Sable

An hour in, Sable presented as an aspirational synthesis of art and interactivity. I had just left home for the first time in the early hours of the morning. I was cruising through the desert on my hover bike, right as the sun was coming up and bathing every surface in a lavish spectrum of light and color. Japanese Breakfast’s Glider reached its peak, and before me was the wide open world of Midden, ripe for exploration. Sable was primed for a succession of moments like these, and I was prepared to indulge each one of them.

In the back of my mind I had suspected, but hadn’t adequately prepared for, a different and soured reality. As played on a launch Xbox One, Sable lurched into a tailspin of a technical disaster. Objectives broke and were rendered inert. The presentation stumbled into a single digit frame rate and had trouble recovering. Buttons didn’t function, movement became guesswork, and it was impossible to tell bespoke interactions from broken systems. I could see the game Sable ached to embody; I just couldn’t play it for myself. The invitation to its world was rescinded without my consent.

Sable opens with its titular protagonist preparing for her coming of age journey. As part of her Gliding, she’s positioned to leave her community behind and search Midden for a purpose grander than nomadic life. Or, maybe, Sable just wants some exposure to the outside the world and to see how far she can go. The game doesn’t burden the player’s experience with its own definition. It’s as freeform and improvised as the journey itself, deriving meaning and satisfaction as a product of player agency and action. Sable can be a fleeting adventure through a desert wonderland or a sophisticated exploration of community and responsibility. Ultimately, it’s up to the player and what they do with their avatar.

Some guidance and structure are provided through Sable’s collection of badges. Professions are tough to separate from personalities, as each desert encampment or community seems to have a Machinist, a Merchant, an Entertainer, and somebody obsessed with beetles. Completing a favor for them usually earns Sable a badge, and three badges can be turned in for a mask. A culture of masks surrounds Midden, and stands in for some kind of social rank and place. Your value is shaped by what you can contribute to a local community. In a broader sense, earning badges and wearing masks across her Gliding allows Sable to sample a life outside of her nomadic upbringing.

Sable has talents that belong exclusively to Gliders. She can encase herself in a glowing rust-colored orb and, well, slowly glide down from any surface. Sable is also entitled to her hover bike, Simone, and able to buy new parts, recolor its pieces, and customize it to a surprising degree. The ability to climb any non-metal surface is Sable’s most in-demand asset, as the world of Midden is rife with hilltops, mountains, and other sharp ascents. Climbing is tied to a stamina meter, which can be upgraded by locating and turning Chum Eggs in to the Chum Queen. In short, exploration and movement in Sable feels like it was designed by someone who fell in love with the movement systems of Breath of the Wild.

There is no combat in Sable. There isn’t any sense of menace about its world, either. Crashed spaceships of a long-gone civilization can tell the story of what came before. The people occupying Midden tell of what’s happening now. Sable is there to decide her own personal future, and no part of any of this features the player killing beetles or fighting goblins. Sable is a journey of discovery with the absence of violence. This is extremely hard to depict in a medium that usually features combat as its primary expression of a player interacting with a world. Sable also avoids the pratfalls of a walking simulator, instead relying on the player to use periods of isolation and discovery as its means of forming a personal story. Sable’s narrative is a much an improvised journey to the top of a mountain as it is learning what happened to the atomic core in Eccria. The fusion of the two is intended to be the player’s journey.

All Sable really asks for is patience. Midden is a huge world. A lot of it is empty. Occupants of villages ask for tasks out in that world—find a way up the Bridge of the Betrayed to meet Eliisabet, go to The Watch observatory and solve a puzzle with ancient machinery, collect metal scrap all over Midden and trade it for currency—and these provide some direction, but Sable hopes players get lost in the spaces between these sequences. It’s a massive world, and climbing every mountain, crashed ship, or skeletal remain doesn’t always have a Chum Egg waiting at the end, but there is satisfaction in wondering if getting somewhere is possible and finding out that, yes, it was.

Sable’s mechanics thrive in seeking out Cartographers in Midden’s six diverse biomes. Cartographers are always positioned at some absurdly high point, and finding ways to manipulate Sable’s climbing systems provides a suitable challenge. The reward is a more detailed map for each area, some of which hints at greater points of interest and further invitations to explore, if not solve, mysteries of the world. If Sable were measured in raw gameplay, intuiting the path to a Cartographer would be its own peak.

Writing is another of Sable’s positive features. The residents of Midden regard Gliders with equal part amusement and annoyance, but usually choose good nature decorum over aggression and hostility. They’re resigned to help a Glider on their journey, recognizing their innate abilities as solutions to some of their own hardships. Sable herself narrates conversations as they happen, telling the player of an NPC’s disposition and demeanor in a game without faces or voiced dialogue. It’s wonderful, deft touch, and combines with Moebius-styled visual presentation to make the whole game feel like different pages from a storybook.

The last seven paragraphs describe an idealized form of Sable. It’s what I imagine the game to be if it were allowed to perform as designed. Unfortunately, on the Xbox One I purchased in 2013, playing it was a nightmare. During the Eye to the Sky quest, a button I need to stand on did not work, causing me to wander around in search of nothing. Orange Beetles not spawning in their nest made me waste time looking for objects that did not exist. Sable either froze or dropped frames during perilous jumps, forcing me to re-climb an entire mountain. I spent 20 minutes looking for Nimoor plant only to not be able to pick one up once I had located it. I found a garden, or something, while exploring The Whale, but nothing would happen when I interacted with places that had button prompts. I would frequently lock in place and only be able to walk forward. I wasn’t allowed to board my bike. My bike disappeared Frames dropped to single digits in Eccia with alarming frequency. The game crashed a dozen times. Rebooting the game solved some of these problems, but who wants to do that every time something might be broken? It’s a tremendous waste of time and harms the entire experience.

And yet I did my best to soldier through Sable. I tried to fall in love with what it wanted to be instead of what it was, which was a mess. Mirroring Sable herself, I tried to think of these hardships as my own journey of perseverance and self-discovery. Overcoming every busted puzzle or technical failure would build my own character and tell my own story, one wholly unique to the minority still sporting a basic Xbox One. But I couldn’t do it. It was death by a thousand cuts. There was no way to tell if something broke or if I just wasn’t trying the correct solution. When I finished Sable, I had collected five masks, but I never finished talking to SARIN, never found out what to do with butterflies, and gave up on whatever I was supposed to find in The Whale. Frustration took over the mystery. My journey was at its end, and it wasn’t the one I (or the game) had sought after.

One could make the argument that I was not supposed to play Sable, a game from 2021, on Xbox hardware released in 2013. I would agree with you, and I would have much preferred to play it on a Series X if one were able to be acquired by normal human beings without resorting to insane internet scalping. Regardless, Sable is available to purchase, for money, on the Xbox One platform and how it passed any level of certification is its own mystery. As it closes, Sable tells the player what an adventure you had, and it was only for you. I wish I had been allowed to actually take it. Sable didn’t work on this platform and it broke my heart.

In the interest of positivity, Japanese Breakfast’s soundtrack works 100% of the time. Better the Mask and the aforementioned Glider are the stars of the show, but the ambient pop that fills the space in between is where Sable finds its sustenance. It’s a synth wonderland of mellow moods and curious wonders, accentuating a familiar yet alien world in a manner I haven’t felt since Saori Kobayashi’s work in Panzer Dragoon Saga. Sable’s music showcases an understated beauty that doesn’t seek to overpower its visual presentation (and how could it?), but rather functions as a companion piece to guide a heart rather than provide explicit direction to a mind. It’s beautiful, and I already bought it on vinyl despite my feelings toward the rest of the game.

As designed, Sable is a freeform journey across gorgeous landscapes in pursuit of self-discovery. Agency is at a premium and the player can go as far as their initiative can take them. As executed on an Xbox One, Sable is a devastating technical calamity unfit for basic service. It was a cruelty to observe the heights Sable was capable of reaching and yet not be able to experience them for myself.