Published
- 3 min read
The Impressions from Sable
Long before Sable was release it catched my attention on twitter. This games graphic is basically a picture of Jean Henri Gaston Giraud better known as Mœbius come to life. It’s such a unique sight and they combined it with breathtaking landscapes. I had a blast playing it just to find new sights around every corner. The world has quite a few different landscapes and the day/night cycle really tints the entire landscape in beautiful colors.
All in all, the game has several distinct gameplay features. There is this world that you are placed in, free to explore with your hoverbike. There is a small town in every biome with people who give you a limited number of quests. The number of quests given is always enough to explore the biome without overdoing it. Most quests are searching for something and do another thing to unlock it. Another part is the platforming. You can climb walls just like in Zeld Breath of the Wild, and you can kind of hover through the air. Then there is puzzlesolving, where you find crashed ships where you have to solve puzzles to get to the boardcomputer. The boardcomputer lets you unlock logfiles, which tell you the story of these ships. Another feature are the circles you have to hoverbike through in each biome. If you are fast enough (which is not a big challenge), you will unlock a chamber, giving you access to an artifact. Last but not least, the world is teeming with Churm eggs, presenting you with mini-challenges to collect as many as possible. Each batch of 20 eggs unlocks a bit more stamina, helping you climb further.
The free world without enemies and the hidden eggs everywhere make for a complete world that just feels like the right mix for the game. At the start your character is set free to explore their destiny and you are basically set free to explore the world too.
Unfortunately, there is some bad along with the good. The games performance is really not great, and sometimes you just have to restart the game to reset it to get good performance again. Some areas could need quite some optimisation. It took me out of the game too often and I considered stopping completely more than once. When driving around, the hoverbike physics can be quite ridiculous at times, with small jumps resulting in a crash into the ground, for example.
But, overall, I absolutely love the game, so take the criticism with a grain of salt and think about it for yourself :).
As always, here are the best of screenshots on imgur and you can find the entire set of screenshots on my Steam profile here https://steamcommunity.com/id/Thecell/screenshots/?appid=757310&sort=oldestfirst&browsefilter=myfiles&view=imagewall.