Video Game Review: Sable

Developer: Shedworks

Publisher: Raw Fury

Genre: Open-World Exploration

Reviewed On: PlayStation 5

Also Available For: PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S

In Team Cherry’s 2017 masterpiece Hollow Knight, Cornifer the Cartographer says in an early encounter “Getting lost and finding your way again is a pleasure like no other.” Though Sable and Hollow Knight are quite dissimilar in most respects, Cornifer’s philosophy is one point they converge on; both games are most rewarding for those who enjoy the experience of being lost, though not even necessarily for the pursuant pleasure derived from finding yourself again.

And it’s a rather significant point of convergence in this case! Sable places players in the shoes of the titular main character, a young girl embarking on a coming-of-age pilgrimage across the sands of her desert homeland accompanied only by her bike Simoon. It’s a meditative sort of title with very little provided in the way of direction, leaving it to the player to explore and discover the various things to do in the game world. These discoveries tend to be very understated – whether it be meeting new people, finding a shipwreck to climb and explore, or stumbling across a nest of unusually large insects – in a way that makes them seem at once all the more wondrous and perfectly mundane. It’s a good vibe.

One thing that certainly helps with the tone the game sets is how well-populated the desert is. Not with other people, necessarily, encounters with humans outside of the settlements are actually fairly rare, but with interesting things to find and interact with (or even, sometimes, just look at). So many open-world games have a lot of wasted space, empty and boring, and while Sable certainly has plenty of emptiness it spaces out its points of interest well enough to keep it from being boring; to put it another way, the developers really nailed the balance between spreading things out too far and cluttering the game. After a while, you come to realize that Sable’s world isn’t really all that big – and yet, it still manages to feel vast and mysterious and wide and wonderful even as you discover more and more, which feels to me like a brilliant and profound encapsulation of the experience of becoming an adult in the real world.

On the other hand, there were many times when I found myself wishing the bike felt faster. Not so I could get to the next thing to do, mind you, but rather just for the feeling of speed, the exhilaration of racing across the dunes, just me and Simoon. If I’m gonna be zooming through the sand, I want to really be zooming, and unfortunately, the game doesn’t do a great job of delivering that.

That isn’t the only issue I had with Sable during my time with it, but all the others stem less from design and more from poor optimization for the PlayStation 5 – which is SO odd to me, given the console’s processing power. I very frequently experienced visual stuttering, even beyond that which is intentional in the game’s animation style, characterized by a sort of intentionally choppy movement like the one used in Into the Spiderverse. To be clear, I love this stylization in animation when it’s done well, and Sable absolutely does it well, but the aesthetic appeal was somewhat mitigated by the technical performance. The game even locked or froze up entirely a few times during my playthrough, forcing me to restart the application and making me very grateful for the frequent autosaving.

Other issues include constantly having to wrestle with the camera in tighter spaces (some of which were not even all that tight, really) and the fishing mechanic being kind of miserable. Again, this was not a result of the mechanic itself, that part was fine, but sometimes it simply did not work the way it was supposed to until I fiddled around for a solid thirty seconds or so. I suspect this is an extension of the game’s optimization issues, as there were some spaces in the game world where the problem of unresponsive button inputs during fishing was exacerbated and others where they weren’t happening at all. Though I didn’t test this extensively, it certainly felt like the former was areas with more going on in the immediate vicinity.

Overall, I didn’t love Sable, and I don’t think I would have even if I had been playing a more stable version of it. It’s fine for the most part and there were definitely moments that delighted me, but when I was done with it I went “Huh. That was neat.” and moved on with my day. I think that I will look back on it fondly from time to time, the same way I look back on certain experiences in my college days, but it’s not going to occupy my every thought for a while the way some games do. Still, I’m well aware different people resonate differently with things, and I can definitely recommend this game for its solid design and vibes that you may enjoy more than I did.

…Maybe on a platform other than the PlayStation 5 for the best experience, though.