3.5/5 ★ – BartyShmUt's review of Sable.

Sable is an open world exploration game in the vein of Breath of the Wild. You can climb almost any surface in the game, there’s different outfits to collect, some locations are similar to Zelda’s shrine puzzles, and there are collectibles hidden throughout the world which let you upgrade your character. The game lacks combat; or fail-states of any kind, and has more of a focus exploring for the sake of exploring. The game has you playing as a girl named Sable, on an alien/post apocalyptic world where everyone wears masks. These masks symbolize what the person does with their life. Climbers wear climbing masks, mechanics wear mechanic masks, and guards wear guard masks. The game starts with Sable heading off on her gliding, which is this culture’s tradition of traveling the world and experiencing as much as they can, culminating in the glider picking which mask they want to wear for the foreseeable future. This setup lends itself well to the exploration gameplay because in Sable you’re encouraged to just go out and experience as much of the world as possible in order to figure out what mask you want to end up wearing. You obtain masks mainly through quests given by NPCs, which show you a little bit of how people in the roles the masks signify live their lives. There are quests that involve climbing challenges to earn the climbing mask, quests that involve exploring ruins of old infrastructure given by mechanics, selling scrap that you salvage from ruins earns you the scrapper mask, and so on. By the end of the game you will have a good idea of which mask you enjoyed earning the most, which will probably be the one you end up choosing at the end of your gliding. The setup of this game is its strongest aspect, and it’s probably one of the better setups for a game I’ve seen. You explore the world in two ways. Riding around on a hoverbike for long distance travel, and climbing for exploring smaller areas thoroughly. I’m of the opinion that putting a vehicle in an open world game immediately makes the world a lot less interesting most of the time, and Sable is no exception to this rule. A lot of the world is just open space to be traversed with the bike with nothing to really see outside of the few actual structures and landmarks scattered around. Even the korok seed-like collectibles aren’t as spread out in the areas between landmarks, and the vast majority of them are found clustered around points of interest, whereas in BOTW the korok seeds were used to make almost every inch of the map worth exploring if even just once to look for seeds. There also isn’t any incentive to explore for resources due to there being no demand for them besides getting a little money, so there was never really any time that I would just explore the actual map just to do it, unlike BOTW where I was constantly looking around for korok seeds or crafting resources. The climbing does help make the landmarks more interesting to explore than in other open world games. The climbing allows these areas to have more layers than they'd have otherwise, and being able to climb anywhere being an option means that I was inspecting the locations more thoroughly because I was always looking to see if there was a way for me to get higher up any structure. The actual mechanics of the climbing weren’t perfect, and there was a lot of glitching around associated with it. A lot of times when climbing over a wall I would get stuck in the climbing up animation at the top of the surface, and there was a weird quirk where if i was climbing a surface slanted inwards I would climb it as if it were perfectly vertical for a little bit, before falling back onto the surface to climb it vertically again, as if I was climbing some really steep stairs instead of a slanted surface. The artstyle of this game is pretty striking, with hard outlines, vibrant colors, and low fps; almost key-framed animations making it look like a comic book. My complaint with the visuals is that at night time the game tries to mimic darkness by just getting rid of color altogether, which just straight up looks awful. I would have rather had the color palette switch to different colors to represent darkness instead of just getting rid of them all together. The game looks really good when color is present, and I really did not like playing the game when night time hit. This is a very solid exploration game, and if you really liked Breath of the Wild’s exploration system and want to play a game that does something very similar to that, but uses BOTW’s framework to do it’s own thing and tell a pretty engaging story through gameplay; then play Sable.