When the menu came up, I didn’t even realize it was the menu. Fable III‘s menus strip out all those bothersome words and lists (apparently because they are clunkier) in favor of warping the Hero into some sort of alternate-dimension mansion called the “Sanctuary.” Sanctuary contains a grand hall to run around in, with many adjoining rooms corresponding to different sorts of things the player can manage (weapons, wardrobe, magic), and a butler named Jasper, who offers tips and advice in-character. The whole thing felt like Pandora’s Box from Terranigma, except not awful. Some rooms were boarded up and covered with cobwebs until Jasper cleaned them up and offered up a tutorial on their contents.

After taking Fable III‘s menus for a spin, it’s tough for me to say whether the tremendous leap in interface design is a good thing or not. The menus seem like they’re designed to get lost in. Not the bad kind of lost, like getting frustrated or unable to do what you want. It’s he arguably good kind of lost, where you wander through each lavishly-decorated room and sift through your possessions and talk to your awesome butler and admire that giant Scrooge McDuck pile of gold in the treasury and tinker with your outfits and then say to yourself “Has it really been nearly half an hour since I opened the damn menu?” For quick adjustments and changes, on the other hand, having to physically run between separate rooms to tweak things is THE VERY DEFINITION of clunky. If Fable III is built in a way that snap menu changes aren’t often needed in dungeons, the Sanctuary will be a fun diversion and menu system rolled into one.
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