Sable is a game that sent me back and forth, both in expectations in the lead up to its release, and in playing it. For a long time, GIFs of Sable would come across my timeline, and I’d be amazed by how good the Moebius-inspired art looked. It was hard to not be excited by something so beautiful. Then, years after GIFs first started showing up, we finally had some gameplay demos. This was, for me and some other game designer friends, the first sign of trouble for the game. Built on exploration, shooting across a desert landscape on a hoverbike, this core mechanic looked clunky and floaty. The game was still beautiful, but watching it in action was underwhelming. But demos are demos, and judgment has to be reserved for actually playing the game itself.
Screenshot from the game Sable, it shows a masked person riding a hoverbike across a desert landscape. In the background is a brick tower with a domed top, and campfire smoke snaking up to the sky.
When I started playing Sable, my first impressions were good. The game was, of course, beautiful visually - little details in the architecture and the design of the characters all fit together to construct a world that feels fully thought out. The opening platforming section (platforming being the other core mechanic of the game) felt good. This good impression lasted for about half an hour. Once I was let loose on the world, my fears were confirmed - the bike did feel clunky, constantly being spun out on little bits of geometry, and floated in a way that felt disconnected from the world around it. In addition, in the starting area, points of interest are set so far apart that most of the time spent here was experienced through this slightly irritating bike.
Then I started running into bugs. On more than one occasion, the controls just stopped working and I had to save and quit to get the controls back. One of these occasions happened during a particularly arduous climb, and sent me falling all the way back down to the ground to start again. Then, after I finished a long climbing section, I went in search of my bike to find it missing. I stood on the map marker looking around, but it was nowhere to be seen. I restarted the game, hoping it would pop back into existence, only to find it was still gone. At this point I seriously considered just giving up on Sable.
There was no way I was going to play through the incredibly tedious 2 hours I just went through again to get back to this point. On a whim, I pressed the A button hovering over a map marker on a previously visited location and discovered the game had a fast travel mechanic. I audibly groaned at how much time I had spent just holding the right trigger, zipping through empty desert, because the game had not told me about this feature. I hit the fast travel button, and as I expected, my bike reappeared next to me when I arrived at my destination. I decided I would continue on.
After some more exploring, I ended up in the city of Eccria. This is probably 3 or 4 hours into a game that, according to HowLongToBeat, is an average of 6-8 hours long. It’s also when I started to enjoy the game. Eccria is beautifully designed. There’s lovely little nooks and crannies, filled with details that make it seem like a place that was actually lived in. There is, unfortunately, not a lot of people filling out these little spaces, but it still is a more dense hub of things to do than most of the game up to this point. Where most of the quests in the early game sent me 5-10 minutes across some dunes to pick something up or drop it off, Eccria offered several quests that involved exploring the city, talking to people, investigating, and learning more about the world.
Screenshot from the game Sable. It shows a tall, broken stone bridge, with two enormous green statues of soldiers. One soldier trying to climb the face of the bridge, and the top soldier preparing to strike.
In the end, my feelings about Sable are complicated. While the first half was tedious and frustrating, I legitimately enjoyed the back half of the game. The writing was great - there was nice characterization of the people you met in the world, a feat considering how short many of the interactions were. The way the Sable’s words were delivered through their thoughts, and not through dialogue, worked well to show how they were thinking and interacting with the world they were exploring. The art, of course, was beautiful, and when you came across a vista like the Bridge of the Betrayed it was legitimately breathtaking. And of course the sound track, written by Japanese Breakfast, was fantastic. Can I recommend playing Sable? I’m not sure if I can. I don’t know if the tedium was worth getting through to the end, and that’s disappointing for a game that I really wanted to love.
Sable, the first game from Shedworks, is available on consoles and Steam.