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Fable 3 is ten years old today. It’s not as good as Fable or Fable 2 — if you’ve read this far, you’ll know that isn’t the argument I’m making. The argument is that Fable 3 is an oddly unique game. Ten years later, I’ve yet to see anything remotely like it, and I think you’d be hard pressed to find something that is more unanimously ambitious than it is. Yes, there have been more impressive art styles. Yes, I’m sure another game has a far better skill system. But as a whole, nobody ever told the people making Fable 3 that actually, what they were doing was a bit too much. Actually, maybe more is not better. Actually, we can have property management and an entire monarch simulator lapped onto the end of an industrial revolution/medieval fantasy hybrid RPG, but come on. Do we really need full animations for baking pies and dog tricks? "Of course we do," came Lionhead’s resounding response in my imagination. "Otherwise it wouldn’t be Fable."   In Fable III, the player can discover a retirement home for Demon Doors behind a Demon Door in Mistpeak Valley. These Demon Doors have been a staple of the series ever since the first game. The ones in this old-folks home ramble aimlessly at you, but one Door, in particular, may catch the eye of some fans. It's the Brightwood Demon Door that players met in Fable   A unique feature in the Fable series is the ability to have or adopt children. Unfortunately, they don't grow up to be some of the best characters in the franchise , but they're vital for the Demon Door in BrightwInstead of murdering people in the middle of Bowerstone and growing big devilish horns, you had to manage a kingdom and decide whether it was more important to build a school or a brothel. This structure is excellently designed, mind, and went on to define similar systems in other games like Dragon Age: Inquisition. But the magic of Fable’s chaotic mayhem was rechanneled into something a bit more serious, a bit more grounded. While I vastly preferred the old versions of Fable, this wasn’t a bad thing. Fable games are anything if not ambitious, and once a game tries something new that’s genuinely worthwhile… well, I don’t care all that much if it’s not up my street — even failed experiments can help steer progress. Now that a new Fable game is confirmed to be in the works , I’m immensely glad that Fable 3 exists, because for as much stink as people talk about it, it’s a smart, audacious, and important game.It’s important to say right from the get-go that I didn’t love Fable 3. I liked it in a lot of ways, and boy was I happy to hear Stephen Fry’s dashingly dapper Reaver lambast everyone in his immediate vicinity with insults that were dour and spirited in equal measure. But it was a real departure from the sheer debauchery that Fable 2 paraded around.It is also the single best implementation of cause-and-effect relationships I have ever seen in a game. A lot of this has to do with the Pratchett-esque liveliness of the characters, but it can at least partially be attributed to how ambitious its long-term consequences are, too. You’re given a year to raise the arbitrary sum of 6.5 million gold, and you can do this by selling out allies, refusing to build hospitals, or working as a legitimate business owner in a cutthroat early capitalist industrial regime. No matter what you do, you’re going to be bitten in the arse somehow, which is always refreshingly real in the most tongue-in-cheek way possible.   The reveal definitely served its purpose in building up a lot of attention just before the holiday season. But this marketing came at the sacrifice of so many great plot points. Some fans felt the move a bit little shallow -- especially the hardcore fans who wanted to go in bl   Consequences exist, but unlike in Aesop’s fables, the consequences rarely fall upon those who deserve them in the modern world. They just get pushed onto others who are forced to writhe in the background, cursing those that put them there, but never seeing justice. A bizarre adventure indeed, but one that is more poignant than e   When looking at the houses and anchor military buildings in Aurora from a distance – or from the Sanctuary map – fans may notice that many of them look just like boots! This may be a way to indicate how poor the region is (i.e. living in a sh   Taking the body of his daughter, the Stand returns, plunging her young fingers into and through the skin of his neck before giving him a challenge that can, possibly, save his life. Flick a piece of popcorn high into the air, above the nearby streetlights, and then catch it in his mouth, three times in a row. Failure results in him losing his head. He fails, but that’s not really the point here: what fascinated me was the popcFable 3 is a weird game to look back on, mostly because it’s largely confined to the Molyneux meme playground. It’s easy to look at it and think of it as the product of, "What if there was a game that had you as the powerful protagonist, which actually focused not on the means of attaining your power, but on the mundane responsibilities that follow it?" Ultimately, that’s a huge part of what Fable 3 is. It’s not a headlong rush to a climactic battle where the good guys win. It’s not about slaying a dragon with your level 100 magical sword. In a lot of ways it’s actually quite tricky — its inherent humor almost encourages you to be as cheeky as possible, and you reckon you can swindle everyone into helping you defeat the Big Bad at the end of the game. But that’s not the end of the game, and nobody really cares that you saved the world because you fleeced them to do it.