Fantasy games: fables and fairy tales sorted by year, newest first

The Castle of Dr. Malvado is a compact adventure built around the wonderfully old-fashioned idea that entering a mysterious castle owned by a sinister doctor is probably a perfectl...

Fairy Tale Adventure 2: Halls of the Dead (1997) continues its predecessor’s tradition of sprawling fantasy exploration with a darker, more dangerous edge. Available on DOS a...

Fable (1996) is one of those DOS curiosities that feels like it was built late at night with equal parts ambition and caffeine. It presents itself as a fantasy role-playing experie...

A gentle adventure inspired by the animated film, Once Upon a Forest (1995, DOS) delivers an eco-friendly story wrapped in side-scrolling gameplay. You guide three tiny forest crea...

The Manhole: CD-ROM Masterpiece Edition (1994, Windows/Mac) is the kind of game that makes you feel like you’ve fallen into a dream. Created by the same minds behind Myst, it...

Armaeth: The Lost Kingdom looks like a cousin of Prince of Persia who dropped out of school to study magic mushrooms. You play a vaguely heroic dude exploring a crumbling kingdom f...

Mixed-up Fairy Tales takes the familiar world of classic fairy tales and gives it a playful shake, scattering characters, objects, and stories into a wonderfully confused adventure...

Super Solvers: Treasure Mountain! is an educational adventure that sends players into a colorful mountain environment filled with puzzles, treasures, creatures, and questions desig...

Stormlord is a colorful fantasy platform adventure in which the title character has the rather unpleasant job of rescuing magical creatures and confronting an assortment of hostile...

With Gnome Ranger 2: Ingrid’s Back, things get a bit more polished, though not necessarily more sane. The puzzles return, along with the dreamlike environments and that pecul...

Gnome Ranger feels like the kind of game that was designed by someone who really loved puzzles but maybe didn’t love explaining them. You control a gnome (clearly a recurring...

Knight Orc (1987, DOS/Mac) flips the fantasy script: you’re not the hero, you’re the orc. Tired of being slaughtered by noble knights, you decide it’s payback tim...

Mixed-up Mother Goose turns classic nursery rhymes into a cheerful point-and-click adventure where familiar characters and objects have been scattered across a colorful world. Play...

The Faery Tale Adventure: Book I is a charming action-adventure set in a colorful fantasy world where exploration matters just as much as fighting. You play a young hero sent on a ...

The Black Cauldron brings Disney's animated fantasy world to the computer in the form of an adventure game. Released in 1986, it follows the story and characters of the film while ...

The Wizard of Oz brings the familiar world of Dorothy, the Scarecrow, Tin Man and Cowardly Lion to the computer in an adventure inspired by the classic story. Players travel throug...

Troll's Tale is a charming early adventure that combines fairy-tale imagery with simple exploration and puzzle solving. The player takes on the role of a young heroine travelling t...

Winnie the Pooh in the Hundred Acre Wood is a gentle adventure that transforms the familiar world of Pooh and his friends into a colorful computer journey. Instead of fighting armi...

Before heroes had inventory screens and voice acting, there was Adventure in Serenia, the lovechild of a text parser and a fever dream. Released in 1982, this proto-graphic adventu...