Review: Sable Spins a Journey of Gorgeous Wonder and Frustrating Wander

Because the atmosphere encompasses so much of Sable’s appeal, the technical issues can be absolutely ruinous.

Sable
Photo: Raw Fury

With its pastel palette and thin lines, Sable suggests a Moebius comic in motion. The title character has come of age, and among the masked, nomadic people of her tribe that means that it’s time for the Gliding. Sable must journey out into the gorgeous, lonely stretches of salt, sand, and blackened rock via hoverbike to discover the people and places that will shape her into who she will be. The Gliding’s ceremonial rite protects her for however long the journey takes, allowing her to summon a red bubble around herself and float slowly through the air until she hits a wall or finally reaches the ground. When she falls from a dangerous height, she automatically summons the bubble on impact to cushion the blow.

The self-discovery concept is far from just story flavor. It’s also a baton to the player. Once you leave the starting area after you get Sable’s bike and levitation bubble, you can go anywhere. The game makes one suggestion to check out a close-by settlement, but there’s otherwise no strict questline and no exact pilgrimage you’re meant to make. You simply wander, taking in the sights and picking up odd jobs that will reward you with a badge that can be combined with two others to forge the mask that will mark Sable’s adult profession.

There’s no minimap and no constant on-screen waypoint; you can bring up a compass ring to display the direction of map markers, but some quests don’t have one at all. Each new place must be first located by studying the environment and looking for structures in the distance that stand out against the barren landscape or plumes of smoke that mark a campfire in use. Often, this means climbing up to a decent vantage point, employing a stamina system similar to The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild that lets you climb any non-metallic surface, looking for any outcroppings that might let you catch your breath before continuing.

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The game’s more naturalistic means of navigation is among its stronger attributes, particularly when you know exactly where to go and proceed to scan the surroundings, mentally charting a path up one structure and over to another. You can’t die from fall damage due to your levitation bubble, but that invincibility presents its own danger, as you’re required to start from scratch. To compensate, perhaps, for any frustration over the time lost, few of the intended paths are challenging in the slightest. If you ever lose your footing, it’ll likely be as a result of overconfidence and risk-taking spurred by eventual restlessness at the methodical pace.

The climbing in Sable is basic, as you have no stamina-replenishing items at your disposal or are capable of last-ditch leaps—that is, the sort of things that give your average Legend of Zelda game an additional layer of strategy. Even the default hoverbike feels a bit slow considering the distances that Sable must travel. Upgrades to stamina capacity never feel vital when every location is built to accommodate the starting amount, while outfits and bike parts lack the granularity that might have made customization an enticing carrot on a stick. And in the absence of any such sense of meaningful progression or a general challenge, the game’s reliance on its barebones mechanics eventually grows stale.

Worse, the desert is dreadfully laborious to navigate without Sable’s hoverbike at your disposal. While there’s plainly a vast disparity in the resources used to create Breath of the Wild and Sable, the former used climbing as a way to let players carve out their own paths through the environment. In Sable, climbing is a very long interlude to indulge in a very light challenge before hopping back on the only thing that can sensibly ferry you across the vast stretches of nothingness. Go too far afield and you risk having to hoof it all the way back because summoning the bike tends to just get it stuck on the objects that obstruct its path, and the gorgeous art only holds up so much in the face of such tedium.

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And because the atmosphere encompasses so much of Sable’s appeal, the technical issues can be absolutely ruinous. When the bike disappears into the ground, when the menus break, or when Sable passes straight through an object that she should be able to land on, the illusion collapses and we’re left not with a vivid sense of place, but with a video game where the mechanics are all a bit of a chore. With its restrained approach toward collectibles and its rudimentary traversal, Sable attempts to depict exploration for the sake of exploration, but in doing so it only clarifies that such a concept is not necessarily as enticing as it sounds.

The game was reviewed using a code provided by Raw Fury.

Score: 
 Developer: Shedworks  Publisher: Raw Fury  Platform: PC  Release Date: September 23, 2021  Buy: Game

Steven Scaife

Steven Nguyen Scaife is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Buzzfeed News, Fanbyte, Polygon, The Awl, Rock Paper Shotgun, EGM, and others. He is reluctantly based in the Midwest.

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