Masters of Albion Is A Remix Album Of Its Creator’s Biggest Hits
Take my hand.
Even if you don’t know the name Peter Molyneux, you’re probably aware of his work. The famed designer is a towering figure in computer games of the 1990s and 2000s, helping to create the likes of Dungeon Keeper, Theme Park, Black and White, and most famously, the beloved RPG series Fable. Now, he’s back for one more game, and from the looks of it, it’s set to be just as ambitious (and just as odd) as anything that’s come before.
Molyneux’s next game, Masters of Albion, recently got a release date along with a trailer showing off its idiosyncratic blend of RPG and strategy. Masters of Albion is due out on April 22, and it’s being advertised as a god game, a genre that’s mostly defunct these days, but was exemplified by games like Black and White.
Masters of Albion is a strange and fascinating god game from one of the genre’s biggest figures.
“Masters of Albion is the culmination of my life’s work,” Molyneux said in a press release, and it’s immediately clear what that means from the game’s trailer. It starts out with a massive hand controlling the activity of a medieval-ish town, constructing buildings and tools, guiding the residents in their daily tasks, and even chucking them around like ragdolls for fun. It’s exactly the kind of thing you might see in a god game like Black and White, though seemingly with a lot more depth to how much influence you have over the town and its people.
But the Big Hand, as the trailer’s narrator matter-of-factly refers to it, can also possess townsfolk, turning it into something that looks a lot more like Fable. While possessing a person (or even an animal), you shift to a third-person point of view where you can set off on quests to uncover secrets and presumably earn rewards that will help the town prosper.
Later, the Fable influence mixes with another Molyneux classic when the game goes through a major transformation. At night, the town is beset by zombies and walking skeletons aiming to tear down its buildings and slay its inhabitants. In the leadup to the attack, the Big Hand is seen converting some buildings into artillery towers, which can defend the town from the invaders, adding some tower defense elements that take clear cues from Molyneux’s dungeon sim Dungeon Keeper. The wave-based attacks are definitely a big swing for a game that’s mostly looked like a peaceful town builder so far, but they’re certainly an original twist.
By night, the Big Hand helps defend the town it builds by day.
With so much going on, Masters of Albion will depend on how well its seemingly disparate parts mix, and whether they’ll be able to complement each other or detract from the whole is still yet to be seen. That, too, seems like an appropriate feeling to have going into Molyneux’s final game. As influential of a designer as he is, he’s also a highly controversial one, known for making big promises for upcoming games and not always delivering on them. That’s been true of Molyneux’s work for a long time, but in recent years, the promises have gotten bigger and the payoff smaller, leading up to 2013’s Godus never making it out of Steam Early Access and eventually being removed from the platform.
Given the last decade, Masters of Albion is as much a capstone on Molyneux’s career as it is a chance for redemption. It’s bold, bizarre, and ultimately difficult to tell how it will all fit together, but at the very least, it looks like nothing else out there. While the next Fable game, which still doesn’t have a release date, may be a safer bet, Masters of Albion is the more interesting gamble by far, which makes it the perfect swan song for Molyneux.
