Sable

Sable's lonely, heartfelt journey of self-discovery will sit with me for a lifetime.

The occasional bug and missing stamina upgrades are really the only negatives I can lodge at Sable. I can think of very few games that have presented such a beautiful harmony of its attributes. Everything supports everything else. The story implores you to go out into the world, to see all that there is to see. The gameplay ensures that the focus is always on the vistas that lay before you, and it's all stylised beautifully. The game creates a view of which I cannot tire. This is truly one of the most well-conceived and executed games that I have seen in a very long time. It's one of those games that truly is using everything to its maximum potential.

Making an interactive facsimile of Moebius’ style is a daunting task. While it isn’t always a slam dunk, Sable provides handsome eye candy, encouraging you to climb mountains for the view alone. The anticipated score from Japanese Breakfast is even more versatile, stringing the wasteland with theremin, accordions, shoegaze and desert psych. It’s a shame that the initial glider sounds like loose change in a dryer, so I encourage players strictly seeking to vibe to trade up for better parts as soon as they can.

Sable is a fascinating coming of age videogame with an incredible art direction inspired by the works of the late Jean Giraud.

There’s something to be said of Sable’s casual, meditative charm and truly enchanting presentation. Unfortunately, however, it can occasionally feel empty and remains fraught with technical errors and performance issues. Hopefully, there'll be a bug-fixing patch on the horizon. Otherwise, Sable's fresh, intriguing world and solid mechanics could be overshadowed by its assortment of glitches.

The obvious flaws of Sable eliminate the possibility of presenting all these ideas in a coherent and engaging adventure from start to finish. The open structure of the narrative and gameplay, however, allow to calibrate the overall experience on the user's desire to immerse themselves in a story that is as fascinating as it is imperfect.

Sable should be applauded for its strong aesthetic choices and ambitious restructure of open-world priorities, but it fails to fully deliver on its premise and is ultimately undone by a lack of polish or engaging mechanics.

If you're all about game mechanics and combat, this game isn't for you. BUT if you're mind is open for games as art, this is a 10/10. Visuals and score are immaculate. Characters and writing are witty and fun. The pay-off you get from exploring is immense. At this point the bugs are still a bit annoying and can stop progression at times (happened 2 times for me). But other than that this game is game design in perfection.

Short and cozy, it did what it wanted to do in a very simple way. Wouldn't replay it, but certainly a good piece of media.

Game art was really good. But there was no story and game felt bland and lack of life. It was walking simulator go there pickup something go back and speak to someone. Thats the full game experience.

My first impression was actually very positive. I was kinda burnt out by the games where you constantly have to kill someone, so finding an open world with a kinda unique cell-shaded look to it, where your main objective is to just explore the world sounded very promising. Ultimately, though, all that potential went to waste, as the developers couldn't think of anything better to do in this world then to solve lame puzzles, perform very repetitive and often quite frustrating platforming, and talk to NPCs who have little to nothing interesting to say. All the great discovery pretty much amounts to nothing. You either find the same-looking junk to sell or eggs that increase your stamina, so that you can reach more places where you - you guessed it - can find more of the same junk. You can find rare cosmetics here and there, but they don't affect anything. There's also the bike customization, but it's very primitive. Even the best parts only make your bike marginally faster / better controlled, and overall it just comes down to cosmetic changes again. Worse yet, you have to buy all parts blindly and it's not until you bring them to the machinist that you can see how will they affect your bike's stats, which is extremely dumb, irritating, and simply illogical. Maps are also pointless since they don't reveal any points of interest, and I'm not sure why buying them was even included in the game. And then there are, of course, the bugs. The game is very poorly optimized, across all platforms, judging by what I've read online. Some areas only have minor stutters and FPS drops, while others, like Eccria, are just borderline unplayable with framerate dipping to 10-15 region. Instead of just choosing one platform and properly polishing the game, the developers instead chose the big buck and ported the game to both Xbox and Playstation, with PS5 port being particularly messy. Four years after the release, none of the game's bugs were eliminated. On top of the aforementioned horrendous FPS drops, you also gets objects popping up out of nowhere, prompts that don't work (or work but don't show up), trade screen not working (even though many quests straight out require you to buy / sell things in order to be completed), etc. And it's not like the devs didn't have the money. They were backed by Raw Fury, one of the world's largest indie game publishers. They've been able to hire some big names like composer Michelle Zauner of the band Japanese Breakfast and writer Meg Jayanth, the writer of Horizon Zero Dawn. There was a physical issue art book, and the soundtrack was released physically as well on both the CD and vinyl. So apparently they've had funds for all of that additional stuff, but not for fixing the game. Clearly they have problems with setting their priorities straight.

El juego visualmente es agradable y ciertamente es lo único que podría destacarle. En jugabilidad es una completa basura sin vida, es solo un simulador de caminata con bonitos visuales y poco mas, luego de 1-2 horas o incluso menos te darás cuenta de lo aburrido y poco emocionante que es, si lo quieres probar por el estilo artístico esta bien pero no esperes una maravilla