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.