Fable 5.2 vs a model ~700x cheaper vs a free one

Two prompts we wrote ourselves, a small night-harbour shooter and a mountain lake at golden hour, sent once to three models: Claude Fable 5.2 on the regular Claude Pro plan (effort high, every tool off), Meta Muse Ember through OpenRouter, and MiniMax M3.1 Flash, free in OpenCode inside a locked folder. One answer each, no help. Everything runs in your browser.

Claude Fable 5.2 · Night harbour FPS Night Quay

Rain, floodlights, named containers, cranes and drones that shoot back.

WASD · mouse · click to fire35:37 · 206,652 output tokensOpen

Meta Muse Ember · Night harbour FPS Night Terminal

Same prompt, answered in 35 seconds for less than one cent.

WASD · mouse · click to fire35 s · 19,572 output tokensOpen

MiniMax M3.1 Flash (free) · Night harbour FPS Harbour Nightshift

One-line fix marked VITOMIND FIX: the model added an object it never created (a typo).

WASD · mouse · click to fire25 min · free in OpenCodeOpen

MiniMax M3.1 Flash (free) · Night harbour FPS, unfixed As the model wrote it

Exactly the file MiniMax wrote: it stops at start-up with a build error.

for reference25 min · free in OpenCodeOpen

Claude Fable 5.2 · Mountain lake Golden hour lake

Waterfall, mist, jetty, boat, rain on the water and a time-of-day slider.

drag to orbit · panel23:03 · 143,045 output tokensOpen

Meta Muse Ember · Mountain lake Mountain Lake

Same prompt, 36 seconds and about one cent.

drag to orbit · panel36 s · 20,437 output tokensOpen

Time, tokens and fixes

November 10, 2026. Fable 5.2: claude -p --model claude-fable-5-2 --effort high --tools "" on the Claude Pro plan (no extra cost; at Anthropic's API list price, $40 per million output tokens, the output alone would be about $8.27 and $5.72). After the FPS, the plan hit its 5-hour limit. Muse Ember: OpenRouter, reasoning high, billed $0.0098 and $0.0103. MiniMax M3.1 Flash: free in OpenCode; it never delivered the lake file in two attempts. LongCat 2.5 (also free in OpenCode) stalled on every long run and is not included.