Sable PlayStation 5 Review

The open-world subgenre is one of the most expansive in video games allowing players to immerse themselves in large, exciting worlds, and it is also one of the most technically demanding to create. As developers try to pack as much detail and life as possible into their worlds, they push hardware capabilities to the limits. Unfortunately, the two-person development studio Shedworks has bitten off more than it can chew with its debut game Sable, reviewed for PlayStation 5 and available on PlayStation 5, PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S.

Named after its protagonist, Sable is an open-world exploration game in which a young girl embarks on a spiritual journey. This journey is called the Gliding and it is a rite of passage amongst Sable's nomadic tribe in which young people venture out to explore the world; experiencing all it has to offer and discovering their true selves along the way. Sable's lore is its most interesting element. Set amongst the harsh dunes of a far-off planet, Sable, and the people she encounters, are the remains of a once technologically advanced group.

 

The corpses of spaceships, rusted and worn by centuries of sand, litter the desert, and there is a spiritual component within machines that allows people to bond with them. For example, Sable's hoverbike SImoon is treated as if it contains a soul, built from and upon the salvaged remains of the machines that it was made out of. Likewise, the human NPCs of Sable, and the protagonist herself, all wear metal masks denoting their role in society and their clan. The game's main questline involves collecting three badges representative of each clan (Merchants, Cartographers, Scrappers, etc.) and crafting their respective masks; with the Gliding concluding with Sable choosing which mask, and group, to ally herself with for life.

Sabel is all about exploring and its map design does a great job of putting interesting landmarks on the horizon that catch the player's eye as they travel. There are plenty of side missions to do and discoveries to make that fill in Sable's relatively barren world and the level of verticality in each location adds a refreshing level of freedom to the game. However, like many games that let the player clamber up every cliffside (Assassin's Creed: Odyssey springs to mind), the controls can become quite frustrating. Sable will sometimes climb onto the wrong object or get caught on terrain and small obstacles which trigger the camera to spin widely. In closed spaces such as inside a building or spaceship, the camera regularly gets caught on the environment.

The other key gameplay mechanic is the hoverbike Simoon. After constructing her bike in the slow prologue, SImoon becomes Sable's traveling companion, its shadow bobbing up and down across the waves of sand like a scene from Star Wars. For such a big part of the game, it is surprising that Shedworks didn't take the time to finely polish the experience, as the bike bucks widely over dunes with broken physics like a horse in heat.

 

Furthermore, on PlayStation 5 the adaptive triggers of the DualSense fight back as you try to hold R2 down to accelerate, this can lead to fingers cramping quickly. The best solution to this is to switch 'Hold to Accelerate' off in the game menu and turn the adaptive triggers to 'Weak' in PlayStation's controller settings. The bike is equipped with a recall-like feature wherein, by pressing the triangle button, Sable will whistle, and the bike should find its way to her. In three and a half hours with the game, this mechanic only worked once, and that was during the tutorial introducing it. Sable often sees the player park up; explore a structure and then hop back on the bike and ride away to the next location that piques their interest.

Except, exploring often makes the player end up on the opposite side of the large rocky mound they're climbing.  At this point calling, Simoon should summon the bike to you, but with its awful pathfinding (and the fact that pressing the button regularly does nothing at all) it is much easier to Fast Travel back to a settlement. The bike with spawn alongside you and then Sable can begin her adventure again. Luckily the load times are quick.

Sable has a nice, relaxing soundtrack from the band Japanese Breakfast that makes riding through the desert a mostly chilled experience. Pair it with stunning hand-drawn visuals and a unique, colorful art direction, and Sable had the potential to really hit a sweet spot. In a perfect world, I can imagine myself sitting down and comfortably putting several hours into getting lost in Sable's sandy labyrinth with Japanese Breakfast in one ear and a podcast in the other. Unfortunately, as fantastic as the art looks, it comes at the cost of performance.

 

After the prologue and opening desert area which both ran okay, Sable really suffers. The frame rate, which was already stylized to fit with Sable's unique running animation, is made worse by lagging shadow effects. The flickering gave me a headache and the unfocused, swinging camera and mishmash of muddy and desaturated colors in dark areas made me nauseous. Shedworks and similar small independent studios face incredibly difficult challenges in bringing their creations to life and face limitations in hardware that big studios simply do not have. While I empathize with that, I have never experienced a video game make me feel as physically unwell as Sable did.

Sable cannot be recommended at launch and requires numerous updates to help it run well on this system. Shedworks' game (which was published by Raw Fury) promises a culturally rich world with plenty to discover in it, but the essential hoverbike is broken and the game has an overwhelming abundance of technical issues. While there were no crashes or massive bugs (outside of the collectible beatles), almost every shot in the game features an object or person clipping into another; Sable's stuttering animation goes beyond an artistic preference as the differing framerates affect one another in a negative way, and the poor over-excited camera is too much. With so much going on on-screen, from the graphical errors to the stylistic overload of the art design; it strained my eyes, hurt my head, and made me feel very uncomfortable.
 

Alex Johnson (@AlexJohnWriting)
News Editor, NoobFeed