When Sable came out in 2021, I just knew it would be my jam. For some reason or another I put off playing it until now and I’m pleased to report it definitely is my jam. I think if you watch a trailer or read the store description you’ll have an accurate impression if this will be your jam too. The striking aesthetic, subtly well-written dialogue, and wonderful exploration really clicked with me and allowed me to look past its technical shortcomings and bare-bones gameplay. It’s far from perfect but Sable is a worthwhile, focused experience that immersively dives into a central theme through the lens of a desolate but hopeful world.

From the jump, Sable hooked me with an opening section that is a microcosm for the rest of the game. You start out in your little nomadic tribe preparing for your big journey across this desert world in a pilgrimage to find your true calling, called your “Gliding”. Your first task is to gather parts to build your Star Wars speeder bike from a few key locations in the gated starting area. The way the family and friends of your protagonist, the titular Sable, talk to you like you have a collective history is very inviting. The whole tight-knit vibe of your little community quickly got me immersed into my character in a way not many other games have. I’m not a player who typically gets into character when playing a singleplayer game. I’m almost never thinking to myself “what would my protagonist do in this scenario?”. But in Sable, I was drawn into the world so much that I was putting my min-max loot-goblin tendencies aside in favor of actually roleplaying my version of the character. Instead of exhausting all dialogue options, I was asking the questions I thought my character would have. The writing and dialogue really encourages this based on how down-to-earth the conversations are. This world may be alien but the way folks communicate here is unmistakably human.

Sable’s Gliding consists of collecting badges that represent a job/role in this desert society that you will then trade in 3 of a kind for a mask. Your main mission is to claim a mask of your choosing as your calling in life. Maybe you’ll decide to be a Cartographer, Fisherman, Merchant, Climber (wtf is this job), Scrapper, Soldier, etc. Choosing your mask can be done at any time throughout the game. So if one decides they want to claim the first mask they find to be their true calling, they are more than welcome to end the game right then and there. The structure of the game is aligned 1:1 with the plot in a way that is very effective. I decided from the start that I’d play the game naturally and decide what mask to go with from the pool of ones I acquire. I wasn’t tied to going after one specific mask or “catching them all”. I wanted to experience my Gliding as the character would.

How does one obtain badges then? A cynical answer is that you complete lots of generic fetch quests. But! The wrapper for the quests are typically quite flavorful and the locations they have you trekking to were always compelling in one way or another, whether that be visually or in how you have to navigate the space. Sable doesn’t feature combat so you’re not liberating outposts or defending travelers from bandits. Most of your objectives revolve around your navigational verbs: run, climb, float, ride. The fun comes from gazing upon these beautiful locales rendered in the striking artstyle. The carrot on a stick is seeing something you’ve never seen before and being able to explore the picturesque landmarks dotted across the vast desert planet. I saw a gargantuan statue, a bioluminescent cave, an eternal lightning storm, an underground greenhouse, and a benevolent godlike worm creature. The game has fast travel but I never used it because it undermines the entire point of the game: to explore, to journey, to take in the world through your eyes and ears. Sable’s sightseeing tour can be almost emotional at times when the art direction really sings.

A small feature of the world design I’d like to particularly complement is the layout of the encampments you discover. They all feel very human-centric; like they exist and thrive without the player’s presence. The way roads and paths and property are arranged feels realistic to the space and the people who live here. I can imagine the daily routine of any given villager and how they’d navigate the streets of their town. This is yet another contributor to the realistic feel of the fictional world.

One of my only design criticisms is the collectable Chum Eggs. These are little gubbins you can find hidden in odd spots of the environment. On roofs, in hidden rooms, hard to reach places, you know the vibe. The player can trade these in to upgrade their stamina wheel. This is fine in a vacuum. You could even say this is undeniably good game design: to reward players for thoroughly exploring the world. In a game that’s all about exploration, having a collectable system must be a no-brainer, right? Well, I would disagree. It runs counterintuitive to the immersive navigation of the world that I won’t shut up about. It lures out the goblin in all of us. Instead of strolling down a familiar path, I’m motivated to climb around the environment like a parkouring maniac. It's quite literally an egg hunt in a game about interacting with the world with thought and intention. While I find the Chums very cute and even delightful to stumble across at times, I would have much preferred a different avenue to upgrading stamina than this. The Chum Eggs may work in a larger, systems-driven RPG but with how intimate the scope of Sable’s world is, they just feel out of place.

Of course, Sable’s immersive atmosphere could only last so long and around the 10 hours mark I was ready to be done. This was mostly due to the performance issues and buggy moment-to-moment gameplay taking me out of the experience. On PS5, the game would run into these massive lag areas. Mostly this was around the large cities or more populated environments. One minute you’ll be gracefully navigating the sands on your levitating sand bike at a rock solid 60fps and then suddenly the game turns into a slideshow. Unfortunately this isn’t just one or two areas, this happens across every region of the desert. The framerate is consistently inconsistent. There were also a few cases where I soft-locked the game accidentally. I would do an seemingly innocuous action like opening my map and the game would refuse to take input until I restarted. Usually if a game has the occasional bug or framerate hitch I wouldn’t feel the need to write a whole paragraph of a review about it but technical problems negatively impacted just about every moment of my entire playthrough. On the gameplay end of things, I would often run into jank surfaces while engaging with the game’s BOTW style climbing mechanic. The game also doesn’t do a great job at communicating which surfaces are climbable and which are not. There’s nothing more frustrating than gliding into a wall and having my character rub into it with 0 friction, unwilling to grab hold of the surface. Luckily since the game’s structure allowed me to end the story at any time, I was given the green light to end my time in Sable’s world right around the time the game’s magic wore off on me.

Sable is an experience I won’t soon forget. Ultimately, I hope my memories focus more on the world and the characters than the bugs and choppiness. I’m really excited to see what Shedworks cooks up next with the lessons learned from Sable. It’s clear the team has a strong knack for worldbuilding so if they can polish up their gameplay, I think we could expect something truly special.

Thank you to @duhnuhnuh_duhnuhnuh for the game code.

Overview:
A very pleasant experience that is certainly worth your time. My experience can be fairly well summed up by the three B's: Breathtaking, Buggy, and Boring. The game is jaw-droppingly BEAUTIFUL at times, and some of the quests and environments are incredibly well-made. However, there seems to be a little bit of an issue of 'style over substance' here. The game is pretty BORING for a regrettably large portion of the experience and basic gameplay with incredibly mundane quests (most of the time) did not lend itself to anything particularly unique. The unique nature of the game comes in with obviously, the artstyle, and the beautifully crafted world and environments within the open world that just bring you to your knees. I found myself sitting and looking over jaw-dropping vistas in basically every major area, as each area had their own unique, enticing vibes that just made you want to stare. I did have to kinda look past all the texture and lighting glitches that were happening in my FOV at basically all times to enjoy these views, but it's not as big a deal as it may seem. The game is BUGGY as heeellll though... I encountered constant, and I do mean constant, audio, visual, or gameplay bugs. Just be prepared to be torn out of your immersion every other minute, because I know I was. The game would be significantly better without the bugs, but is still certainly playable even with the missing frames, constant lighting issues, annoying camera, and countless other frustrating bugs that I encountered throughout my playthrough. Still definitely a good game that I can personally recommend overall. More details on my time with the game below----

Sights and Sounds
-The artstyle is incredibly beautiful and unique (very screenshot-able)
- Looks good up close (as long as the camera isn't clipping through the entire structure you are in) and is breathtaking far away
-Camera issues and TONS of graphical pop-in took me out of my immersion quite frequently
-Sounds were usually very weighty and satisfying
-But there was a pretty consistent trend of audio bugs like where music suddenly cuts in or out, chimes banging together loudly, or random loud sounds that are very clearly unintentional for the given moment
-Specifically my engine sound on my bike actually hurt my ears
-Very beautiful and fitting score, though

Gameplay
- Movement on the bike is super unpredictable and feels pretty goddamn terrible, honestly
- Movement on foot is much better, and you have a lot more control when NOT climbing (diff story)
- The BOTW influence was very apparent, and having played it just earlier this year, was a nice refresher
- Still much less fleshed out and the gameplay was much more boring overall
- Introduction of new mechanics and the whole 'gliding ceremony' thing felt a little bit tonally conflicting but important to the continuation of the mechanical improvement overall
- ALMOST all quests are laced with tedium and are painfully predictable
- A bunch of fetch quests or quests where you go solve an annoying, basic puzzle for a reward you didn't really care about
- My time with the game was shorter than most, but I still thought the borderline-hour-long intro in the introductory area was way too long. Let me go explore the world please
- Speaking of exploring the world, that was by far the best part
- Exploring caves, ruins, and ships weren't particularly fun nor did they yield enticing results
- But just finding the new, incredibly distinct areas within the world was soooo cool
- All the different areas were super unique and breathtaking in their own ways
-Specific moments like climbing the bones, going to the lightning plateau, and leaving the Ewer were what made the game as special as it ended up being
-Dialogue with other characters was repetitive, but still usually quite interesting because of each character's own, special characteristics and personalities


Narrative/Story/Goal
-Despite the annoying length, the intro was a good way to set up the overall narrative and goal
-Concept of collecting a bunch of different masks was very enticing and interesting at first, but became much less interesting when I learned HOW you go about collecting the majority of the masks (boring)
-The characters all felt very real, very similar to BOTW in that way
-A sentimental story overall with leudo-narrative dissonant elements, but a mainly conjoined story + gameplay
-Rare unique quests were hidden among a sea of boring, monotonous, and repetitive ones
- These unique quests do make the game worth it, however.
-In general, the open nature of it all overwhelmed me a little bit, and kind of pushed me to want to just get the story over with, which I do regret a little bit now, looking back
- Most quests being boring also turned me away from doing as many quests as I could've

Performance
- Good at best
- Mid-High range PC (3060 ti) struggled to run 1440p at 144 hz on high settings, ended up capping at 60
- LOTS of frame stutters/drops throughout but worst in the open world
- A BUNCH of pop-in
- Nothing game-breaking, but the camera, gameplay, visual, and audio glitches highly degraded the experience
- I would've been less critical overall if the game was less buggy
- The bugs were constantly taking me out of my immersion, alerting me to the problems of the game that would've been negligible if I was fully immersed

Un Zelda Breath Of The Wild, sin enemigos, sin mazmorras, sin cocina, sin habilidades, sin combate. Un Zelda Breath Of The Wild mejor. O almenos en mi opinión.
Sable sigue la filosofía de Fumito Ueda de diseño por sustracción y se pregunta si realmente todo eso es necesario para destilar una fórmula hasta su raíz, su esencia más pura, la exploración y el placer de moverte y estar en un mundo.
Esto acompañado por la excepcional banda sonora de Japanese Breakfast y el dibujo al estilo Moebius que le dan una atmósfera como pocas veces he visto.

I may pick this game up again, but I may not. It's an awesome game, just not what I've been looking for. If I had a single critique, it's that it feels directionless and un-driven; however, that's not a negative critique because that's kinda the point of the game.

Sable is an awesome utilization BotW exploration mechanics while introducing so many other unique gameplay experiences. The art style and music are especially well done and greatly contribute to the character design and world-building. Character exploration is really what this game is all about, and Sable is such a great semi-stand-in for the player while being her own unique person exploring what it means to be herself.

This is a pretty good game. Nothing outright blew me away, but it held my attention. I really loved just exploring the world, embracing the music and the visuals. The characters were also fantastic; everybody in Sable's village were a joy to speak to and I enjoyed meeting new people out in the world. Also, a big fan of the amount of customisation for both Sable and her bike.

I feel like two things really dragged this game down for me; the framerate and the frequent bugs. For like 60% of your time exploring the beautiful world of Sable everything runs mostly smoothly, but as soon as you get anywhere close to an interesting place the framerate drops and things get choppy. I thought this could have been a PS5 thing, so I move my playthrough to PC and while it was slightly better, it was definitely still felt.

Some of the bugs on the other hand just made it tedious to play. The whistle used to call the hoverbike barely works, so you spend a lot of time just running over to it on foot. Other times cutscenes would just outright break and show the wrong areas and positions.

Another little thing that I don't think is criticism, but something weird I noticed; There's so much colour and contrast that is lost when you don't change the settings to 'high visibility'. Without it set, everything just looks washed out.

Overall good game with some annoying issues that could drive you away.

Unfortunately, I'm going to have give up on Sable.

From the first moment I saw a trailer for this game, with a cloaked figure riding a hoverbike across sand dunes in cell-shaded graphics and a synth soundtrack I was 100% sold. This was supposed to be my jam.

I'm not a framerate snob at all. Far from it. Higher framerates definitely make games look better, but it's near the bottom of my priorities when buying a game. However Sable has such an inconsistent framerate even I couldn't carry on.

It doesn't help that there's been (I assume) an artistic choice to restrict the frames of animation on the main character, Sable. As for the environments, they will either look fantastic or will splutter and flicker. Add in the character movement animations and it's either super jarring or headache inducing.

It's a real shame because there's definitely a good game underneath this. The freedom to explore the world in whatever order you like, the fantastic dialogue and (taken in little snapshots) it really is beautiful.

From what I've read, it's just a two-person development team so I don't mean any ill-will or maliciousness to them and can only imagine how hard it must be to actually make a game. I hope there's patch at some point so I can revisit.

Incomplete so no score.

Incredibly sweet and touching, Sable is not like other open-world games you may encounter. It's not focused on crafting, combat, or boss fights. Instead, it's a coming-of-age tale, its environments infused with childlike wonder and spectacle waiting to be explored.

With unique stylization and a melancholic soundtrack, its hard not to get choked up on its genuine emotional moments and its central message: regardless of who you choose to be, there is a place for you out there.

If it weren't for its buggy state (slowdowns, crashes, corrupted save-files), this would be an easy recommendation for those looking for a laid-back experience. Only play if you're willing to put up with bugginess and jank.

A genuinely wonderful game. A vast desert, where your objective is on one hand exploration but on the other hand find out more about yourself. As Sable discovers more of this world, you further discover what her future will be, after the credits hit. Or maybe you do that. Maybe you see it as an exercise in freedom and are then overrun by having to make a choice in the end. These things are all plausible and viable ways to approach it from the game itself.
Now, there are technical issues with the game. Sound can get weird, loading issues occur on the fastest bikes and some objects can lack all collision. Frankly, none of those impacted my enjoyment.
With this striking atmosphere and this almost dream-like calmness and peacefulness of this world, it becomes a meditation of identity and self discovery to me. Gliding through those dune seas becomes a calming exercise and the scarcity of points of interest make all of them worthwile.
A freedom and childlike wonder, experienced one final time before you have to choose the path of your adult life. But there are things within the world suggesting that a choice is not final and set in stone. An angler turned vivarium keeper, a guard who sets to explore the world again after retiring, a famous poet once again uncertain about their destiny.
Sable embraces freedom, and finding ones destiny in life, but also questioning said destiny. It wishes the best for every individual, resulting in the best of communities.
It is no surprise that the only place with injustice and corruption is the only city in town. The biggest looming threats in this world, despite what should be a dooming apocalyptic setting, is the same threat of our world - corrupt law and capitalism.
Otherwise, this is a world that feels almost utopic in the calm and peace, especially considering its history and details. There a few fictional worlds where I feel like living in them would be nice. This is one of them.

Sable is a beautiful and often brilliant adventure that tells a gripping coming of age story that forces you to reflect on the quiet moments of life. It's sense of exploration is strong and it's ending feels like it meaningfully confronts you on the memories you have made. Visually it's stunning, with colors especially captivating you while you travel across the waste. With all that said I really do love what this game accomplished, but it's in a state that is hard to fully recommend.

I ran into a ton of immersive breaking bugs. Nothing absolutely game breaking but some things that just pulled me out of it. Two of the quests I was unable to finish, audio crackling, NPCs walking into walls while talking. Your Mileage may vary but you'll likely run into at least a few of these issues.

If Sable was more polished it would be an easy 5 stars and a highly recommend. It's an incredible journey that is partly undermined by its technical state. I am disappointed that my first experience with this title suffered from these issues, but it is an adventure I will return to one day for more because what is here is just that good. Overall I recommend Sable despite the problems.

Sable was very cute with an extremely strong opening and a solid ending. I really enjoyed traveling around the world, exploring the different people within it, trying to figure out what I was going to become.

One of my favorite moments comes at the very beginning when a member of your village encouraging you on your journey say, "You're going to love it out there, even when you don't." And WOW, that blew me away! What a succinct and beautiful reminder of how we look back on the good and bad times in our lives - especially when we are younger. The game is chock full of that sort of stuff and I really enjoyed hearing it, digesting it, and talking it through with my friends.

Also, the art is beautiful. The style is simply perfect for this sort of adventure and I loved looking at the beautiful world they created for Sable.

A few critiques you should know about going in though: First, it's buggy. Really buggy. Even this many years later it has its hiccups. Nothing game breaking, but its noticeable. Second, the game gets a bit grindy in the latter third. If you want to do everything, you're going to be grinding, which feels like an imposition in this game. I should be exploring and enjoying not grinding. Better explanations on what you need to do next would go a long way. Finally, the while beautiful, at times and in certain locations the colors all blend together and the world loses definition. Mostly at "dusk". I had trouble seeing a few times and some of my vision impaired friends really struggled with this.

Still, with all that, Sable is a great little indie game with a good story and some nice meat to chew on as you step into life. I would 100% give this game to someone entering into college or who is struggling to figure out what's next.

Honestly this was kinda an eye opener for what I actually value to like a game. Buggy and poor performance? So what, as long as there isn't anything game breaking that messes with my progress it didn't bother me. Really easy without much of a challenge? Awesome, now I can just focus on enjoying the game and its world without any frustration. I just loved the games artstyle and how it built its world and the rituals of the people you encounter along your journey made this an unforgettable experience for me

The game came at just the right time. I played it at a time in my life when I myself was very aimless and, like the game's protagonist, had embarked on a kind of search for meaning. Sable is a very unique, very atmospheric exploration game with no combat and no possibility of dying or otherwise failing. I loved being carried through the desert on my hoverbike, exploring ruins and uncovering secrets of the world. The dialogue was well written, funny but not silly, and often with a dose of melancholy that I really enjoyed. Unfortunately, the game is an absolute technical disaster on PC. I constantly had flickering textures, performance drops and very strange sound bugs, which often disturbed the overall experience. Nevertheless, this journey through the desert planet will stay with me for a long time. What a beautiful and extraordinary game.