Fable is a good game for the RPGer who's looking for something to play.
Fable opens in a fairly standard way with your village being attacked by bandits and shortly after you find yourself a student in the local hero guild where you train to become a hero who eventually ventures out into the world to join the ranks of other heroes and face that challenges that come before the guild.
One of those interesting mechanics is that as you progress through the game, you age, beginning as a child in your village, working in the guild through you teenage years and eventually joining the ranks of the well seasoned adventurers. There doesn't appear to be much affect on how the game plays out, but your appearance does change over time.
There is a morality axis to the game as well. From the very beginning, when you undertake quests, you often make a choice between doing something that is good or doing the opposite which is evil. You start off as a neutral character, but these decisions push your overall alignment in one direction or another and this alignment affects how other people respond to you and can affect a small number of skills and items that you can use.
The role-playing aspect come into play through three disciplines known as strength (melee combat), skill (range and thief skills) and will (magic). As you battle, you gain experience points in the area of combat you are using plus (in greater number) general experience points. The points in each area can be spent to improve skills in that area while the general points may be spent on any area.
As you move through the game, the heroes guild you belong to will offer you various quests that you can take on. Some are optional and some are core to the main story of the game. You accept a quest from the guild and then proceed to wherever it is you need to go and fulfill the quest.
In addition to the guild quests, there are a number of long-term quests you can pick up that require you to keep your eyes and inventory open. There are quests to collect a set of dolls or book or one to find a sequence of clues to a hidden treasure. These quests tend to be rather difficult to complete and most will take to near the end of the game if you can solve them at all. This adds some replay value to the game as you'll be more willing to play again in order to satisfy all of those quests.
The graphics of the game are quite good but it's difficult to find any one game to compare them to. As a matter of overall feeling of the environment, the closest game to look to is World of Warcraft III. The game has a bit of a cartoonish feeling to it with exaggerated characters and giant chests in the wilderness that open with a flourish. The game consists of small areas that include relatively confined paths that you can move through that may feel a bit like Knights of the Old Republic.
Most of these areas are populated with monsters that you battle and each area re-spawns as soon as you leave it which provides for an infinite amount of experience. It can also get tiring to battle through an area over and over but generally you can just run through an area. The game is also filled with teleportation points that allow you to jump around the various areas of the game as you encounter them.
In addition to the monsters, throughout the game are a number of "Demon Doors" that require certain levels of skill or pose puzzles and problems to the player. Once a door has been satisfied, it will open for you and you can claim whatever treasures lie inside. These doors do add an interesting element to the game and you'll find yourself wanting to get through as many of them as possible.
In addition to your decisions affecting your morality, there's also a fair amount of appearance customization you can do that affect how others respond to you. You can decide what kind of haircut you want, whether or not to have a mustache or you can apply all sorts of tattoos that can make you look both silly and fearsome. You can also try out your romantic skills and find yourself a wife (or a husband), buy a house and even have sex.
The interface to the game is overly complicated. There are an awful lot of menus to navigate and it will take you a while to get the hang of getting to where you want to go. As an example, if you wish to drink a healing potion, you would open the menus and select Inventory/Items/Potions/Healing Potion/Use. Of course, you can assign items and spells to hot keys to reduce this difficulty.
There are a number of things about the game that I found notably annoying. One is that while your moving, if you move the mouse to rotate your view, when you stop, the camera will bounce back in the opposite direction a bit. I don't see a reason why it should do this, but in the beginning it may tend to give you a headache as it makes for a bouncy ride.
The last thing I want to note is a feature that in any other game would be considered an exploit of a flaw in the game. Fable includes a "World Save" which saves the game in the typical manner but in addition to this is a "Hero Save" which only saves the attributes and inventory of the hero, but not your progress within a quest. When you load a Hero Save, the last World Save is loaded, but the attributes of the hero are loaded from the Hero Save. Thus, you could begin a quest, gain experience, special items and anything else you want in the quest then save and load a Hero Save and you'll be back at the beginning but retaining all of your stats. You can load up on experience or special items in the manner.
You can only use a Hero Quest while in the middle of a quest and a World Save when you are not. For the first part of the game when your in your village as a child and when you are training in the guild, you cannot execute a World Save and for the first 30 minutes to a few hours (depending on how thorough you are) you won't be able to save your game.
Many players have commented that this game is too short but I must say that in my experience, this was not the case. I suppose if you rushed through the main quests you might find the game on the short side, but if you do all the side quests, work on the demon doors and try to finish some of the collecting quests, you'll find a game that is as long as any typical RPG.