An amazing indie exploration game with some really bad performance issues. The music and aesthetic are top notch
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.
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.
simplesmente um dos jogos mais queridos que eu me deparei com uma musica que pra mim faz parte do culto luminatti pelo o que me faz sentir. me apresentou japanese breakfast e sua percepção de se jogar no mundo como 'adulta' é interessante e incrível :) shelved mas com certeza vou voltar a jogar.