Format: 360
Release: Out now
Publisher: Microsoft
Developer: Lionhead

It’s ironic that all the while Media Molecule toiled in its Guildford offices, aiming to stitch the worlds of work and play so tightly together that nobody would be able to see the join, the core team’s old employer across town was plotting to tear the two apart. Fable II, the result of Lionhead’s experiment in uncompromising accessibility, was a ferociously divisive title, many players seeing empty ingratiation instead of generosity, while others were willing to forgive some presentation and storytelling shortcomings because of the sheer speed with which the narrative tugged them along.

Knothole Island, Fable II’s first DLC, was similarly controversial, providing a breezy satire on local politics or a needless shaggy dog tail depending on your point of view. Favouring a quirky aside over pompous spectacle, at least no one could claim Lionhead was drastically changing its approach, and the team’s latest effort, See the Future, is just as wayward, just as contradictory, and just as likely to charm and frustrate in equal measure.

As narratives go this is, if anything, even less disciplined than that of Knothole Island, with the opportunity to buy a few cursed trinkets from Murgo the Trader sending you off on a handful of strange, meandering adventures. The first, which centres on a mystical snow-globe populated by lost souls and shadow creatures, suggests that Lionhead has spent the last few months overdosing on absinthe and attending Blue Man Group concerts, as it thrusts you into a monochrome world in order to tackle various strategic arrangements of colour-coded enemies. While the black and white environments shot through with notes of lurid neon might suggest unpromising borrowings from Tron or Sin City, in truth, the effect has the faint watery tint of a magic lantern slide, an approach that somehow manages to remain consistent with the game’s hazy period detailing but could equally be seen to disguise a lack of environmental variation as you tramp back and forth through a selection of familiar glades and caves.

The second quest, a succession of quick costume changes primarily set in yet another of Albion’s moody graveyards shows equal signs of thrift, even as it cranks up the combat with a new twist on an old foe. Despite a slight tendency towards backtracking, however, along with the plot’s unwillingness to take on too much shape, both episodes provide a welcome chance to revel once more in Fable II’s unexpectedly visceral fighting, a kinetic mixture of magic, melee and gunpowder that makes up for a multitude of other sins and, at times, almost turns the adventure into an elaborate hi-def Gauntlet remake.

Rounding everything out, along with a shower of trinkets for both hero and hound, is the slightly restrained glimpse of what is to come, with any sense of anticlimax quickly swept away by the sugary onslaught of a new variation on the Coliseum. It’s a pure score-rush charm offensive, and, with just the slightest hint of Geometry Wars, provides the perfect expression for the combat preoccupations of this strange and lop-sided package.

While See the Future undoubtedly delivers on its title, giving you a single feverish glimpse of a potential new direction for the series, this odd collection of entertainments offers far more than a mere early-warning hype machine dressed up with a few free haircuts for your dog. In its cheeky refusal to conform, it’s also a chance to see Albion’s present, and take another look at a game that’s both fascinating and gently flawed. It was one of the defining features of Fable II that it often tried to do too much at once; ultimately, it’s almost reassuring to see that, even with its DLC, Lionhead remains just as wilful and ambitious. [6]