Tyler Hillis

Wait – go play it first

Before you read on, I encourage you to watch Sable’s initial reveal trailer. If it looks like something that would interest you in the slightest; go and play it before reading this. I’ll be diving into the story, locations, and characters of this game – all of which are exponentially more interesting first-hand.

Introduction

Sable has, quite possibly, poked its delightful little nose into the treasured halls of any gamer; the personal top ten list. I’m not totally sure it stands there firm footed. I’m still in that wonderful post-playthough glow phase. But for the time being it sits there, right next to games like Fallout: New Vegas, Breath of the Wild, Minecraft, and many others.

So how did an independent studio primarily consisting of two people working on their first game manage to craft an experience so deserving of that high pedigree? Luckily, they answer this question within the game itself – or, better put, I found the answer to that question while playing their game.

Spoilers Below

What is the value of Art?

At one point in the game, the player might encounter an Atomic Priest looking for someone named Llhor. This begins a quest that leads around the entire map, asking inn-keepers for information. Without getting into the gritty details, eventually you find her and have a pleasant conversation around a fire. She’s someone at a major decision point in her life, questioning her purpose, her passions, and where exactly she fits. She then asks the player three deeply philosophical questions.

The first of which is seen above – What is the value of Art? Is it spreading truth, or is it spreading joy?

When looking at this game as a whole I was compelled to answer, “Spreading Joy.”

I think most who play games would answer this way, as they are an artistic medium that provide joy more than anything else. And when looking at Sable specifically, I see and feel joy every moment I play it. A great example being it’s most striking feature – the artstyle. Wow. What an artstyle. I saw the trailer back in 2018 and immediately fell in love. I wasn’t really that interested in how the game played, I simply wanted to control something that looked that good. Every time I boot it up to play, it takes a good five minutes for the stupid child-like grin to fade from my face.

And when that grin returns back to my usual sour-faced resting position, the simple yet satisifying mechanics throughout Sable steadily chisel it away. Anyone who has played Breath of the Wild will recognize the stamina circle, rock climbing, and gliding mechanics. However, in a pretty bold choice, none of these can be upgraded or changed throughout the entire game. Once you set off after the prologue, none of the core mechanics change at all. And to me, this is a surprising departure from the RPG-ification of the majority of modern games. It feels like developers are worried that without skill trees and numbers going up, the player will lose interest – or even worse – lambast them on the internet. Yet Sable knows that what it has feels great and is content.

So if the core loop is the same throughout, how does it continue to bring Joy? Those mechanics, once mastered, allow the player to experience the world they have been placed in to an intimate degree. They can look at an area and plot their course, knowing which ledges they could climb and which they couldn’t. There’s no guessing game of, “Maybe I’m meant to come back here later with an upgrade.” Nope, if it’s a landmark you can access it at any time. And this makes exploration a joy. You don’t have anything holding you back. You can just go and be curious without quests or NPCs leading you there. It’s exactly how I felt playing Breath of the Wild. I thought no other game would be able to replicate it, and yet, in some ways, it’s done better in Sable. For instance in Breath of the Wild, I almost never used a horse to get around. It was far more interesting to walk everywhere and discover what was hidden in that incredibly dense world. Whereas in Sable I love to fly my little sandspeeder around – knowing that the world isn’t necessarily dense, but it’s rich. It’s rich in it’s distinct biomes, colors, weather, and terrain to traverse. It’s a joy to navigate in the beautiful world by virtue of navigation itself. There is no goal or objective, and there doesn’t have to be. There is just joy.

Do you value caution or safety?

Next, Llhor asks a question that seems to offer only one answer. Sable even inserts a thought about asking Llhor if there is a difference between caution and safety, but resists, allowing the player to give an answer. And so I sat there, first trying to figure out how I personally divide the two, and second trying to figure out how I approach challenges between that divide.

I landed on caution. In my eyes, it’s more important to face something as honest and true as possible while recognizing the risks instead of falling back to a safer option. You may read the question differently.

I also think Sable as a product itself took the cautious route instead of the safe one. As mentioned previously, the decision (and yes – it was a specific design decision made be the developers) to never alter the core mechanics was bold. They had to recognize the risks of this decision, and yet faced it instead of taking the safer route to do the typical video game upgrade scheme.

This speaks to the game as a whole as well. It’s an ambitious scope for a two-person team (even with the many other contributors listed in the credits). It’s not the most technically polished game I’ve played. Throughout the experience the FPS was inconsistent, I encountered numerous music looping bugs, I managed to access areas I probably wasn’t supposed to access, and I had a quest get stuck on a certain step. All things I wish didn’t happen, sure, but felt like the result of risk management decisions made toward the end of production. I never had the game crash or hit a moment where I could no longer progress. All this to say that the safe choice in many people’s eyes would be to continue delaying until all those issues are fixed. But let me tell you from my personal day job, you’re never going to fix every issue in a game. And instead, you need to address the biggest issues that cause the most harm to the player, and then triage from there. So they took the cautious approach of releasing a game that was ready, knowing there were still some problems. This is a hard thing to do as an artist, but it’s also much better to get something out in the world (I speak as someone currently struggling with this final, crucial step).

Why do we explore?

Finally, we get hit with the question the entire game is based around. Sable is a coming of age story about a girl who goes out into the world to discover who she will be. You encounter characters who love what they found for themselves on their own journey, characters who hate it, and others, like Llhor, who are still figuring things out.

There is no right answer to any of these questions. Sure, the quest will complete in slightly different ways depending on how you answer them, but these are more for the player than they are for Sable or her questlog.

This question was an easy answer for me. I don’t think I will ever find my purpose in life, and I’ve accepted that. So exploration has been about indulging in freedom for a while. This game elicited that from me, as you can probably tell from the previous sections. My favorite moments where not directed or waypointed. They were self-driven and curious. But those small moments lodged themselves into my memory and are what I see when I recall my time with the game.

There is plenty more to talk about in this game. The world-building, characters, elegant region design, quest design, UI (and lack there of) and the amazing music. Seriously, the soundtrack by Japanese Breakfast is the perfect backdrop to the world. I couldn’t imagine one without the other.

But those three questions were what lingered in my head the longest, so I wanted to write something down about them. This game will sit there in my personal top ten games for a while, I think. It’s something everyone should play.