IriidaV
Sable 2021
Log Status
Completed
Playing
Backlog
Wishlist
Rating
Time Played
19h 48m
Days in Journal
7 days
Last played
September 20, 2022
First played
September 24, 2021
Platforms Played
Played via the Xbox Store version on Windows 11 (Gigabyte B560 HD3, i7-11700 @ 2.5GHz, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070)
A year ago I bought and played Sable on launch on my trusty Xbox One X. I had bought the console recently, half as a way of exploring Microsoft's exclusives and the cross-gen period, and half for this game. I said it in my previous review but Sable should never have been released for the Xbox One line of consoles, with a truly awful presentation in performance all round.
On a beefy PC, Sable handles significantly better, albeit not without it's fair share of issues. The more you run the game for a single play session, the more likelihood of the framerate slowly tanking, with my initial startup giving me around 100fps and then the game managing to slow down to the teens before I'd had to close and restart the game. The audio stutters are a consistent issue here too and can vary from mildly irritating to frustratingly annoying depending on the sound effects played via things like your bike setup and the clothes you're wearing. The dialogue selection menu can bugger up sometimes, soft-locking you in the conversation with no option to select a response and the pause menu refusing to respond, leaving me with the only option of closing the game via the desktop and rebooting again.
Those are just the major technical problems (there are more minor ones but I want to keep this concise) but I also ran into a couple of key design flaws with the game too.
This is wholly inspired by BotW, there's no denying it. Whatever this game started off as, the main traversal mechanics of Sable herself make a hefty nod to the Zelda franchise's highest-selling game of the entire franchise. When I originally played this game on the Xbox, I was fine with that - I hadn't played BotW after all and the wide-open world with a stamina-based "climb whatever you want" mechanic is fun as all hell. But after playing BotW for quite a reasonable chunk of time this year, Sable's design inspirations don't quite hold up as well.
One of the bigger differences here is that Sable gives no clear indication as to what can be climbed and what can't. Zelda has a clear texture in Guardian-related environments that once you try scaling once or twice you now know you can't climb them. Sable only relies on you understanding that when you're exploring old ships you cannot climb anything, no matter the texture. Fine, but frustrating when you see a new wall that looks different and vaguely like other climbable walls but isn't.
The other big difference is Sable does not indicate in the slightest that you can upgrade your stamina. I found this out within an hour or so of finishing the game, having believed up til that point that either the developers knew exactly how to perfectly design certain ledges and cliff faces to be scalable with the base stamina meter, or they just gave a rough estimate, leaving you to rely on out of the box ideas to cheese your way up to new heights. I knew the collectable chum eggs had to serve a purpose, but due to the way I explored the game world I simply didn't discover what that purpose was until near the end game.
My last complaint about Sable and it's BotW-inspired design is that there is simply nothing to do in the areas between locations. Do you see something that doesn't fit in with the rest of the environment? Mark the location and go straight there because anything else that blends in with the rest of the area you're currently in yields nothing and you will waste your time exploring. One of the many great design features of BotW was the fact you could go quite literally anywhere and find something that will help you on your journey or was just interesting to see. Sable's large open world only exists to give the player a relaxing vibe of riding through it's environments on a hover bike which is really great to see for the first five minutes and then becomes tediously boring in the second hour when you have a bike that barely goes faster than your sprinting speed and you're just holding down the acceleration button with nothing else happening for minutes at a time. Had the world been more enclosed and tighter with the long stretches of riding limited to once in a while sequences, Sable would have been a lot more memorable for me.
If this review sounds salty then I probably still am from that initial Xbox One play session. I had assumed after installing this game on a beefier PC that all my initial problems would vanish, but it seems they only lurked in the background with the purpose of slowly revealing themselves once again.
On it's presentation and story merits, I understand why Sable has gotten the acclaim it has - the visuals are simply stunning with the Moebius inspirations, and the story of self-discovery in the larger home away from your family is well-written. But from a gameplay perspective this was non-stop jank and I can't believe even after a year from launch that the game is still in the state it is today.
A year ago I bought and played Sable on launch on my trusty Xbox One X. I had bought the console recently, half as a way of exploring Microsoft's exclusives and the cross-gen period, and half for this game. I said it in my previous review but Sable should never have been released for the Xbox One line of consoles, with a truly awful presentation in performance all round.
On a beefy PC, Sable handles significantly better, albeit not without it's fair share of issues. The more you run the game for a single play session, the more likelihood of the framerate slowly tanking, with my initial startup giving me around 100fps and then the game managing to slow down to the teens before I'd had to close and restart the game. The audio stutters are a consistent issue here too and can vary from mildly irritating to frustratingly annoying depending on the sound effects played via things like your bike setup and the clothes you're wearing. The dialogue selection menu can bugger up sometimes, soft-locking you in the conversation with no option to select a response and the pause menu refusing to respond, leaving me with the only option of closing the game via the desktop and rebooting again.
Those are just the major technical problems (there are more minor ones but I want to keep this concise) but I also ran into a couple of key design flaws with the game too.
This is wholly inspired by BotW, there's no denying it. Whatever this game started off as, the main traversal mechanics of Sable herself make a hefty nod to the Zelda franchise's highest-selling game of the entire franchise. When I originally played this game on the Xbox, I was fine with that - I hadn't played BotW after all and the wide-open world with a stamina-based "climb whatever you want" mechanic is fun as all hell. But after playing BotW for quite a reasonable chunk of time this year, Sable's design inspirations don't quite hold up as well.
One of the bigger differences here is that Sable gives no clear indication as to what can be climbed and what can't. Zelda has a clear texture in Guardian-related environments that once you try scaling once or twice you now know you can't climb them. Sable only relies on you understanding that when you're exploring old ships you cannot climb anything, no matter the texture. Fine, but frustrating when you see a new wall that looks different and vaguely like other climbable walls but isn't.
The other big difference is Sable does not indicate in the slightest that you can upgrade your stamina. I found this out within an hour or so of finishing the game, having believed up til that point that either the developers knew exactly how to perfectly design certain ledges and cliff faces to be scalable with the base stamina meter, or they just gave a rough estimate, leaving you to rely on out of the box ideas to cheese your way up to new heights. I knew the collectable chum eggs had to serve a purpose, but due to the way I explored the game world I simply didn't discover what that purpose was until near the end game.
My last complaint about Sable and it's BotW-inspired design is that there is simply nothing to do in the areas between locations. Do you see something that doesn't fit in with the rest of the environment? Mark the location and go straight there because anything else that blends in with the rest of the area you're currently in yields nothing and you will waste your time exploring. One of the many great design features of BotW was the fact you could go quite literally anywhere and find something that will help you on your journey or was just interesting to see. Sable's large open world only exists to give the player a relaxing vibe of riding through it's environments on a hover bike which is really great to see for the first five minutes and then becomes tediously boring in the second hour when you have a bike that barely goes faster than your sprinting speed and you're just holding down the acceleration button with nothing else happening for minutes at a time. Had the world been more enclosed and tighter with the long stretches of riding limited to once in a while sequences, Sable would have been a lot more memorable for me.
If this review sounds salty then I probably still am from that initial Xbox One play session. I had assumed after installing this game on a beefier PC that all my initial problems would vanish, but it seems they only lurked in the background with the purpose of slowly revealing themselves once again.
On it's presentation and story merits, I understand why Sable has gotten the acclaim it has - the visuals are simply stunning with the Moebius inspirations, and the story of self-discovery in the larger home away from your family is well-written. But from a gameplay perspective this was non-stop jank and I can't believe even after a year from launch that the game is still in the state it is today.
EU release played on a Xbox One X.
Update: it's now been 3 months with various updates and the game still runs poorly on Xbox One X. Maybe in a few years I'll give this game another shot on the Series lineup but for now I'm too bitter to touch it for a good while. Sable should never have been released on Xbox One/X.
Original review:
To say Sable is a Breath of the Wild clone is both a disservice and fairly apt - it's story is more one of personal self discovery and finding one's place in the world which I have been highly enjoying, but the clunky controls and poor frame pacing leave more to be desired.
When the controller isn't being touched, Sable is a wholly beautiful game, with its Moebius-inspired artstyle really being pulled off immaculately (despite the low fidelity on both character and environment models) with warm inviting colours during the day and blue hues for the night. The sound design soothes you in both its calming melodies and weird, alien noises and the soundtrack provided by Japanese Breakfast is simply enchanting. The story premise and characters in the introductory area are melancholic in a way befitting of a lost Ghibli movie or one of the many AA/indie games in the past decade such as Journey, The Last Guardian, or The Pathless.
On the surface level, Sable is simply a stunning-looking game.
Trying to control the character however is when things go wrong - the input latency here is real, with movement and jumping taking up to half a second to register, making the BotW-style running, jumping and climbing extremely awkward and clumsy. There were several instances where I ran to the edge of a cliff and simply fell off because the jump button didn't register in time, making simple platforming a frustrating task.
The movement and handling of the bike is also a harrowing experience - if you ever played Jak II for the PlayStation 2 it feels exactly like that game's hover-bike races: overly-tight steering with the bike never quite being able to balance on even stable ground properly, let alone on a patch of dirt with a few rocks. It's always juddering about the place, which wouldn't feel quite so bad if the maximuk speed felt too slow. I understand Shedworks were aiming for a calm game with low levels o of adrenaline, and I don't need to be blasting off across the environment at 200 miles per hour, but the first bike felt at most maybe twice the speed of the player character's and the personalised bike you get a bit later barely feels any faster. There's a great big expanse you can explore in this game but traversal just feels like it drags a little.
And then there's the framerate itself - to say it's unstable is simply an understatement. I assumed that the poor frame-pacing and complete and total slow down of the game's visuals and audio were simply my poor, weak Xbox One X simply not being strong enough to handle all the action(?) on screen, but even folks with a Series X are reporting stuttering game play with no clear reason for it. The one guaranteed instance of the slow down is whenever new quests are accepted, where the whole game siezes up for a couple of seconds before it manages to stabilise again. I can't tell of 30fps is meant to be the target here simply because it never raises above that, which makes the stylistic choice of the choppy character animation frustrating to see in motion.
All in all, Sable is disappointing. I've been relatively hyped for this game for a few years now, but the poor optimisation on display here is simply annoying to witness. I'd leave trying this out until a good few patches are released to help stabilise everything.
Update: it's now been 3 months with various updates and the game still runs poorly on Xbox One X. Maybe in a few years I'll give this game another shot on the Series lineup but for now I'm too bitter to touch it for a good while. Sable should never have been released on Xbox One/X.
Original review:
To say Sable is a Breath of the Wild clone is both a disservice and fairly apt - it's story is more one of personal self discovery and finding one's place in the world which I have been highly enjoying, but the clunky controls and poor frame pacing leave more to be desired.
When the controller isn't being touched, Sable is a wholly beautiful game, with its Moebius-inspired artstyle really being pulled off immaculately (despite the low fidelity on both character and environment models) with warm inviting colours during the day and blue hues for the night. The sound design soothes you in both its calming melodies and weird, alien noises and the soundtrack provided by Japanese Breakfast is simply enchanting. The story premise and characters in the introductory area are melancholic in a way befitting of a lost Ghibli movie or one of the many AA/indie games in the past decade such as Journey, The Last Guardian, or The Pathless.
On the surface level, Sable is simply a stunning-looking game.
Trying to control the character however is when things go wrong - the input latency here is real, with movement and jumping taking up to half a second to register, making the BotW-style running, jumping and climbing extremely awkward and clumsy. There were several instances where I ran to the edge of a cliff and simply fell off because the jump button didn't register in time, making simple platforming a frustrating task.
The movement and handling of the bike is also a harrowing experience - if you ever played Jak II for the PlayStation 2 it feels exactly like that game's hover-bike races: overly-tight steering with the bike never quite being able to balance on even stable ground properly, let alone on a patch of dirt with a few rocks. It's always juddering about the place, which wouldn't feel quite so bad if the maximuk speed felt too slow. I understand Shedworks were aiming for a calm game with low levels o of adrenaline, and I don't need to be blasting off across the environment at 200 miles per hour, but the first bike felt at most maybe twice the speed of the player character's and the personalised bike you get a bit later barely feels any faster. There's a great big expanse you can explore in this game but traversal just feels like it drags a little.
And then there's the framerate itself - to say it's unstable is simply an understatement. I assumed that the poor frame-pacing and complete and total slow down of the game's visuals and audio were simply my poor, weak Xbox One X simply not being strong enough to handle all the action(?) on screen, but even folks with a Series X are reporting stuttering game play with no clear reason for it. The one guaranteed instance of the slow down is whenever new quests are accepted, where the whole game siezes up for a couple of seconds before it manages to stabilise again. I can't tell of 30fps is meant to be the target here simply because it never raises above that, which makes the stylistic choice of the choppy character animation frustrating to see in motion.
All in all, Sable is disappointing. I've been relatively hyped for this game for a few years now, but the poor optimisation on display here is simply annoying to witness. I'd leave trying this out until a good few patches are released to help stabilise everything.