Richard Ayoade in Fable is inspired casting, and the trailer's tone is perfect too
Microsoft's Xbox Showcase gave us our first look proper at Playground Games' upcoming Fable reboot and the vibes are as good as it gets. The trailer stars comedian and actor Richard Ayoade, a fruit and vegetable farmer with a very low opinion of heroes («wafters», he says, not unfairly). This is interspersed with clips of a Fable hero doing their thing, as she shanks a few bandits, sinks the odd pint, and seemingly wellies a chicken into the upper atmosphere.
Things take a turn after that and, if you want to see for yourself, watch above before reading on. A giant beanstalk grows, the next thing you know the hero's at a massive door, and It turns out Ayoade is in fact a giant. «Well, this is awkward» he says to her before a quickfire action sequence chasing the diminutive hero around his house. The sequence ends with the hero in his grasp, being raised to his mouth, and turning to the camera to say «fff-» which abruptly cuts to the Fable logo, before a neat little coda suggests the outcome.
It's deeply charming stuff and visually spectacular, with the realisation of Ayoade capturing his expressions, mannerisms, and deadpan delivery perfectly. There will be questions over the claim at the bottom of this that it's «in-game footage» though certain sequences involving the hero are certainly suggestive of stuff (the chase sequence with the giant definitely feels more of a CG fest).
Quite outside of what we can glean about the game's world though (villages with feckless and rude inhabitants, mythical beasts, a bit of drinking, some roughing up bandits, presumably at least one house-sized boss) what left the biggest impression on me was Playground's choice of jumping off point. Every kid in the world knows Jack and the
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