Playground Games' devs were so confident in Fable, they made me play the Gamescom demo twice

"We don't want to spoil anything," associate game director Will Kennedy as I started my much-anticipated Fable preview at Gamescom this year, "but we've got two very different loadouts for you to play with today." So began the hour-long, behind-closed-doors demo, the first time anyone outside Playground Studios has been allowed to take the long-anticipated fantasy RPG for a spin. Turns out, this little slice of the game - taken from a dungeon a little way into the game filled with undead - was quite short. But that didn't matter because the devs, smirking, told me from the outset that I'd be going through the whole thing twice. They were confident, and after playing it those two times I can tell you they were right to be.

Longtime Fable fans will instantly understand the cadence of combat Playground is going for - you need to alternate melee, ranged, and magic attacks in order to hold off the undead hordes. You can be as inelegant as you like, if that's your style: stumble into heavy melee attacks (hold button to charge), or chain together quick combos and then pelt your enemies with disjointed spells.

But, as far as I could tell from my dual demos, the real satisfaction is going to come from weaving all these individual strands together. I was locked into using a hammer in my playthrough (though I'm reliably informed that there'll be more primary weapons in the full game), and this was a nice brute force way to smack armoured skeletons around. You want to use your spells to crowd control, use melee when they get too close, and use your ranged attacks to keep enemy archers and mages at bay. When the action gets too close, you've got a block and - praise be! - a parry, too. I used this a lot to basically render any melee-enemies inert until my magic charges refilled. Resultantly, if you can think ahead and have any sense of rhythm whatsoever, you can control the pace of the fight, even if the enemy numbers threaten to overwhelm you.

During playthrough one, I could target multiple enemies in range with a lightning spell that would chain to nearby enemies. When I cast this whilst in water, it seemed to extend the reach of the spell to anyone in the pool with me. I had a spell that turned all enemies in range into chickens, and if I hit them with a fireball afterwards - you guessed it - I was suddenly surrounded by roast chicken. Very Fable.

On the second playthrough, I was given an over-powered character, equipped with late-game items and spells - the most destructive of which was a repeater crossbow. In the first demo, I'd been popping headshots with the bow - which will feel familiar to anyone that's used a bow in any third-person adventure game, ever - but the crossbow was more interesting. Packing more of a punch, it punished you with more recoil. Understandable. But the result of this was less accurate fire on my behalf, resulting in me kneecapping skeletons and so on. The first go around, anyone I popped a headshot on began swinging swords or shooting crossbow bolts randomly, liberated from the use of their eyes. In the second go, the legless foes would roll and crawl around - still dangerous but severely handicapped. Will this level of nuance be available to other enemies? Does the game's obsession with choice and agency extend to other enemy mobs, other biomes? I asked Kennedy this, and he just smiled at me.

The spells were different on the second go, too. Instead of thunder/fire/chicken, I had a spell that could lift all the enemies into the air - ripe for picking off with ranged attacks or electrifying the terrain - before slamming them back down again. I also had a sort-of 'Force Push' move that synergised nicely with the lift, a combination that cleared mobs away when I was getting overwhelmed. And I needed that breathing space the second time, because associate game director Craig Little came over between demos and bumped me up to the highest difficulty going. Cheers, mate. Here, the parry timing was tighter, the mobs hit harder, took more strategy to kill, and seemed to me to be smarter, too (this is hard to gauge in the time I had to play, though).

Both runs culminated in a boss: a 'Lantern Wraith' that took a mechanic from the rest of the level - skeletons don't just die when you defeat them, they let a wraith loose that must be eliminated unless it reanimates the corpse of a downed sack of bones - and drew it to its natural conclusion. Namely, the boss could summon wraiths that, in turn, summoned more dead. Again, very Fable. The boss itself was an extension of what these demos were trying to teach me: use melee, use your bow, use magic. Hit the weak spots, beat the mobs, profit. It's not exactly ground-breaking, but when the realtime decision-making and tools at your disposal are this meaty, I'm not going to complain.

I need to give a special shoutout to Matt King, here, too: you may know him better as Peep Show's Super Hans. Whilst the party-loving "musician" might have been pretty one-note in Peep Show, King really shows his acting chops here - the timing, delivery, and self-awareness of his character in Fable is excellent. I'm told he's one of many companions you'll get to hang out with during the game, but I really hope we see much, much more of him. I think you'll be surprised how emotive and dramatic he can be, even when cracking fart jokes and swinging a sword at skeletons.

"What we really need to do is create a powerful sense of dread. The longer the note, the more dread." | Image credit: Playground Games

Chris has already spoken at length about Fable's preoccupation with player choice, with how Playground has drilled into the minutiae of game development in order to furnish us the level of agency you'd expect from a Fable title. It seems what is writ large in macro is also applied to the micro, then: the moment-to-moment choice in combat is as broad and satisfying as what the studio is planning at the higher town-, city-, and world-level. There was some hesitation about the game's length over the weekend, but - having played only a sliver - I really don't think there's much need to worry. If the game promises this much depth and nuance all the way through, I don't mind playing 20 hours a few times over. This tactic clearly worked on me in the Gamescom demo, after all.