Sable: A World Worth Seeing

It feels like I've been climbing for hours. Each handhold bringing the next platform closer and closer, I keep a close eye on my stamina. What a tragedy it would be to lose all of this height if I miscalculated my ability to hold on until the next ledge. I glance over my shoulder at the towering fall beneath me, not afraid of dying, after all I have the Perpetual to slow any untimely decent, but while taking in the striated pillars of stone above the ocean of sand I can’t help but fret that I won’t make the climb. With a grunt I mount the ledge and pause briefly, letting my stamina return. The view above is daunting, I’m only halfway up this climb. I survey the possible routes, chose the most actionable, and make my way up another sheer rock wall. I’m immediately reminded of Shadow of the Colossus, though this is no living beast. Every movement a careful exercise of judgment and execution, I make my way, slowly, up to the top. At the summit lies a pair of stone silo-esque buildings adorning an abandoned courtyard. Birds line the wooden pegs jutting out from each tower. There’s a dilapidated cart, its canvas slouching between dry-rotted struts, the wheels long detached. Turns out there is nothing of material gain atop this precipice, but a short climb to the top of a silo, displacing the reposed birds, yields a different kind of award. In the distance I can see what I will later discover is the Eyrie, a collection of ancient buildings cresting the the finger-like towers of the Badlands. There is smoke emanating from one of the peaks, a telltale sign that someone has made camp there. The gently bobbing balloon tells me that someone is a Cartographer. The perilous trek to their balloon will have me traipsing the spine of a long dead titanic beast, climb at least a dozen more outcroppings, and likely glide across chasms so high above the Badlands floor that a fall would prove the end of my willingness to attempt again. Somehow, despite the risks, I make the journey. My hands aren’t sweaty, per se, but I feel my shoulders drop a good couple inches when I step up to the Cartographer. It’s a lot of work for a map and a badge, but in Sable, the stylish coming of age tale from Shedworks, the journey is literally the entire point. 

I first recall seeing Sable when it was announced in 2018. Like many others, I was immediately drawn to the Moebius influenced art and motorcycle-like gliders. In the three years since its announcement I would remember it occasionally, hoping its release was close. Video games and expectations mix like oil and water, generally. Though I would be the first to tell you it’s ok to be excited by something, in games that often culminates in disappointment. Sometimes that responsibility lies on the shoulders of the developers for talking up their project, but often it rests on the shoulders of fans. We are so prone to dumping all of our hopes and dreams into projects that catch our eye. Sable was in the middle for me. Never something I found controlling my thoughts, but a game I remained fiendishly curious about as more information dripped out of the small UK studio. 

In 2021, honestly for the majority of the history of games, one of the defining anchor points in games has been combat. Mechanically it is often what gives a game legs. Is the combat fun, is it repetitive, is it challenging? It’s far more rare to encounter a game that does away with this core mechanic entirely. Sable is not at a lack of things it could use to kill you. From giant beetles to gravity itself, yet it decided to do away with player mortality entirely. You are going to be killing anything here. And nothing is going to try to kill you. It’s refreshing. A respite from the day to day killing that possesses so many other titles. Sable isn’t about mastering the pattern of a bosses attack flurry or finding the right elemental damage to use against mobs or even jumping on enemy heads. It’s a game ostensibly about the coming of age for a young girl named Sable. It’s core mechanic: exploration. 

It’s not exactly a new premise. There are other games that put their emphasis on exploration. But where Sable differs, to me, is in its setting. Midden is a beautifully desolate place. From the Ewer, where your Ibexii tribe is settled, the the sprawling deserts that surround it: The centrally located Sansee, Redsee to the west, Hakoa to the southwest, The Wash, to the southeast, The Sodic Waste to the northeast, and the Badlands in the south-center. Each stretch of dust holds aesthetically unique elements. The Sansee is sprawling and wide, with rock outcroppings, plinths and plateaus. The Badlands a collection of towering geological formations. Redsee features deep and layered canyons. The Wash is pale, as its name would imply, and has a hauntingly foggy forest and a massive tract of titanic skeletons. Hakoa is dark-sanded and smog laden, with the incredible Crystal Plateau looming on the horizon. Finally the Sodic Waste is a graveyard of massive ship carcasses, their hollowed shells canyons of a different nature. All of these places bleed into each other with sand. The dunes of one region sweeping into the next, connecting every inch of Midden with a sense, not of loneliness, but of isolation. It’s not lonely because in your travels you will come across a smattering of settlements. In one instance, Eccria in the Redsee, you will find a full blown city. The people of Midden aren’t struggling, this isn’t a post apocalypse. Though in your crawling through fallen ships like the Dunboyne and Shadow of Neave, you will start to weave together a story that suggests these people are the survivors of a tragic and isolating event, interactions with the locals of each region suggest that life is fine. It may be tough at times, but people genuinely seem happy. This lends this almost whimsical nature to the interactions Sable has. I rarely caught myself worried or stressed about the tasks I undertook.

Sable is a coming of age story. It is imparted early on that the children of Midden, as they approach adulthood, venture out on what they call their Gliding. These young adults build (not make - an important distinction) their Gliders, hovering motorcycle-like craft, and set out into the desert to discover their life’s calling. The entire game is framed around Sable’s Gliding. Gliders are expected to explore the place that they inhabit in depth, interacting with and doing favors for the people they come across. As a plot device this works very well on its face, but the writing of Sable quickly lends more to the pull of the Gliding. As you venture out into Midden you will come across people wearing specific masks. Masks are equally utilitarian and identifying in this world. Cartographers wear masks that appear to be fashioned out of sextants and octants, Scrapper masks are shiny and fabricated from - you guessed it - scrap metal, Merchant masks are gold and opulent. There are fourteen masks in total to discover, and most of them require you to acquire badges from members of each guild. Help a Machinist, get a badge. Collect three badges and you can visit the Mask Caster and claim your mask. The cutscene that plays when you receive one of these masks from the Caster is strange and sort of uncomfortable and adds to the mysterious nature of these people. 

So off I went. I saddled up on Simoon, my glider (more on that later), and started wandering the arid drifts. 

The first thing you will notice playing Sable, as I mentioned before, is its art style. UK developer Shedworks drew heavily from the famous artist Jean Giraud (known also as Moebius). Well know for his peculiar and fascinating style, Moebius’s work is most easily compared when viewed through the lens of ligne claire (French for “clear line”), a style consisting of strong lines and bold colors with little to know hatching. Only vaguely familiar with his work I found myself looking into it more pointedly nearly eight hours into the game. It was so vivid and unique I had to see where it came from. It’s arguably an odd path to discovery, as I am sure many would have sought out the inspiring work first, but what my haphazard process prompted was a sense of awe at Shedworks’ ability to capture the Moebius style in such a large world. Dunes and canyons are painted in bold monotone when the sun is high. Bright oranges and reds punctuated by greens and yellows. As the sun sets the palette begins to bleed into itself as teals fade into deep blues and purples. Find yourself in an unsightly interior after nightfall and color will wash completely from the screen as grays become the dominating tone. There are many ways to beautifully portray an open, sandy world. What Sable does is unique and constantly gave me pause. Clearing a canyon wall to see undiscovered meandering mounds of sand and rock foregrounding a blue scale horizon is stunning. I never got tired of that experience. 

Honestly, given what I have told you so far, I had seen all I needed to see of Sable to enjoy it endlessly. Much to my surprise, what I got from the writing easily surpassed my expectations. 

Sable isn’t an exposition heavy game. In fact, most of the story that you encounter tells itself to you as you glide about the world, he phenomenal Japanese Breakfast score filling your mind with ethereal sound. The enormous carcasses of ships and the AI remnant inside them tell you the story of how this population ended up where they are. The small towns and villages, each with their own merchants and Machinists tell you that these people aren’t struggling, they have adapted. The missions you go on will rarely tell a story to you in the dialogue boxes that bookend the quest. Rather, Sable tells you about its world by sending you into it. You start to become familiar with the topography, recognizing outcropping and plateaus, navigating around Kemble’s Cube, using the Bridge of the Betrayed as a reference point, or framing the world around you from the domed top of The Watch. I didn’t become as familiar with the world as I did, say, Night City from last year’s controversial Cyberpunk 2077, though forgoing fast travel for the first half of the game to better learn my surroundings paid off in similar ways. Each region in Sable carries with it a colored distinction, complemented of course by unique topography (a word I realize I am going to use a lot in this piece). With those environmental distinctions I started to piece together the “story” of the people I met. The traders at Burnt Oak Station lived a slow and easy life, soaking in the rolling amber horizon in the mornings and evenings, receding under their tents in the fire-gold afternoon. The citizens of Eccria bustled beneath their canvas sail awnings, the smell of merchant perfumes and fish wafting through the air. A tavern in the center of town, with a multileveled floor plan, the common place to drink the day’s stresses away. The dark and thunderous Seven Sisters Station, an outpost a short glide away from the ominous and beautiful Crystal Plateau, whose denizens deal with the Hakoan crystal miners, crack jokes in the dark at night over stewed pots of small game and warm drinks. None of this is explicitly stated. Still, the way that the creators of Sable constructed their world lends perfectly to the kind of storytelling I am the biggest fan of: Player-driven. 

It’s no obscured fact that I absolutely adore the XCOM games, and despite the mechanical differences between them and Sable, I love them largely for the same reason. There is a ton of diligent work put into creating an environment that, once the player is given the reins, allows them to fill it with their own little stories. Then, as you hunt down badges you learn that Machinists can hear the machines in the wilds. Not just the groan of aged and weathered metal humming in the wind, but actually hear the heartbeat of machines, attune to their souls, speak with them. There is a moment later in the game, where Sable mentions liking Simoon’s (her glider) sense of humor, and I was broadsided by this charming sense of discovery and joy. How amazing that their world works like this. To conceptualize that Machinists don’t “make” new machines, instead they find the separated parts of a machine destined to be put together and build them whole anew. It wasn’t far into my journey with Sable that I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Machinist mask would be the one I chose at my Gliding’s end. I had become fully attached to Simoon, emotionally. As I found new parts for her I sought to find the parts that seemed to best bring forth her true voice. The moaning hum of Whale and crackle of Shock Crystal combination I settled on just felt, well, right. I had found her voice. I didn’t change her, I merely gave her the tools to speak freely. Truly an experience I have never felt such ownership of, nor pride in, from any other game. 

Then comes the timing of this game’s release in my personal life, something the developers could not have planned for, but nevertheless get to reap the rewards of. For the last three months I have battled sciatic nerve and lower back pain that, at times, proved to be nearly crippling. I’m not a terrifically mobile person day to day anyway, so initially I hadn’t worried about the smothering sense of immobility I was quickly confronted with. I’m a human, I like to move around. Being unable to do so without stabbing pain has been a trial of the most excruciating form. Couple that with an extremely isolationist 2020 and 2021 and sitting down to a game that asks you to simply explore and find the joy in that endeavor was nothing short of a spiritual experience. I know that may sound over exaggerated, but in truth, I really can think of no other way to put it into words. A diehard fan of Bourdain and his globetrotting lifestyle and the food experiences that came with it, I found myself relishing in the novelty of each new place on Midden. What was the food like here? I imagined savory smells wafting from merchant booths, condensation beaded glasses and sweet concoctions at the bars, the particular smell of percolated coffee in an enamel mug at campfires. I was freed by Sable to travel freely. To run and jump and climb and explore and solve and learn. 

Mark Twain is attributed with saying “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” Sable seems to have taken that sentiment and made it the core of this world’s ethos. Go out and see the world, experience what it and its many different people have to offer. Find your place among them, beside them, and then move forward into adulthood with this new appreciation for what is around you. It’s something all people should do. It’s something far too few people ever actually do. On Midden, for the young Sable, it is simply how life is lived. 

I try to write about games as personally as I can. This often leads to long breaks between written pieces because not every game speaks to me in a way I feel I have something unique to share. Sable gave me something to write about from its very first moments to its very last. A coming of age tale that has just as much to say about what it means to find your place in the world as it does reminding you to remember what it felt like to explore without fear. A world where learning is more important than fighting. A world where the remnants of the past are a guiding light to where we are going more than a reminder of how it used to be. What a tremendous way to think. What a wonderful thing to put in the hands of players. 

So to close, in the words of Sable herself, looking up at the Hakoan Crystal Farmer stooping over her, and as a reminder that what you take from this game is your own: “My reading is informed by the markers I see among my own people, the shorthands of a culture, and [you] are in no way beholden to my interpretation.” Though I imagine, if you enter with an open mind, you will find a similarly beautiful creation.