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Review for Sable

Sable review
Sable review

Sable is a visually striking coming-of-age adventure about growth and development—about going out into the world and discerning through experience just who you are and what you really value. It’s a game about learning by doing, about examining your own actions to try to understand what they say about you, about taking as much time as you need to figure out the shape of your life before beginning the great undertaking that is your purpose. The supreme irony, unfortunately, is that while Sable’s writing demonstrates an intimate knowledge of these things, the game itself feels like it was rushed to market before its own journey was complete, and it consistently undermines its own vision with buggy gameplay and poorly implemented features.

The action takes place on the desert world of Midden, an alien planet settled by humans in the distant past. Few now remember the circumstances of humanity’s journey here, but the trackless wastes are littered with remnants of the original settlers’ abandoned technology. These have taken on a quasi-mythical status for the descendants of the original pioneers, as have the scraps of their history that persist in the collective memory.

The titular character is a young woman of the Ibexii people, a nomadic tribe who eke out their living from the harsh wilderness. As the game begins she’s preparing to embark on her Gliding, a ritual common across Midden whereby young people set out on a journey of self-discovery and return when they’ve found their calling, represented by a stylized mask they’ll wear going forward. This rite entails the loan of two artifacts: a hoverbike for travel and a Gliding Stone, which allows a person to float down from great heights. With these in hand, Sable prepares to venture out into the world with no mission except to seek out who she is and what matters to her.

Part of what sets Sable apart from other open-world science-fantasy titles is the small-scale, inward-looking nature of its narrative. You won’t wind up opposing a world-threatening enemy, or unraveling a deadly conspiracy, or discovering a terrible secret and revealing it to the masses. You’ll simply be exploring a significant episode in one person’s life, deeply meaningful to her and to those whose lives she touches but a mere blip in the larger cosmos. Exploring is only incidentally an opportunity to earn new gear; most often it’s simply a chance to learn about Sable’s people, their history, and Midden itself. Even the knowledge acquired doesn’t have any practical use except in how it affects Sable and her understanding of this place. In a unique turn of events, once you’ve been on your Gliding for a few days you’re free to return home and end the journey at will, meaning the finale can come whenever you feel you’ve found what Sable might be looking for. This more intimate, grounded approach that Sable takes to exploration is refreshingly unconventional among open-world titles.

And exploring here is frequently a joy. The environment is large and littered with landmarks to investigate, from towering spires to bustling villages to huge, derelict spacecraft. Visually the world is a feast for the eyes, with an art style inspired by the work of Jean “Moebius” Giraud; at its best the game manages to feel like a classic European comic brought seamlessly into the third dimension. Giant dragonish skeletons dot the landscape, sometimes serving as bridges between plateaus; neon-colored waterfalls cascade into volcanic calderas; and you’ll even have the opportunity to traverse the internal geography of a fossilized worm-creature. All of this is augmented by the wonderfully immersive sound design, which mixes howling winds, whispering sands and the ever-present thrum of your hoverbike’s engine, along with an understated, relaxing instrumental soundtrack by Japanese Breakfast that remains comfortably in the background while enhancing the mood wherever you are.

Gorgeous as its art style may be, the lighting often removes some of its visual majesty. In scenes of broad daylight, Sable’s colors are bold, bright and solid, in keeping with its influences, and in these moments the spectacle shines. However, it simulates lower-lighting conditions by essentially washing its colors out into pale pink-and-blue pastels or all the way into shades of gray. Rather than effectively conveying that a scene is set at evening or deep underground, it leaves textures looking overexposed at best and incomplete at worst, and it diminishes what’s otherwise an extremely effective aesthetic.

Controls are mostly simple and straightforward. While gamepad and mouse/keyboard schemes are supported, the experience was clearly developed with the former in mind and plays much smoother that way. One control stick (or WASD) moves Sable and the other (or the mouse) the camera, with dedicated buttons for jumping, interacting with objects or people, and activating the Gliding Stone. You can also sprint, which uses stamina, and accelerate on your hoverbike, which otherwise moves the same way that Sable does on foot. It’s possible to lift and carry certain items, with an on-screen prompt telling you how to subsequently drop or throw them. A menu with multiple tabs holds your inventory (where Sable stores quest items and tradable goods she collects), your map, and the various outfits and bike upgrades you can acquire. This is also where you’ll access the settings, which include a variety of accessibility options. The game records your progress automatically at various points, but for reasons I’ll get into later it’s advisable to save manually when you’re able.

Appropriate for an exploration-based title, you’ll spend the vast majority of your time simply getting from one place to another. Fortunately, the process of analyzing a particular area, figuring out the best way to navigate it and then attempting to reach your intended destination is perhaps Sable’s most satisfying element. Each of the six regions is home to a cartographer selling maps of the area, which let you track the places you’ve visited and examine the landscape for features that might be worth a closer look. You can’t fast-travel to a given point until you’ve actually been there, but it’s better that way; the moment when you first see a unique landmark in person after intuiting its presence from a blob on the map is always a thrill.

Sable is small and the world very imposing, which means you’ll do a lot of climbing. This is an intuitive and user-friendly process; simply walking up to a vertical surface (or using the Stone to glide onto it) is all it takes to start climbing. The young protagonist has only a limited amount of stamina before she must let go, meaning you’ll have to be strategic in moving from ledge to ledge to rest and recuperate. Having the Stone means that there’s no fall damage to worry about—even if you fail to activate it in time, Sable will use it herself right before touchdown—and you can get creative with how you ascend, climbing to a certain point and then gliding to a lower one in a slow descent to observe the terrain from a different angle. One drawback is that there’s no way to judge heights except by sight, and the stylized art style can make that difficult. Miscalculating and exhausting your stamina before reaching a ledge means you’ll just have to hope there’s somewhere to land before you wind up back at the bottom. Fortunately you can increase your maximum stamina by collecting eggs from friendly worm-things called chums, who hide in nooks and crannies across the terrain. (It works if you don’t think about it too much.)

No matter how pleasant it is to explore, however, the game feels oddly empty of things to actually do.  Each settlement you find usually has a few characters who need help with something—it’s tradition that youths on their Gliding look for people to assist—but the missions they give you tend to be blandly straightforward, requiring little thought except about the exact spot you should be looking for. Go to this nest and collect this many beetles; find this cave and bring back a bushel of mushrooms; climb this pillar and wait for a certain crystal to sprout there. It gives you a lovely excuse to take in more of the game’s vistas, but it’s mostly busywork with little challenge. It also feels at odds with the central narrative, as it’s hard to imagine Sable learning much of anything about herself and her place in the world by ticking off shopping lists. There are some enjoyable puzzles scattered around—especially those centered on finding the parts to repair machines in derelict spacecraft and figuring out how to use them to access locked chambers—but these are the minority.

Sable’s ultimate goal is to determine the role she’ll eventually play in this society, as symbolized by a mask she’ll receive from the mysterious Mask-Caster. To earn a mask, one must first collect three badges from members of the corresponding profession, usually by performing tasks at least theoretically related to their duties. (Gliders may collect as many masks as they want, but they’ll have to commit to one at journey’s end.) The problem is that many of these quests are only tangentially connected to the job in question: you’ll earn Guard badges, for instance, by collecting souvenirs from various regions for a retired Guard who regrets never traveling there; and two of the three Entertainer badges come not from the songs, stories and stagecraft we’re told is that caste’s bread and butter, but by indulging requests from small children. Cartographer badges are purchased directly from mapmakers, but they don’t come with any additional knowledge, experience or insight into the vocation that might help Sable decide to take it on herself.

This speaks to a larger problem with the game’s script, which is that the world and characters are chronically underdeveloped. Concepts, locations and people are introduced using a few lines of explanatory text and that’s the end of it. Few of the people you meet have distinct personalities, usually presenting as blandly cheerful in a way that makes them feel generic and interchangeable. You’ll meet characters in wildly interesting settings, like the mountaintop Eyries or the storm-blasted Lightning Plain, who offer only a few sentences when asked about themselves and their surroundings, and Sable—who has ascended multiple peaks or braved lightning bolts to reach them—blithely accepts this before moving on. Several questlines—most egregiously a whodunit-style subplot in the city of Eccria—just ... end without any sense of finality or closure, with participants sometimes speaking to you afterwards as if the completed quest was still ongoing.

It’s Sable herself, though, who’s most underserved by the game’s underwriting. She isn’t a cypher per se—she speaks for herself, and we get a sense of her free-thinking, can-do personality when she does—but despite the adventure positioning itself as the tale of her journey toward self-discovery, we never really get a feel for who she is inside. Dialogue options let you react to others in different ways, for example—usually choosing an excited, reserved or displeased response—but nobody keeps track of how you’ve behaved or treated them, and Sable’s thoughts, demeanor and general attitude remain the same regardless of what you have her say.

Design-wise, this is perhaps the biggest obstacle preventing Sable from successfully telling the story it means to: it is so intent on leaving choices in the player’s hands that it neglects to make them feel meaningful for the character they nominally affect. The game may be named after her, but its protagonist never feels like a real person who grows or changes in tandem with your chosen style of play. Rather, the bits of personality she’s been granted feel like another mask, this one to cover up an inability to reconcile the desire to tell a character-driven story with the decision to center the player as its driving force.

The result is that you can choose what Sable does and when she does it, and even how she responds in a given situation, but neither the world nor Sable herself actually changes or reacts to the choices you’ve made. It’s entirely possible, for instance, to tell every single badge-giver that you hated what they asked you to do; then, without being offered anything to bridge the resultant narrative gap, you can reach the ending and choose that profession anyway.

It never feels like you’re accompanying Sable on a quest to discover what’s meaningful to her, because the question of what’s meaningful and how is never really addressed. There’s no sense along any of the mask-paths that Sable is gravitating toward or away from a particular activity, nor that she feels much of anything about what she’s doing except genial goodwill toward the people she meets. The badge quest chains don’t feel integrated with the story at hand, or even like they’re part of a story; Sable isn’t discovering an affinity or a distaste for these tasks, just carrying them out without much comment. On collecting her reward she’ll say what you tell her to, but from there she’ll go on to treat the quest-giver with the same bland niceness she affords everyone.

Still, the visuals and the exploration process are enjoyable enough that I’d probably recommend the game anyway under other circumstances. Unfortunately, there’s no ignoring that Sable is one of the buggiest and most unpolished major releases I’ve ever played. Never throughout my roughly twenty-hour playthrough did the game feel like it was running as intended for more than a few uninterrupted minutes. Technical problems were everywhere, intruding into nearly every aspect of play, so that it came to feel less like I was playing a finished game and more like I was beta testing an unreleased one.

I lost track of the number of surfaces that popped in and out of visibility, or that I glitched through to fall into gaps from which I could only escape by fast-traveling away. NPCs walked blindly into walls and remained there, eternally shuffling their feet as they tried to continue forward. Menu text often remained stuck on a single item description no matter how I scrolled through, making it impossible at times to see descriptions of what I had in my inventory, while the “Outfits” menu became stubborn and refused to let me view more than a few items. Worse, there were times when I went to save manually and found it was inexplicably impossible, forcing me to quit and hope that I hadn’t done too much since my last autosave. The overwhelming bugginess even affected how I experienced the story, as a glitch prevented me from selecting the specific mask I wanted for Sable at the end of the game.

All of which pales in comparison to the problems with the hoverbike, intended as Sable’s signature mechanic. Nearly all of the marketing has been centered on the image of our heroine cruising through the desert on her mechanical mount, a crimson streak of exhaust stretching out behind her, but in practice this isn’t the smooth, sleek, exhilarating experience it’s meant to be. On Midden, hoverbikes are held to be semi-sentient, with names of their own (Sable’s is Simoon) and Gliders view them as equal partners in their travels; the game, however, does nothing to make any of this feel true for the player. Riding Simoon, you run headlong into slopes you should be able to float over; you careen off into wild spins as invisible obstacles suddenly derail you; you plummet through vertical spaces with little to no control over where your nose ultimately points. The “summon” button that brings Simoon to you while on foot works perhaps a quarter of the time, and that’s if I’m being generous. More often it does nothing, even when there’s a clear line of sight between you and your bike, or it sends Simoon off in a bizarre and unexpected direction, her broken pathfinding causing her to forever bump against a surface she can’t navigate around. She even got stuck in a lake once, leaving me to watch incredulously as she inched along beneath the surface toward a rim she couldn’t hope climb back up. Your only option in these situations is to fast-travel to a nearby location and hope your “friend” materializes where she’s supposed to.

This isn’t by any means an exhaustive list of the bugs, malfunctions and little irritants I encountered, but to go into every one of them would take much too long. How and why Sable was released in this state, I can’t even begin to speculate. It’s not unplayable, but it’s incredibly difficult to enjoy; that anyone considered it ready for public consumption as-is absolutely beggars belief. Since release a patch has come out that supposedly fixes several issues, but I didn’t find that it changed my experience in any noticeable way. This is all an especial shame because in a more polished state, Sable’s forgettable quest design and underwritten characters alone wouldn’t have been enough to dissuade me from viewing it favorably; its world is beautiful and, even without a lot to do, it’s a thrill to explore. If the game is patched further, I hope to be able to recommend it one day; as it stands, though, there’s simply too much going wrong in Sable for me to call it even a qualified success.

WHERE CAN I DOWNLOAD Sable

Sable is available at:

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Our Verdict:

Sable is a visually interesting game with a unique concept and setting, but uninspired gameplay, sparse characterization and a staggering number of technical issues prevent it from realizing most of its lofty goals.

GAME INFO Sable is an adventure game by Shedworks released in 2021 for Mac, PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S. It has a Stylized art style, presented in Realtime 3D and is played in a Third-Person perspective.

The Good:

  • Moebius-inspired art style is lovely to look at when it gets out of its own way
  • Invites you to actively explore a big alien world
  • Evocative sound design and a versatile score set the mood well
  • Sets out to tell a kind of story that isn’t often explored through gaming

The Bad:

  • Lighting effects tend to wash the visuals out and eliminate much of their charm
  • Much of its open world feels empty and repetitive, with frequently uninspired quest and puzzle design and one-dimensional NPCs
  • Main character is chronically underdeveloped, which creates difficulties in a story about her growth as a person
  • So full of bugs and glitches as to feel unfinished on release, with the hoverbike mechanics especially frustrating

The Good:

  • Moebius-inspired art style is lovely to look at when it gets out of its own way
  • Invites you to actively explore a big alien world
  • Evocative sound design and a versatile score set the mood well
  • Sets out to tell a kind of story that isn’t often explored through gaming

The Bad:

  • Lighting effects tend to wash the visuals out and eliminate much of their charm
  • Much of its open world feels empty and repetitive, with frequently uninspired quest and puzzle design and one-dimensional NPCs
  • Main character is chronically underdeveloped, which creates difficulties in a story about her growth as a person
  • So full of bugs and glitches as to feel unfinished on release, with the hoverbike mechanics especially frustrating
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