Sable is a game I’ve been keeping an eye on since E3 2018, I think? If there was ever anything good that came from the PC Gaming Show, it was Frankie’s joke about Maneater and Sable‘s gorgeous art direction. I may be talking about the former at another time, but for now, let’s talk about what I’ll happily call one of the most beautiful games of 2021. Up there, we’ve got Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart and Psychonauts 2 fighting Sable. However, I think on pure distinctiveness, Sable is clinching the victory thus far.

It features a beautiful design characteristic, akin to Jean “Moebius” Giraud’s style of art. It makes everything look, somewhat, grubby and weathered. It is like a world that has been sandblasted for decades, building up little scratch-marks and definition, all while lacking pixel-perfect granules of sand or even stitches in the fabrics. It brings a sense of a world that is beaten by hard conditions, yet somewhere out there, there is still life breathing beneath the sand dunes of the endless wasteland. A world of exploration that’s yet to be uncovered.

By and large, that’s exactly what Sable is all about. You play as the eponymous child named Sable, a young person within a tribe of strange and wonderful traveling nomads of this dusty land. As Sable, you have to go out on her expedition/coming-of-age right of passage travels. The game calls these travels her “Gliding”. Throughout your travels, you’ll come across dilapidations of temples, space ships, and small surviving colonies that remind me of Mad Max. Mostly, you traverse every bit of terrain with your hoverbike or climb cliff-faces with a tiny amount of grip like you are playing Shadow of the Colossus.

As you may have gathered, it is quite an art-focused game. There is no combat and no real sense of peril. It is entirely focused on a relaxing adventure and exploration. Instead, you spend a lot of time trying to decipher simple puzzles, or as I sometimes found, trying to figure out if there is a puzzle in this area or if I was just here to collect something for someone miles away. That can be incredibly frustrating.

There is one area where you can get an achievement called “Nesting Giant,” with a bug protecting the entrance to this cornucopia-thing filled with little insects. I thought it held a puzzle or something special. No, it was just a massive nest for some larva that I assume were the babies of this beetle-like creature. The larva was something that I was asked to get by one of the many people that send you on fetch-quests, but I’d forgotten about that because behind all the puzzles, it is a series of quests to get badges from people. Yes, it is a massive game of becoming the top badge earner in Girl Scouts.

Some may be thinking, “that sounds like a boring game,” while the 100% completionists are very excited. Let me pour a little bit of cold water on that, as performance on the Xbox One is sometimes dreadful but most of the time palatable. Throughout all the areas I’ve seen small jitters, as the game possibly loads an asset or two poorly. Though in the second area once you’ve hit the title sequence after the prologue is a desert forest, and Sable did not like that one bit. What was a small inconvenience before wound up becoming what was burgeoning on the unplayable. The frame rate became increasingly variable, not violently so, but more and more noticeable.

That is a hard thing to say, as part of the art style employs a slightly different framerate, or at least some frames are skipped (of sorts), for Sable herself. It is something used as a way to posterize her from the world she’s in, I guess. So when the whole game starts slowing down a bit more, it is recognizable what is changing. I think that is the biggest issue that may affect the most amount of people, just some kind of hardware limitation or possible lack of optimization. It is a shame because it is very much that postcard game: Something endlessly beautiful, but little else is said about it.

This isn’t to say there is a lack of story, there absolutely is a lot of it. However, much like me writing a script, there may be too much of it. Every conversation is a series of text boxes, and much like Biomutant‘s style of getting a story across, Sable (the character) doesn’t have lines but, instead, it is her inner monologue that describes what she has said. Meanwhile, lines from other characters are completely quoted. In itself, that’s not wrong, but when you are reading through all the fluff, you can get stuck in those RPG/JRPG loops as you tap incessantly so you can leave the conversation. As far as I’ve found, there is no way to jump to the end of a dialogue tree even after you’ve gone through it once, which can make it all the more bothersome.

Being an indie game featuring a child that also just happens to be very stunning, I think you can guess the beats that the story is trying to hit. This isn’t a bad thing, I have found nothing but joy from Sable. It is an adventure with a touch of sci-fi, fantasy, and child-like wonder. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there is a reason I love Doctor Who, and it is those elements. Sable brings that in a world that is so endlessly beautiful that you start to wonder why more games don’t use this art direction. However, the irritations are enough to make it a game feel lacking in what a game is often meant to be.

Yes, the puzzles are somewhat fun and simple, and the exploration is great because it is such an alien place. Nonetheless, that hoverbike is impossible to control with precision and there is no weight to it as it comes over the dunes so it flails about crashing into everything. Moreover, that matched with the framerate that gets worse and worse on the Xbox One version, it is enough to make anyone want to stop playing altogether. This is not something you might want to do, but for the same of the number of painkillers you need to ingest afterward, you’ll have to.

Overall, I think Sable is one of the most beautiful games ever, in terms of visuals. However, every irritation such as having to clumsily rattle through dialogue a couple of times because I accidentally clicked on the same prompt, again, the at times sickening framerate drop, and that bike, make it somewhat annoying. The directionless way the story goes might put off some, but I think it fits with the nomadic nature of Sable as a character. It is a pretty and interesting game, but it isn’t fantastic at being a game that’s going to capture you.

An Xbox One copy of Sable was provided by Raw Fury for the purposes of this review.

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Sable

$24.99

7.5

Score

7.5/10

Pros

• Look at that art!
• The sense of adventure.
• Options to make the lines thicker, great for 4K TVs.

Cons

• The performance around Eccria and beyond is near impossible to play.
• It is easy to get stuck in a loop skimming through fluff text.
• That weightless and lifeless hoverbike.