Sable Review (Blue Balls Gremlin)
I've gotten every achievement for this game, though I haven't technically completed it (still have about 60 chums to find). So understand that I'm talking about this game from the standpoint of someone who completed all of the meaningful content.
Sable is an enjoyable, relaxing game, that takes minimal effort to play. If that's what you want, then stop reading and buy the game, you'll get a solid fifteen to twenty hour experience You go around, do a bunch of tasks, get drip and parts for your star wars speeder bike, and explore the desert land it takes place in, all in this beautiful Moebius inspired comic art style. If you take your time with this game, and try to find as much as you can on your own, Sable is a really rewarding game... if you like cosmetic rewards. Which I do, so I enjoyed this game a lot. Though I don't think I'm going to be playing this game again.
While I enjoyed my time playing the game, there were some things about it that kind of annoyed or bothered me. For one, the glitches. For a game with a massive selling point being its visuals, there were a lot of visual bugs in this game. I'm not talking about "two many lines on this rock", or "I don't like this color scheme so its bad". The game uses cell shading and coloration to a pretty great effect, and when it all works this game is absolutely gorgeous. But I think about five times the ground below me just disappeared like an ubisoft game. I didn't fall through or anything, but the ground disappeared. Kinda rips you out of the experience. I also frequently found grass and rocks floating off the ground. If this game had just come out, I wouldn't be too bothered by this, but it's been out for two years at the time of writing this review and these issues persist.
Going back to the ground disappearing, after playing this game and travelling around for a couple hours I noticed performance severely dipped. Insane frame drops down to 20fps, terrain took forever to load, talking to merchants and for some reason I can't buy anything, grass patches and bushes would just pop in. I'm assuming that this game doesn't have good terrain loading and unloading optimization, because if I stayed in one area for a long time I didn't encounter this issue, it was only when I was travelling around the whole world did it become an issue. I'm not usually a frame snob, but i'm on an Omen, and I'm running a 4050 here, I should not be having these issues.
There's also some quests in this game that are kind of annoying, specifically the angler quest. Fishing in this game is rough. You have to go to hyper specific locations to get what you want, and there are only super vague clues to where you can find these things. For example, the first angler fish asks you to get three fish. One of these you can seriously get anywhere, another has the hint of "it lives nearby a lot of cactus". Looking around a bit, and you'll find to the far east a place with a lot of cactus. Fish near one, and voila, you have your fish. But the last fish says "it likes shade in the eastern dunes". I spent an hour, going from dune to dune, all in their shadows fishing for this fish. Nothing. I went to this area that was basically entirely covered and was only shade. Nope, nothing. I go back to the cactus' and fish in this super specific spot I saw this guy on youtube go to and OH LOOK AT THAT I HAVE TWENTY OF THEM NOW! Suffice it to say, I ended up just looking up where the rest of the fish were, and I also started to do this with the chums. I got sick of it once I got to the Wyrm Chums. To hell with it, I got 100, thats all I need for max stamina and achievements.
So would I recommend this game? Well, yeah. I know I just bitched about it for the last three paragraphs but if you take this game at your own pace and dont worry about completing it and just soak up the world and enjoy it, it's a fun, relaxing time. The visual glitches can (mostly) be fixed by saving and reloading, as can the shop glitch. Though if you see a bush or patch of grass flying, it's stuck there no matter how many times you reload. But overall, its an enjoyable game. I would recommend buying on sale.