Fables & Fiends: The Legend of Kyrandia - Book One

The Good
Graphically speaking The Legend of Kyrandia is an impressive looking adventure game for an early 90's release. The scenes are richly detailed and despite the low resolution of the era everything looks crisp and clear.

The Bad
Sadly enough the gameplay itself leaves a lot to be desired. Most of the puzzles are based on collecting miscellaneous junk, like gems and ingredients from all around. Then these items are used at some point, but most of the time the puzzle solving is frustrating trial and error, not logic. What makes this even worse is the badly designed inventory system, which makes sure, that you need to run around lot, as it holds only 10 items at a time.

The game world itself is designed as a maze, some of which are also sadistic instead of just being boring. The worst design choice of the game is the fire berry cave, which will either make you pull your hair out or look for a walkthrough.

The Bottom Line
The Legend of Kyrandia is one of those old games that suffer a lot from bad game design. The premises of the story is interesting, but the execution leaves a lot to be desired. And that is a shame, really.