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Sable is a very intriguing game that combines Zelda-inspired stamina-based climbing and hoverbike-centric exploration with a gorgeous and unique graphic art style, but is ultimately held back from being something much greater by constant stuttering, and framerate-related issues as well as a ton of other minor annoyances. The game takes place during the young protagonist, Sable's, gliding, which is a time in an older child's life where they get to explore the world by acquiring a hoverbike and a "gliding stone" that allows them to glide down in the air to try and discover what job they want to have and subsequently what mask they will take and clan they will choose. Though the story is entirely text based I found it to be a pretty intriguing one that explores growing up and finding yourself in the world. I was really excited for the soundtrack coming into the game given that it's a fairly well-known artist: Japanese Breakfast. But only the two songs that had vocals were pretty good in my opinion and the rest were fairly forgettable, yet decent ambient tracks that were fitting to the world although a little too basic. Note: there are tons of ambient and non-vocal videogame soundtracks that I really enjoy but this one just didn't hit. BASIC: Now that is a theme for a lot of the game. You go around exploring the strikingly beautiful desert planet of Midden that is defined by seven distinctive biomes which stand apart due to some changes between them while still managing to keep the same theme together - but the issue is that they are mostly empty, with large swaths of lands with nothing to do. It's much like Death Stranding in this sense, and it shares a lot of the floaty vehicle controls and wack collision detection. For example when riding your hoverbike, named Simoon, it would flip out if you went over a bump after you hit a rock.
Despite this, the game's core focus on exploration and the several means of transversal offered to you were enough of a motivation to go and explore it because, among other things, the gorgeous world characterized by the very unique pastel-colored cell-shaded art style and various distinctive landmarks to climb made it enticing. Something very important to note about this game is that there is no combat, enemies or ways to die/game over. As you explore, there are chests to find, some light puzzles to complete and quests to take on as well as some trading to be had with NPCs, and a little creature called "Chum" to collect. I discovered fairly late in the game that the point of collecting these chum was to go to "The Chum Queen" to collect her tears to boost your stamina. There are ruins to explore as you make your way across Midden, many of which are crashed ships that give you some history on the origins of how these people came across this desert world and serve as puzzle hubs to find currency, chum, and scrap to sell. As you explore the world you can head over to cartographer balloons you spot while traveling in each region. They're typically high up so they provide a nice climbing challenge. Once you reach them you can buy maps of the region to give you a sense of location. Certain important areas and towns get fast travel icons to speed things up. The game's quests are pretty much all fetch quests or go here and do that, although there is a cool detective one in the only large-ish town Eccria, which is considered a city by this game's standards. The main things to buy and collect apart from the currency, "cuts", are bike parts, color dyes for them, and clothes, all of which are fun to go around collecting and customizing. Some of them even have satisfying sound effects.
The primary goal of the game is to explore and complete quests from people of specific professions to attain badges. Once you aggregate three of a kind you bring it to a mask caster to turn them into a mask for you. Once you have enough masks
you can return to your camp and complete the game by selecting one of the masks.
Recently the game was updated with the addition of a fishing minigame and a new mask attainable through a questline with Yoshi the fisherman, as well as a vivarium that technically wasn't a quest, but it allowed you to bring the owner all of the fish and butterflies in the world - a fun little task to do. The first problem that I noticed with this update was the fact that the fishing minigame didn't work on a mouse and keyboard, which is my only control scheme. That was extremely irritating, but I figured out that I could get fishing working by resetting my controls to default before tweaking them back. New problems that I noticed appeared only after the update - because I had completed the entire game prior to the update - was that Sable's character model completely disappeared while riding the bike, I noticed this issue a second time except the bike also froze in place even though I could hear it making the flying noise.
Now on to my complaints for the game. The relatively jank climbing and bike controls didn't bother me that much and neither did certain npcs getting stuck on terrain or the scrolling sound in the map screen blaring out, but these are issues of note and minor annoyances nonetheless. What bothered me more apart from the aforementioned bugs from the update was the framerate issues, but more annoying was trying to call your bike to you. Oftentimes the bike wouldn't come to me when I was far away from it and pressed the f button 100 times, making me have to run all the way over there which was a massive waste of my time. It was also unfortunate that there wasn't enough to do in towns. There were a lot of buildings, but very few of them that you could enter, only the ones with open entrances and no doors. My final issue was that you get ahold of the best bike in the game in terms of all stats early on to the point that I didn't find it valuable to use other parts even if they looked cooler.
To wrap this overly long review up, Sable was a fairly unique and intriguing new game that is sure to make me check out whatever the developer releases next. It's disappointing that it's riddled with so many easily fixable flaws and not really enough to do in the towns, but the story and Artstyle still make it a likable enough experience that is worth a try on sale.
I give it Simoon out of ten.