Fable: The Lost Chapters was a groundbreaking RPG that revolutionized the genre when it launched in 2005. Despite a rocky start due to some unfulfilled promises in its initial release, the game ultimately delivered a living, breathing world where player choices shaped everything from character appearance to the fate of entire towns.
In 2023, Fable’s co-creator Dene Carter quietly released Moonring on Steam. The Ultima-inspired RPG delivers an open-world, turn-based roguelike experience with more depth than some big-budget giants. It’s another hit from a creator who’s had his hand in the creation of classics like Fable and Dungeon Keeper—and it’s completely free for the most wholesome reasons.
Moonring Is A Love Letter To Classic RPGs
Explore The Game To Uncover Its Secrets
Moonring is a retro-style RPG with an intricate hand-designed world and dungeons that shift every time you journey into them. The game has over 100 enemies, ship warfare, special skills whose effects change based on the phases of the moon, and even a hidden magic system.
The dungeons in Moonring are generated based on the character’s name.
You can learn more about the world by typing certain words and phrases during conversations. Or, just venture out into the vibrant overworld, where you’ll encounter monsters and gods, and everything in between.
Moonring has a lot of moving parts, and it can take some time and effort to make sense of it all—and that’s before you dive into the hidden features and lore. This encourages players to explore, which is entirely by design.
According to a letter from Carter on the game’s Steam page, the game is his “love-letter to a style of gaming that has largely fallen out of fashion: with its vivid, bright sprites overlaid on stark black backgrounds, true open-world gameplay, and lack of handholding.”
For those who grew up playing games like Ultima in the infancy of video games as an art form, Carter hopes that his game “recaptures some of the spirit of those days for you.” If you didn’t, he adds, “I hope that the more modern conveniences you find in this game allow you to catch a glimpse of what we did 40 years ago.”
Moonring Is Free For A Wholesome Reason
A Polished, Complete Game With Hours Of Content
Moonring has a complex battle system, an intricate world to explore, and around 20-40 hours of playtime. And yet, it’s completely free. As Steam user agavran writes, “What a tremendously generous thing this developer has done for us.”
The game wasn’t always going to be free, but then the pandemic happened. In a comment on Splattercatgaming YouTube playthrough of the game (as reported by Eurogamer), Carter writes the simple and wholesome reason why he decided to make Moonring free:
“Life is hard, Covid sucked, everyone’s poor and stressed, I don’t need the $300 this would make me: I’d rather take the goodwill.”
Revisit a simpler time in gaming, when players could let their imaginations run wild based on some pixels on the screen.
Moonring is a must-play for fans of old-school, retro RPGs like Ultima, from someone who helped bring classics like Fable into the video game industry. It is and always will be free on Steam: Carter promises that “The game’s only going to get better, and still remain just as free.“
Source: Steam, agavran/Steam, Splattercatgaming/YouTube, Eurogamer
