3/5 ★ – Wiwa's review of Sable.

TOTAL WEIGHTED SCORE: 63.4% How's the vibe? 6/10 How's it play? 6.2/10 How's it look? 5.1/10 How's it sound? 4/10 Attention to detail? 8/10 - Sable is a game with huge potential - but which is marred by what seems to be an overreaching scope, and more jank than I can really accept. Starting with the great: The world is wonderfully laid out for exploration, with distant landmarks catching your eye at every turn and inviting you to come and have a look. This, along with the passable climbing system, are clearly inspired by the modern Zelda games, and they pull it off well. The quest design is... okay. I wouldn't say any of them are particularly engaging, and the objectives do get fairly samey. This isn't such an issue though, since the game isn't very big. Now the stuff that was grating. I found the visuals were great in some aspects, and difficult to look at in others. In particular, the character animations were at a significantly lower framerate than the rest of the game, so it looked weird and jittery. The toon shading is cute, but gives the game a bit of an amateur look. The audio was what bothered me the most. Some parts of the soundtrack were fine, but others just seemed confused, and different parts often drifted out of sync with one another. Worse were the sound effects: even now I don't know what triggered 90% of the sound effects in the game because they didn't really sound like anything, and they would play way maybe 5 or 10 of them. The final major problem I had with the game was how much of my time it wasted. From watching the same unskippable cutscene over and over for collecting collectables or masks, to a side mission right at the end where it asks you to wait several in-game days before you can continue (there is no way to skip time and it maps 24 minutes to a day - no thanks). Sable really could have been something special: a game without combat, telling a coming-of-age story with some genuinely pretty interesting lore behind it, but it fell a bit flat for me.