1,539,100 gold coins. That’s the amount of money my Albion property portfolio accrued in rent from the moment I last switched off Fable II, having completed its first DLC release, Knothole Island, to the moment I sat down to play this, its second. It was deposited as a lump sum, having accumulated in even amounts every hour for the past four months while I was away.

I mention this fact not as a boast (although you should check the hell out of these kickass solid gold trainers) but rather as evidence that innovative systems designed to draw players back into a game in the short term can present unforeseen problems over the long term. In See the Future, every bag of gold coins in a hidden treasure chest and every ruby gemstone my trusty dog sniffs out is worthless: time and distance already made me a millionaire.

While Knothole Island was pieced together in a matter of weeks by a team weary from the crunch of delivering the main game, the time leading up to this second add-on has evidently been used to regroup, refocus and decide where Fable II’s future lies. Unlike the first add-on, See the Future presents three distinct, small mini-adventures as oppose to a single medium-sized one, each one tied to a different mysterious trinket on sale from a newly-installed Bowerstone market trader, Mungo.

The first object Mungo sells you is a cursed snowglobe that whisks you away to a black and white village drained of all colour and inhabited only by ghosts and the ghosts of ghosts. Just as your job was to restore balance and order to Knothole Island by solving its small-town politics-cum-weather problems, so you must restore colour and life to this more esoteric community. However, in contrast to Knothole Island’s yarn, the story surrounding the snowglobe village’s misfortune is told in whispers of dialogue, and half-clues scrawled in dusty diaries: it is mystery piled upon mystery and the resolution, when it comes, is both fleeting and unsatisfactory.

In essence, the mission consists of two small dungeons, one underground, accessed via a well, the other inside a haunted house. Both locations are inhabited by a new kind of enemy, a Tron-like apparition, which comes in three varieties, colour-coded as being susceptible to one of your three types of attack: melee, ranged or magical. There are no bosses to defeat here; you simply follow Fable 2′s sparkly breadcrumb trail, and kill everything on sight while keeping a lookout for collectables along the way. Once colour is restored to the village there are a couple of secrets to tie up but, otherwise, there’s nothing to stop you leaving the snowglobe forever.

You can read the rest of this review over at Eurogamer here.