Fable 2’s combat - one button serving the disciplines of melee, ranged attacks, and magic - was banal. But there’s been nothing like Fable 2’s Albion, a land where charm appeared to have been embedded into every line of the game’s code. There’d been brilliantly designed worlds in videogames before, and there’s been plenty since. In Fable 2, I lived in a place much like that I’d left behind up north. The two rooms I rented rumbled whenever a bus drove by outside. In my real life, I lived in a bedsit that smelt of moss. Sure, I enjoyed booting a chicken up the arse as much as the next hero, and I bloody loved a good crawl through a dungeon, but the love I had for Fable 2 always shone brightest in the village of Oakfield, the amber sun setting on my hero’s head after another day’s adventuring, as composer Russell Shaw’s achingly pretty score soundtracked mine and my hounds jogs (and jobs) around town. But I really can’t think of any games as loveable. I can think of many better games than Fable 2. A Home Away From Home A welcome escape from life's humdrum routines. Sometimes people play videogames for reasons other than just to have fun. Even when I’d forgotten to feed him and he’d taken too many hits from bandits and Hobbes, he always limped back to me, squeaking. In Fable 2, in Albion, people cooed as I ran past them in village squares and castle ruins, through the markets and past the docks. I was but a year or so into a mid-twenties relocation from the north to London, and I was painfully lonely. In my real life, I had an extreme anxiety disorder and a job that essentially saw me live in a magazine office. The proper “I can’t wait to get home to you” sort. Not a clumsy, “I’ll do a few dances for you, maybe a heroic pose, I’ll give you a ring, and then lead you to one of the many properties in Albion I own like the RPG land baron I have become” love. For a period there, in my late twenties, I fell head over heels in love with Fable 2.
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