A week later I complete my journey and I am sad to come to my final decision. I am pleased with my choice of mask, but I feel a bit of melancholy regarding leaving the adventure behind.

Sable is a beautiful and meditative exploration of identity, self and personal discovery. Sable the character is presented with a choice of how she wishes to present herself to the world. Through exploration she discovers who she is as a person, and who and how she wants to present. Because I just finished the game and am still currently working through my own thoughts, I'll let someone else's words articulate some of what I feel about the game's themes:

Identity not as self-conception, but social function. You wear your machinist’s mask, and people come to you when they need a machinist. I perform the social function of lesbian, and that affects how people interact with me. Identity expresses a way of relating to other people, not just the way you see yourself.

In a nomadic culture that is deeply invested in change, you can shift your social function with time. Most people, after their Gliding, settle with one mask. They embrace that role for the rest of their lives. There is another option though: You can just do it again. Just like a town can become a ruin, which can then become a place for children to learn about their place in the world, so too can a child become a Machinist, who then becomes a Cartographer.

Sable imagines identity and growth as playful, joyous, and nearly impossible to fail. It promises you that changing your mind is okay. You wanted to be an Innkeeper, and now you don’t. It encourages you to become something else then, without rejecting or hating the person you’re leaving behind. (Renata Price, Sable: The Kotaku Review)

It's true that the game has a number of bugs, a healthy amount that ensured I found something new every day. But none of those bugs prevented me from enjoying the experience of Sable, and helping it take a place among my absolute favourites this year, both released in 2021 and played. That puts Sable in good company with games like Kentucky Route Zero and Psychonauts 2, and I think that's fitting. It's a small game with big heart, a game that distills much of the wonder and joy of exploration from games like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild while eschewing the usual need for combat. Sable needs only wrestle with her own choices rather than monsters and villains. The landscape and it's denizens are not Sable's antagonists, but her guide along her path to new or reaffirmed identity. The player's biggest challenge is simply knowing when Sable's journey is over.

It's very hard to me to write coherently about a game that I loved. Especially one that's nonetheless flawed like Sable.

Gorgeous. The bold colours, the thick outlines, the simplistic aesthetics are incredible. While playing the game I sometimes would just stop everything to just watch the scenery. The world design is also compelling, areas of natural beauty, futuristic derelict spaceships, monumental architecture and simple wooden buckets lying around infuse life and complexity to this place.

The mystery. One thing that pushes my gamer buttons is being set lose into a strange world with not a lot of explanation and it's up to me to figure how things work. While quests in this game are simple (go there and get some beetles, go that other place and get some stones...) that's not the point of the game. The point is to explore this place and discover its past and present. But there's no quest that reads "Learn about the world" and you "beat" the game by getting masks by doing more trivial chores.

There's no "Discover the world" quest, but there doesn't need to be. It's a sort of minimalist game design with self-imposed goals. Did I need to climb into the mouth of an ancient wyrm? Nope, but I saw it and decided to explore it.

The jankiness. That part I didn't love. Even months after release, some bugs still persist. Luckily none of them deal breakers, but still annoying. The relaxation of gliding through the desert is often punctuated with annoyance at the weird hoverbike physics. The first bike body in particular drives pretty poorly and it tends to rotate wildly along its axis.

The whole experience is nevertheless sublime. I loved coming back to my village after spending so much time exploring the landscape, meeting new people and learning about our origins. It felt truly like a rite of passage. The village was the same, but I had changed.

Sable is the first game from developer Shedworks and follows the titular character on a journey of self-discovery across a desolate desert open-world.

The initial draw of Sable is undoubtedly its visuals. Gorgeous Ghibli-esque art augmented by bright, bold colors with a minimalist almost texture-less look at times, the visual spectacle is something to behold. Interestingly enough, the game features a day/night cycle where the night shadows completely negate the color palette and make the game look washed out, nullifying one of the title’s core strengths. There are visual settings to alter the thickness of the lines in the art as well as a “high visibility” mode that retains the game’s beautiful color at night, which I personally preferred, but this option is set to “off” as default. Another interesting visual choice came in the use of a jittery almost stop-motion animation style, that may initially be distracting but becomes second nature over time. What does not become less distracting however is the overall quality of the animations which are simplistic and a bit rough in places and made worse by the jerky nature of the animation style. The animation quality aside, Sable is still a visual delight.

This may be the first time I was more excited to hear a game’s soundtrack than I was to actually play the game, as Shedworks called upon indie rock outfit Japanese Breakfast to compose. Although the score is largely ambient, it does a great job at capturing the whimsical and bizarre nature of the world of Midden. Jangly guitars that wouldn’t be out of place in a Western, woodwind instruments, bongos, and chimes that give an otherworldly nomadic feel, and the sparse but haunting vocals give major moments added impact. The audio aside from the music is also fantastic, like hearing the whirring, humming, or sputtering of the differing bike parts you can select, or the crackling fires around a camp. Aesthetically, the game is brilliant, but, your mileage may vary when it comes to actually playing.

Being an open-world game with a primary focus on exploration, Sable wears its gameplay influences on its sleeve. It features stamina, gliding, and climbing systems that mimic Breath of the Wild and there are numerous collectible chum eggs, akin to BotW’s inventory upgrading kurok seeds, which upgrade your stamina a la the lizards in Shadow of the Colossus. A navigation system for placing markers is in the game but some wonky controls prohibited me from using it too often. More often than not you’ll follow the tried and true method of “See cool thing? Climb cool thing.” and there are plenty of cool things to explore like monstrously huge skeletal remains, statues, ancient alien artifacts, and barely functioning derelict ships that hold secrets of the game’s world. I found myself getting very easily sidetracked and going off the beaten path often to check out the amazing sites and find new hidden rewards. There’s a currency system that lets you customize your look and buy some performance-enhancing parts for your speederbike that gets you from place to place when you aren’t climbing and gliding. One minor gripe is that some surfaces really look like you should be able to climb but can’t. I understand avoiding potential sequence-breaking in some of the rudimentary “puzzle areas” but too often I would find myself in the open world, glide across a chasm expecting to climb the wall I’m heading towards only to smack face-first into it and slide helplessly down, losing precious progress and having to start the climb over. Another potential quibble is that’s really the majority of what you’ll be doing in Sable; climbing/gliding/biking to check out some cool-looking area. There’s no combat, health system, fall damage, or any sort of failure state and this may turn off some or be regarded as boring, but I found it pretty relaxing and kept wanting to see what was behind the next corner. While the game is very open-ended as to what you can do and when, you will ultimately be doing quests for NPC’s and these are less than great. Of the 36 quests I completed they almost all ultimately boiled down to repetitive fetch quests. Delivering goods from one NPC to another and retrieving a nearby insect or flower for an NPC make up the vast majority of the quest content in this game and became dull and repetitive quickly.

The Story of Sable is one of growing up and setting forth on a pilgrimage or passage into adulthood called the Gliding. The goal is for one to set forth and explore the various masked occupations and decide which best suits you for eternity ranging from stoic protective guards to lively entertainers, studious cartographers, and tinkering machinists to name a few. There are familiar themes of growing old, leaving your hometown and never returning, and parallels to a young person choosing a career path and finding purpose in life, but unfortunately the writing didn’t really affect me all that much. I feel some games explore this topic much more thoroughly and with much more heart (Night in the Woods comes to mind). There are lots of interesting ideas in the game but none of them feel fleshed out enough. A machinists’ reverence and connection to technology, otherism and tribalism amongst nomads, the history of the land and those that came before, how things ended up the way that they are, why everyone wears masks. Many of these ideas are haphazardly dashed off in a line or two in some quest dialogue if you’re lucky. I remember one of my most harrowing journeys to conquer a series of giant desert sand spires. I traversed incredibly long gaps with the glide, made climbs I narrowly had the stamina for and braved falling multiple times but I had finally reached my goal. What awaited me? An NPC that had two lines of dialogue about collecting bird excrement. I’m not sure if this was the game’s idea of a cosmic joke but it ultimately surmised my experience with the writing, story, and NPC’s; I just didn’t feel rewarded or enriched by the story in equivalence to the time I was putting in.

I played on PC with an RTX 3070 about a month after launch, so I expected a majority of technical issues to be addressed. Unfortunately, a bevy of hiccups awaited me. The large-scale landmarks were fine but there was frequent object pop-in on the smaller items like rocks and plants on the default draw distance which is the max. I had frequent framerate stuttes no matter which resolution and fps I targeted, as well as nearly constant audio ducking in and out. These issues were severe enough in my case that they greatly detracted from my enjoyment of the game as their persistence was ceaseless throughout my 12 or so hours of playing.

Sable is an aesthetic masterpiece that is often held back by some repetitive gameplay and quest design, uninspired story and writing, and a litany of technical issues during my playthrough. It might be up your alley if you just want to zen out, listen to cool music, look at a gorgeous environment while climbing stuff, picking up bugs, and doing odd jobs for NPC’s. but I don’t feel there’s much to be gained from the story. The gameplay is solid enough but the repetitive nature of it and the abundance of technical issues really soured the experience. I do hope to see more from this development team in the future as I think there is some special stuff going on in this game, the next one just might need some more time in the oven.

Playthrough Stats: Main + Extras - 12 hr. 04 min. 16 sec.

Score: 6/10 (Okay)

I came because I love Japanese Breakfast's music and honestly I probably would not have bothered with the "Breath Of The Wild clone" had it not been for her participation... but, it really does work.

From the "Main Menu" BGM "Main Menu"

There is a lot of emptiness and loss and history in the music and the game world... also a lot of bugs. I would have broken objects and items and interactions a lot. Enough that I might have quit were I less invested. The map and game are just a hair too large for me but I am old and want to finish things more judiciously.

A younger me may have gotten more immersed and never used fast travel but as it was I was occasionally annoyed at not knowing what the fuck I wanted to do or how the fuck to do it.

Still, as the game was coming to a close it all washed away and even before the heart-breaking end credits theme began I was getting really emotional. I feel comfortable with my decision but confused by how much crying I ended up doing over that credit song...

I wish the game looked better, was less broken, etc, etc, etc... but, there IS something here and it is special.

Sable made a fantastic first impression, lulled a bit as I began to get a feel for what the game actually was and then settled into a really nice, chill experience that I loved. I hate to be reductive but the best way to describe it is Breath of the Wild with no real physical conflict, violence, combat or threat of ever dying from a fall. Most of the game is exploration, climbing and light puzzle solving in the vein of BOTW style shrines. If you want a challenge or something that will make you sit up in your seat and sweat, this isn't it. If you want a chill experience where you ride a hoverbike, everyone you meet is super nice and the dialogue makes you feel warm and fuzzy (most of the time) then you'll have a great time.

I wanted to give Sable five stars. It's one of the best single-player games I've played in a while and really kept me hooked through to the end. Unfortunately the significant amount of bugs, jankiness and poor performance on PC was so bad that I felt I couldn't give it a perfect rating. Even on a very modern PC, it's difficult to get the game to run without stuttering constantly while you ride your bike (which is a large part of the game). Additionally, the framerate is inconsistent, calling your bike barely works, quest triggers break and require reloads, messed up geometry will launch you across the map, and more. Assume that you will have to deal with an occasional frustrating issue like this while playing.

Lastly, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the graphics and aesthetic. Most of the time, Sable is one of the most breathtaking games I've ever looked at. I loved how it looked and felt. The audio can be understated and occasionally bug out but when it's working, it also adds a ton to the feel of the world. It's a real achievement to still make me feel nervous and make the environment feel ominous even when you KNOW you cannot be hurt.

As I come away from finishing Sable, I find myself hoping that Shedworks is planning on making a sequel. This is such a fantastic start. With a bit more density of content and more polish, it's hard to imagine that a second iteration wouldn't be amazing.

I love pure exploration games. Journey, Omno, and Abzu are some others that focus heavily on just wandering around and experiencing the world. Sable has many similarities but I think it does more. Normally games that throw dozens of quests at me at a time are overwhelming, but sable makes it exciting because navigating the world is satisfying and fun.

After I left the Ewer, I think I played for 5 hours straight, wandering around and doing quests. I did not get bored. At that point I thought Sable would end up as as one of my favorite games ever, but my next few sittings made it drop a bit. The game has a lot of glitches. Normally I overlook glitches (Subnautica was glitchy but still ended up as my favorite game ever) but it's not fun to have to exit the game every couple of hours because the area I glide into is unloaded or the game crashes or something. Also, a major moment was when I learned I could fast travel. Fast travelling, I think, actually made my experience worse. Immersion was what made me love the game so much; fast travelling turned quests into a few meaningless button-presses rather than real tasks that I wanted to complete and that felt rewarding. I know that I could have just not fast-travelled but it was too tempting. I'm not even suggesting that fast-travel is a bad addition to the game, but upon reflection I've realized that it made my experience less immersive. towards the end of my playthrough, my desire to get 100% completion was still there, but I didn't follow through with it when I realized that instead of exploring on my own to complete quests I was staring at guides on my phone and fast-travelling everywhere. I returned to the Ewer to complete the game when I realized that I was no longer playing and enjoying the game, but mindlessly following a walkthrough.

But the game was great and many of my criticisms are my fault. The most powerful moments were:

• Leaving the Ewer for the first time and gliding through the open desert as the beautiful music played. I was struck with a sense of limitless freedom and excitement
• Returning back to the Ibexi camp to see everyone around the campfire. I really felt that I had personally gone on that journey with Sable and that the choice of mask was a personal one
• When I first arrived at Burnt Oak Outpost, I saw a child sitting at the edge of the rock looking into the distance. I sat down with them and watched the sun set and rise. I think I actually stayed there for a full in-game day (It reminded me of Outer Wilds and the immersion of taking a moment to appreciate the game-world

I had my eyes on this game ever since its announcement. But due to some busy moments in life, never could just sit down and give it a chance.

After finally playing it, the game is def good. It is everything i hoped it'd be but with some issues.

Firstly, the bugs and frame-drop issues were super annoying most of the times which really effected my gameplay.

Secondly, i wish it was much grander of an adventure than what i went through. The adventure was still fun don't get me wrong. I've spent almost 18 hours in this game trying to explore everywhere but eventhough i was having fun while playing, i hardly doubt if any moments will stay with me from this game...EXCEPT ONE MOMENT.

Ever since its announcement i was a huge fan of its song from japanese breakfast called glider. The intro of this game paired with that song was one of the most beautiful moments in my gaming history. <3

Totally forgot to praise the art style which was the thing that caught my attention in the first place. Its beautiful but then again with these bugs it leaves a bad taste on ur mouth. Im pretty sure if they were to make another game with no more bugs and grander adventures, it will be one of my fav games ever. Here's hoping for that..AMEN

I loved Sable for its chill vibes, its retro hand-drawn animation style, its intriguing world and its charming dialogue. As a free-roaming exploration game, a narrative about self-discovery is a classic choice and it's executed well.

Mechanically, the gameplay could be a little more compelling; movement is a little slow sometimes both on the bike and off, and then when I got a fast bike it started causing glitches as the game couldn't seem to handle loading the terrain that fast (I was playing on console so it wasn't a machine with inadequate hardware that was the issue).

Content discovery was a little bit of an issue. There's plenty of content - I think the right amount: not too much or too little - but a good deal of it relies on complete chance for the player to encounter. I had to google where to even find the start of several quests (I knew of their existence due to the trophies), and how to complete a couple more. The gameplay wasn't quite compelling enough on its own to make me want to wander around long enough to find things on my own. There are some very cool locations to discover, but a few of them (Aeyrie I'm looking at you) are way harder to get to with not much payout when you finally arrive, resulting in a general discouragement to the aimless exploration the game seems to want the player to engage in.

Sable is a game that asks you to think about what you want from life: what excites you, what brings you joy, what is your calling? It encourages you to explore only that which interests you, to stop and smell precisely as many roses as you want, and to end your journey as soon as you're sure what you want to do with your life.

So naturally this is the 2nd game I've ever platinumed.

I'm not great with the whole "figure out what you want to do with your life and then dedicate yourself to that" thing. I've never been able to really excel at anything because the time required to do that is time I can't spend doing other things.

Somewhat ironically this includes video games, which is part of why the only other game I've platinumed is a game you can beat in about an hour. (The other part is that a lot of trophies don't require you to be good at the game or even to do anything interesting in the game but instead ask you to do incredibly pointless, tedious tasks that add nothing of value to the experience and say nothing about your abilities other than your ability to spend a lot of time doing something meaningless that you don't enjoy in order to get a digital trophy that not one single person on the planet will care that you have. It's like a job but worse, and it should be banned.)

But Sable doesn't actually require you to be good at anything, and pretty much tells you exactly what to do in order to achieve greatness in every possible way. Basically, it's what I often wish life was. Just a series of well-defined tasks the completion of which make me feel accomplished and, eventually, content. Rather than what life actually is, which is spending almost a quarter of your time (or almost a third of your waking hours) generating profit for someone else, of which you get, if you're lucky, a fraction barely large enough to feed, clothe, and house you, often destroying your body (if not also your mind) in the process, and then hoping that you somehow have enough energy left over to do anything that will make you feel like a worthwhile human being and not just a (noticeably expanding, if we're being honest) sack of meat with delusions of significance who seems to be having a midlife crisis despite being only 29 and if that's midlife then shit I'd better hurry and do something with it.

...um. Don't know where that came from. I'm fine, everything's fine. Let's just talk about something else.

As beautiful and compelling as Sable is, what becomes increasingly clear if you play it for as long as I did is that, at least on PS5, the game can be kind of a pain to actually play. Mechanically, the platforming is rough, with inconsistencies in when and whether you grab a wall or ledge (especially from floating), a perspective while climbing that makes it difficult to tell how close you actually are to the top of something, and a glitch when climbing moving objects that makes you just let go for seemingly no reason. Not to mention the camera is frequently a hassle to wrangle. Performance-wise, there's a lot of frame stuttering and audio clipping that get really annoying as the game goes on. And then there are the game-breaking glitches. There were several times I had to restart the game in order to complete a quest because of some event not triggering correctly. And don't even get me started on fishing—I had to restart at least—AT LEAST—a dozen times because fishing just broke the game (like, really broke, like the buttons stopped working broke). For comparison, I had to restart Cyberpunk maybe twice because of glitches?

Obviously a lot of allowance has to be made for how small a team this is (the credits are like 30 seconds long, if that), and if you play the game as it's probably intended (and maybe in small doses...and don't fish at all) it's probably fine.

But play it long enough and you might start to hate it a little, which is a shame, because there's a lot to love about it, from the gorgeous art to the fun characters to the intriguing little snippets of worldbuilding you can uncover. Hopefully those are the memories that will stay with me.