Sable Review

Game: Sable
Genre: Open-World, Indie, Puzzle, Adventure
System: Steam (Windows) (also available Xbox)
Developer|Publisher: Raw Fury | Shedworks
Controller Support: Partial
Price:  US $24.99 | UK £19.99 | EU € 24,99
Release Date: September 23rd, 2021

Review code provided with many thanks to Johnny Atom Productions

Sable is an open-world adventure game with a unique art style. This comic-book-looking title is filled with all the excitement of Breath of the Wild or Horizon games without the combat.

The Story

Sable is the story of a young woman who is finally old enough to begin her Gliding. This coming-of-age ceremony throws new adults into the open world to meet people, learn, grow, and find their place in the world. Sable is our young Glider, ready to head out into the sands to find her destiny.

Players gather everything needed for their journey, including parts for their bike, a Gliding stone, and other necessities. After putting the bike together, Sable is sent to the temple to pray. When she returns to the village, everyone has left, leaving her alone for the first steps of her all-important Gliding.

The game truly begins after stepping foot outside of the village’s immediate vicinity. Players travel through the desert, collecting quests and items, meeting new people, and discovering the history of the world in which Sable lives.

The Gameplay

Sable, like many open-world titles, gives players complete freedom to move around the world as they choose. While players will always have a quest or two to follow if they wish, Sable’s little bike is capable of driving through any terrain, allowing complete freedom for her to find herself.

There are not a whole lot of buttons to learn in Sable; players have mostly jump (space bar), movement (WASD), and interact (E) to learn. While the map button (M) or crouch (C) are occasionally needed, most of the game will be played with a combination of only four buttons and the mouse. This makes it easy for newer players to learn, giving non-gamers a chance at completing the story. And with its non-traditional graphics and open-world exploration, Sable will most likely appeal to those who don’t usually show much interest in gaming.

The Pros of Sable

When talking about the unique features of Sable, it’s hard not to bring up the way it looks over and over again. These comic-book-style, hand-drawn graphics combined with the beautiful desert-scapes and gorgeous village and NPC designs make it impossible not to mention in a review of the game. There is something incredibly exciting about a game that is completely unique-looking, and players will most likely love the look of this title.

The gameplay is fun and relaxing; if you like games like Journey and Yonder and similar chill games that focus more on story and visuals than anything else, you will probably love Sable. The controls are easy and the setting is engrossing. The sound design is wonderful, and the characters are realistic. It’s nice to see an adventure title with a female main character that is not sexualized in any way.

The puzzles in the game are not going to blow anyone’s mind; this is an adventure game before it is a puzzle game for sure. But the puzzles are fun enough that players don’t lose interest while trying to get back to questing.

The Cons of Sable

Bugs. Oh my goodness, the bugs. While many of the bugs have been fixed, many have not. Between the Beetle Bug where the beetles needed to complete Sable’s bike do not spawn and the weird visual bugs that make seeing where you’re going impossible, Sable can be a frustrating experience.

Driving through the desert on a speeder bike really puts a lot of the little glitches into high focus too. While the bike is like a 1970’s Weeble Wobble toy, where it wobbles but doesn’t fall down, it does some seriously strange tricks to stay upright. Players will find themselves flying around with the tail straight up in the air, backward, and bouncing around as they fly at full-speed over the dunes.

Also, the developers of Sable learned that stamina while floating is pretty annoying, but didn’t apply the same to running or climbing. The stamina meter is incredibly short, and there is no reason why it should be. The devs could have easily put barriers in the way of places they didn’t want the player to climb. But I found myself looking wistfully up at high cliffs, desperately wanting to climb them and use the height to plant markers on the map or just to take in the view, but the game was determined not to let me.

Stamina in games like Sable is not only widely unnecessary, but it actually deters from the gameplay and the story. Why can’t we climb into the sky if we want to? How does that detract from the story? If anything, it would add to it.

Conclusion

Stamina in games is something that I could complain about for days, but overall, it doesn’t completely detract from the game. It’s still a masterpiece of art and video game design. With a few less bugs and a couple of tweaks, this game could be absolutely perfect. I loved my playthrough and would suggest it to just about anyone who digs a chill game with a relaxing atmosphere.

Final Verdict: I Like it a Lot.