, really reminded me of the "Kingdom for Keflings" series in some aspects (Keflings? Fablings?), the lighthearted tone and overall wholesome vibe. Actually makes me suspects that some of the devs were either inspired by it or straight up worked on it but I haven't checked if that was the case. In any case, really recommend if you just wanna chill ☺️