Craft First Look: 24 Hours Inside the Friends & Fables Sequel's Closed Beta

Access disclosure: the developers provided closed-beta access and a subscription. No conditions were attached to our coverage; this first look is independent and unpaid.

This is a hands-on first look at a closed beta, not a review. We don’t score pre-release software — a beta can’t be fairly rated, and this one is changing by the day. A full rated review comes at launch.

Craft is the new AI RPG from the studio behind Friends & Fables — same team, roughly the same premise, which is why players are already calling it Friends & Fables II, or simply the F&F remake. We’ve spent our first 24 hours inside the closed beta. Here’s what those hours actually looked like — including the rough half.

The Presentation Leap

The first thing Craft shows you is that this studio has been thinking about how AI RPGs look, and nobody else in the market has.

The interface reads like a visual novel — if you’ve played anything built in Ren’Py you’ll recognize the grammar immediately: text box below, character sprite above, and the sprites carry different expressions as characters speak. Conversations have faces now, and the faces react. On top of that, there are actual cinematics in the game.

The combined effect is simple to state: this looks more polished than anything currently on the AI RPG market. Not marginally — categorically. Every platform in our directory presents its story as text in a box; Craft presents its story as a scene.

The First 12 Hours Were Rough

Honesty requires the other half of the story. Our first half-day in the beta was clunky, and we weren’t alone — the Discord was full of players hitting the same walls.

The bugs were real campaign-breakers: the DM would loop events, narrating the same beat again in different words and repeating turns; sometimes it would reply with nothing at all; and refreshing the page could delete your last five turns of progress. For a long stretch, the bugs persisted.

What stood out was the developers’ behavior while it was happening. They were constantly in the Discord asking for details and screenshots, and visibly working the problem — not managing sentiment, debugging.

Then the Patch Landed

In the back half of our 24 hours, the devs pushed an update that fixed the looping and lost-progress issues — and playing became a blast again. A closed beta that ships a same-day fix for its worst bugs while players are still complaining about them is behaving exactly the way a closed beta should.

What’s Still Clunky

Craft is not done, and it doesn’t hide it. The DM’s memory is short. It sometimes hallucinates quests and people. And there’s a clear detachment between the map-and-tactical layer and the narration: the map gives you troops, geographical features, and directions, and the narrator misplaces them, ignores them, or doesn’t acknowledge them at all.

That map–narrator gap is worth watching, because it’s the hard problem Craft has chosen for itself — keeping a spatial, tactical game state and a generative narrator in agreement is exactly the kind of engineering that separates ambitious AI RPGs from chat windows. Right now the seam shows. This is normal; it’s a beta, and a closed one. But it’s the seam that will decide the final product.

Why We’re Bullish Anyway

Add up what’s already true: the worldbuilding tools are at Friends & Fables’ level — which is the level of our current top overall pick — while the graphics and interface quite surpass it. The game is honestly approaching playable state, and if the edges get scrubbed and the clunkiness addressed, this is going to be one of the leading products in the AI RPG market. It is professional, polished, and clearly well worked on.

And the strongest signal isn’t in the build at all. Through the roughest hours of the beta, the developers were actively listening to the community and working the bugs as they appeared. In our book, that responsiveness is one of the strongest indicators of quality a pre-release product can show — features can be added, but a studio’s relationship with its players tends to be set early.

What Happens Next

We’ll keep playing through the beta and publish a full, rated review when Craft launches. In the meantime, we sat down with the team building it to ask why they started over instead of evolving Friends & Fables — read the exclusive Craft interview. Until the full review lands, our Friends & Fables review covers the studio’s current game — and if Craft delivers on what these 24 hours suggest, that review is going to need a sequel of its own.

Update (2026-07-24): the studio just shipped its first official, in-house world built with Craft’s own tools — Project SABLE launched, a secret-bureau setting about covering up monster outbreaks in 2090.