The following is a transcript of a video review which can be viewed here: https://youtu.be/5RPT0j9-KzQ

Sable, 2021’s most nebulous indie hit, is mysterious for all of the right, and all of the wrong reasons. Does the world beyond the Ewer contain something worth seeing or should video games be about more than just seeing interesting things?

Video games have become increasingly affordable for independent developers to create in recent years, allowing more unconventional video games to become available and for micro-industries to spring up all over the world. No longer would a panel of disconnected executives decide what video games could be made, if people wanted to revive dead genres or sell to more niche markets then they are at liberty to do so. The games that entered the market as a result of the newfound affordability have an immense variance in quality, with some even surpassing those professionally designed and assembled projects. The critical and financial acclaim these games would achieve inspired many others to enter into game development, and in 2017 a studio would form within a parent’s shed with aspirations to create something beautiful. Despite a scheduled 2019 release, Sable wouldn’t reach digital shelves until 2021 giving publisher Raw Fury enough time to get the project onto Xbox consoles and giving Meg Jayanth and Japanese Breakfast time to work on the narrative and music respectively. This extra time may have been to the game’s detriment, though, as the final game still contains a large number of bugs that affect most parts of Sable, bugs that the additional time in development should have squashed. Did Shedworks achieve all they had desired within Sable, or did their lack of experience cause the game to have to release before it was ready? Does Sable satisfy the targets it seems to have set for itself, or are there important things missing that have prevented the game from reaching its full potential? And finally, is the audience Sable seeks as bountiful as it appears or are those who sing the game’s praises louder than their size would suggest?

Sable gives the player very few obvious clues what the game will involve during its opening, but it very quickly gets the player into the loop and sends them out into the world. The player is shown that Sable can climb surfaces, then they are given the ability to float around, and finally they are given a jetbike to ride around at high speeds. The player is given an objective without urgency and sent into a world full of mountains and stories of a bunch of side characters. On first glance, Sable looks a lot like Breath of the Wild with the combat stripped out and after playing Sable for the 12 hours that I did, yeah, it’s like Breath of the Wild with no combat. The world is split into smaller regions that have different geographies, there’s a handful of populated locations throughout the regions, plenty of elevation to climb around upon, high places to reach to fill in the map, and a bunch of creatures to find for rewards. These similarities aren’t necessarily a bad thing, though. Iterating on the parts of Breath of the Wild people enjoyed most is a highly effective way of creating a product people are certain to find value in. No need for expensive market research or gambling on a gameplay system they haven’t experienced before, Shedworks could extract the best from their inspiration and mix in their own ideas on top. Their final product is significantly different to Breath of the Wild and I think that Sable’s world is the best example of the differences.

The world the player explores consists of seven distinct regions that each maintain a different geographical identity, usually revolving around a single identifier that the other regions don’t contain. One zone is heavily forested, one seems to be actively volcanic, there’s a salt flats area, and so on. There aren’t many sources of water throughout the world and the largest population of NPCs are positioned beside a small lake. Other NPC populations occupy impermanent camps that don’t appear to hold much in terms of resources for subsistence. The world’s verticality is very rarely used in combination with the NPCs, but summiting a large mountain and coming across someone was always a pleasant surprise. The views from those mountaintops are also often incredibly impressive; the game’s render distance is very generous, there’s always a handful of landmarks to view, and the unique palette often creates screens that no other game could ever produce. The player is also shown the large distances they’ll be crossing in order to get to those landmarks, which is a bit of a double-edged sword. The distances are vast and the bike isn’t too comfortable to use over uneven terrain, but the music triggers whenever Sable is on the bike for long enough and it’s fantastic.

Sable’s most prominent, and most laboured aspect is the game’s presentation. The music is spectacular, the main theme is eerie and hopeful, and the rest of the tracks are similarly haunting. The other tracks do a lot of the work in setting up a location’s atmosphere, and since the game’s lighting acts in an unusual way the music has to do a lot of the atmospheric work. Sable is textured in plain colours, the details are minimal, and there’s a heavy layering of toon filter across every surface. I like the colours but I’m not so sure about this use of toon filter over texturing the black lines onto the objects. The filter is only active in a radius around Sable, and since the game encourages the player to climb up things to observe their surroundings they’ll likely see the filter flickering over the entire scene which isn’t a great look. It also makes the z-fighting and poorly optimised pieces look even worse. People are going to export an object with too many polygons now and again, and a normal texture will keep that mistake hidden. This might seem too nit-picky but the fix is so simple and comes down to not relying on a filter to be the lynch-pin of the visual design. It’s a shame, because some of these places are unbelievable. The region full of stone pillars looks amazing when the sun sets behind it, and driving through the central desert with the sun high above is uniquely iconic. Similarly, the large pieces of foreign debris stand out against the rest of the game’s art without seeming to clash, although they have a tendency to be quite busy and often contain containers with massive, ultra spoilers on them for no reason. The debris pieces are the only surfaces in the game that cannot be climbed which makes entering the ships into some of the few puzzle scenarios in the game.

There are only a handful of systems at play within Sable, and while the simplicity is enjoyable and refreshing, it can get a little stale. Climbing, riding the bike, and carrying items are the only things Sable is able to do so you’d better buckle up and get used to putting heavy batteries into slots. Sable is limited by her stamina when climbing so initially the player will have to survey their ascent carefully and find a way up with plenty of spots to rest upon. Again, like Link, Sable can upgrade her stamina by turning in Chum Eggs to the Chum Queen, allowing the player greater range on their climbs and reducing the quantity of time they spend assessing the surface. I think the initial quantity of stamina is pretty good, nothing outside of the very late game requires any more stamina than Sable starts with and some light exploring in most locations will yield Chums. Climbing is well rewarded, but the entire bike system is half-baked at best. Simoon is the name of Sable’s bike and the thing can barely handle most of the uneven terrain throughout the world. Cresting a dune almost always leads to the bike spinning out of control, calling the bike to Sable over rough terrain usually has disastrous effects, and the various bike parts that change the bike’s weight cause it to react even more drastically to the terrain. I managed to get the bike stuck in the ground more than once and the bike parts I got from the Crystal Plateau made Simoon into a lumbering mess. The bike would also seem to open a lot of opportunities to create races to compete in or embark upon long distance deliveries, but the closest Sable gets is asking the player to drive through a series of gates to raise a tower. In the same vein, carrying stuff could have been expanded upon in fun ways that moving batteries around only hints at. Within almost all of the crashed spaceships there are puzzles that involve moving batteries to the appropriate slots to open doors. The batteries are too heavy to carry while climbing, and Sable can only just throw them so the player has to use large pistons present within the environments to move the batteries up to higher levels. Carrying items never expands beyond this, leaving yet another pile of potential on the table.

And so, we reach the crux of my experience with Sable: the inescapable sense that something is absent. The majority of locations within the game are especially shallow and give very little reason to stay in them for any length of time. If it weren’t for the mystery of the missing power core, the only city in the game would have less than an hour of content. A bridge with statues battling on it has a quest to go there, a couple of Chums to find, and a really weak puzzle that involves waiting for some shadows to line up. None of the climbs involve much thought, and without any other form of conflict the player passes through this area once and has no reason to ever return. Showing these areas in this video is exactly the same as being within them in the game, which is endemic throughout all of Sable. So much was done to make the game’s locations visually interesting, but nothing has been done to make them mechanically engaging in any way. There are no consequences for failing because Sable can never take damage or drop the items in her pockets. The player can throw Sable from the highest point in the game and step away from the controls, it doesn’t matter. There are no stakes. There isn’t even conflict in the narrative. A game doesn’t need conflict, necessarily, but the mechanical systems within Sable are screaming for something else to tie them all together. Any other mechanic to make this world a little bit more alive would go a long way, but I suspect the game’s technical problems would prevent it from supporting that kind of additional content.

I mentioned the bike’s struggles with the terrain previously, but there are pervasive problems like that throughout most of the rest of the game too. Traversal isn’t a problem exclusive to the bike, as the tiny number of NPCs that aren’t bolted down have trouble navigating the environments as well. I watched Joti get stuck on the same lamp post more than once despite having a lot of deliveries on their plate, apparently. The handful of beetles to chase around will often find a wall to run into so catching them is much easier than I assume was intended, and every other movement occurs off camera to prevent the pathing from breaking down in front of the player. The spawnable towers that appear after the player rides through the rings also have a consistent disappearing problem. Various pieces will disappear whenever the player is interacting with the towers, an interaction that is encouraged by the consistent placement of a Chum right on top. The water also acts strangely, and I found a waterfall the Sable could climb too. And dialogue is frequently assigned to the wrong character which makes some of the narrative scenarios hard to follow. Not that they’re especially complex.

Sable’s narrative is a coming of age story in the most stripped back sense possible. Sable, the character, must leave her tribe and step out into the world upon her “gliding” where she will find her life’s purpose. Once her purpose has been found, Sable can return to her tribe and continue with her life. The gliding is a solitary excursion into the world; Sable will never meet someone to travel with nor are there many people to become friends with. Within each of the game’s regions there is a population of NPCs who might have a self-contained side-story to experience as part of Sable’s journey to better understand her place in the world. Typically, the player will have to receive one of these quests from an NPC wearing the mask Sable is attempting to earn, and upon completing the quest Sable will receive a badge that can be handed in for the mask. Whenever the player collects 3 of each badge type they can turn them into a Mask Caster, reach into the Caster’s face, and claim their new mask. Eventually, the Ibexi will return to the game’s starting location to meet Sable again. There, the player enters a large temple and will select the mask that Sable will wear throughout her adulthood. And then the credits roll. This touches on so little of the potential culture that has formed among these people, the various groups would have grown more distinct over time, but the nomads and the settled peoples are essentially no different and it’s the crystal harvester tribe who are the only ones with a different perspective on the world. The world of Sable contains ancient, mechanical structures, massive temples and observatories, strange creatures, and everyone must wear a mask at all times but apparently all of that just sprang from the ground and nobody really cares that much about it. The huge, petrified worm and the countless gigantic skeletons are also casually ignored. The crashed ships have their own side-story, but none of the regular people even care that they exist. Sometimes a scrapper will want pieces from a ship, but they never investigate further. This whole world just exists and nobody within it is ever curious about what came before.

The game does have an answer for the origin of humanity in Sable's world, and I think it’d be a much more interesting game than what is present within Sable currently. Within the crashed spaceships in each region, the player can access a terminal that is run by the ship’s AI controller named Sarin. Sarin was present the day all of the ships landed on the planet but due to a security protocol they are unable to reveal more than a single ship’s log at a time. These disparate stories reveal that a crew of people from Earth had travelled to the planet with intent to terraform it for colonisation. Something went wrong, though, and the ship became stranded in orbit, unable to return to Earth. The ship’s crew eventually resolved to place the terraformer machines onto the planet and resign themselves to a life behind their oxygen masks. The people still living on the planet, including Sable herself, are descendents of that crew that crash landed there. So much time has passed that they have forgotten their connection to Earth and how to read English. The thing is, I can still read English. So the labels on the boxes that say “Made in London” serve no purpose beyond explicitly and immediately spoiling this side story. There are no other connections to Earth aside from these labels and the ship’s logs making inference. I don’t understand why this choice was made and the dissatisfaction I felt when the big reveal within the ship’s logs finally came was comparable to the feeling of watching the poor polish and missed opportunities squander all of the potential Sable had within it.

Some of you might prefer the low stakes on offer within Sable, a game so chilled out that playing it almost seems lazy, and I don’t mean to censure you if Sable is something that sounds appealing to you. If you’re on the hunt for something visually interesting, or so shallow that you can casually chat with your stream audience and barely pay attention to what’s on screen then Sable is your ideal candidate. Or it would be if it didn’t have so many technical problems. If you like to experience interesting stories, you like characters, you like goals, you think that the best fix for Breath of the Wild’s combat was not to just rip it out, well, Sable wouldn’t be among the game’s I’d recommend to you.

I believe Shedworks has created the game they had intended to, although I’m sure that it isn’t exactly what they had planned to release. Sable is very much an exploration game with stunning views and an interesting aesthetic. I don’t think their idea is coherent with their design, though. Developers working on projects like Journey and Gris recognised that their original concepts were very simplistic, so they dedicated most of their resources toward delivering the best possible polish on their 3 to 4 hour game. There’s no fat in those games. There isn’t anything that could be removed or needs to be fixed. Sable shares none of these qualities. It was released in September and has been patched several times since then - it isn’t finished - and it has a long way to go before Sable can realise any of its potential.

I might have unearthed something that was buried for a reason.