Once Upon a Spacetime...

From top to bottom Fabular is an odd game demo, but one that grows more familiar the more you play it.  The green and gold dominated color palette is used to paint an outer space-like void complete with a sprinkling of planetoids adrift in the aether.  In this quasi-Spelljammer setting, the game begins with the player receiving tutelage from a mentor who I can only describe as a lizardman dressed in gothic plate armor.  It becomes apparent very quickly that your character is the heir apparent to a royal house.  As is often the case for tutorials, bother character and player are being taught the finer points of travel in this fantastical environment.  Excluding this starting zone, each of the five regional maps are semi-random in layout (similar to sectors in FTL).  Clusters of interconnected nodes represent points of interest.  Typically, traveling to one triggers an event which can (in turn) lead to combat or treasure.  Battles are top-down and 2D, making the gameplay a bit similar to that Atari classic Asteroids.  Your spaceship (if it can really be called such a thing) has arm-like protrusions that are armed with oversized melee weapons.  A lot of fighting consists of getting in close and bashing an opponent's ship to flinders.  However, this isn't the only approach.  There are ranged attacks, as well as a bunch of other tricks that the player can employ - such as a grappling hook or decoys.  Even the environment itself can be used as a weapon since it contains dense thickets of drifting boulders.  Rewards for victory include upgrade materials, healing items, new armaments, precious fuel and coins.  That last one is useful when the player chances upon a merchant.  Each section of the game ends with a boss battle.  In addition, there is a gradually rising "threat level" meter that indicates how challenging any given combat encounter will be. 

If the player is defeated then their Young (Little?) Prince character is warped back to his father's throne room.  There, the journey restarts from the beginning in typical rogue-like fashion.  Three types of ship are available to choose from (each with it's own approach to combat).  On top of this, the player can spend a special kind of currency (acquired throughout previous journeys) to purchase permanent starting bonuses that carry over from one attempt to the next.  Is this beginning to sound like something you have played before?...Sunless Sea or Sky perhaps?  It took me a few runs before I could fully grasp the controls and overall strategy.  After that, I began to enjoy the game quite a bit.  Something that helped a great deal in overcoming this initial learning curve was the option to set the movement orientation to either "relative" or "absolute", a nice feature to have in twin stick style shooters...much in the same way that a third-person shooter offers standard or inverted camera controls.

If I have one complaint, it's that I saw some repeat events when visiting map nodes.  Granted, that's to be expected on subsequent runs.  Even so,  I hope the full version of the game will be richer in terms of content.  If they do that, and add some more variety to the enemy types, then this game is going to be fabulous...or should I say Fabular?