Fable

A number of Xbox-exclusive titles have had any mention of Xbox Game Pass removed from their listing on the official Microsoft website. Previously, the likes of Fable, Avowed and Hellblade 2 all mentioned their inclusion on Xbox Game Pass on their respective listing on the Microsoft website, alongside the logo for the Xbox Series console. Now it seems Microsoft has updated those listings. There is no mention of Xbox Game Pass until much further down the page, and text reading “console and PC” has replaced the Xbox Series…

What better way to start the new year with what will surely be remembered as one of its worst films. This mashup of magical realism, gratuitous violence and sentimentality is an atrocity in filmic form. It’s only a bit offensive for its appropriation of the Holocaust as a dramatic engine. What really stirs revulsion is the film’s smug delusions of quality, a self-belief so strong that it has the gall to take two hours and 21 minutes to unfurl itself to the end. Everyone who whined about Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the…

Writer-director Greta Gerwig’s cinematic reinvention of Mattel’s most (in)famous toy comes on like a sugar-rush mashup of Pixar’s Toy Story 2, Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio, the cult live-action feature Josie and the Pussycats and the Roger Ebert-scripted exploitation romp Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. It’s a riotously entertaining candy-coloured feminist fable that manages simultaneously to celebrate, satirise and deconstruct its happy-plastic subject. Audiences will be delighted. Mattel should be ecstatic.After a heavily…

Anna Megill, narrative lead on the next Fable game, has announced that she is leaving the Leamington Spa-based developer Playground Games. “In August, I’m stepping away from my role as Narrative Lead on Fable. I’ve had several wonderful years scribbling away in my fairytale cottage, but the time feels right for new challenges,” said Megill in a tweet posted on July 14. “Working on Fable was a dream come true for me, and it’s wrenching to leave it behind. But Playground has assembled a Heroically talented team, so I know…

What even is this? It’s a daring, uncompromising, bonkers serious-scape of the kind that rarely gets the limelight in the UK’s contemporary literary field. Why? Because it’s subversive, off the wall and, frankly, challenging to the status quo of what literature is and does. For all these reasons, I’m glad of it.Corey Fah is a writer who’s been awarded a prize for “the fictionalisation of social evils”, but the prize turns out to be a strange, UFO-like trophy that Fah repeatedly tries and fails to collect. Bambi Pavok, a…

It’s flawed and all over the place in conventional script terms, but there’s real interest in this freaky, peculiar, interestingly directed psychodrama satire from Rio-born artist and film-maker Anita Rocha da Silveira, which takes aim at the conformist-authoritarian patriarchy of Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil.Mari (Mari Oliveira) is a member of an evangelical Christian young women’s singing group called Michele and the Treasures of the World, who (like the Barden Bellas in Pitch Perfect) sometimes squabble when one of their…

Peter Molyneux, creator of Black & White and Fable, has shed light on his next game, saying that it shares much DNA with those classics and features a mechanic that’s “never been seen” before. In an interview with Game Reactor at at Gamelab in Barcelona, the influential game designer and programmer who’s also known for Dungeon Keeper gave little detail about the untitled game. “So in days gone by, I would just start telling you about the whole game and the whole game design and why it was going to be the most…

Is Molyneux trying to rekindle days of yore? Those who recall the old days of Lionhead Studios and (going back even further) Bullfrog will know the name Peter Molyneux. Responsible for the Fable series, the veteran designer and programmer has certainly made a name for himself. Unfortunately, not always in a good way. Typically known for overhyping his upcoming releases (not to mention his brush with NFT games), Molyneux seems to be uncharacteristically doing something un-Molyneux-like. In an interview with Game Reactor,…

The new novel by British Ghanaian author and performance poet Nii Ayikwei Parkes is set in a fictional Caribbean country called Fumaz, an island nation whose history is strikingly similar to that of Cuba. It has been under a US trade embargo ever since a leftwing revolution in 1959, and was for many years economically dependent on sugar exports to communist Russia; the collapse of the USSR in 1991 plunged the islanders into severe hardship. The primary protagonist, Yunior, is a talented crop scientist hired by the Fumaz…

Here is a perfectly decent, personable family entertainment from Pixar, based around another of this studio’s oddly pedantic and algorithmically developed abstract high concepts: what if fire and water fell in love? It is also a star-crossed love story based on that most traditional of American themes: melting-pot diversity in the big city.The scene is another fabular alt-reality: Element City, a place of vivid colours and shapes like a toy held up in front of a newborn. Here, the creatures of the four elements – fire,…