izigame.me

I initially bought this game for the visual design (and because Japanese Breakfast wrote the soundtrack) and hadn't heard about gameplay all that much. To be really honest, I expected the game to be kind of boring? Now, while this game is INCREDIBLY stunning, and you could pause the game at any second and see a literal work of art, what kept me hooked the most to play through the game were the world building, storytelling and gameplay.
The story to me really felt like reading a book. I am usually a person that frequently skips dialogue because I find that it's often so irrelevant and unnecessary to listen to most of what NPCs actually have to say. I didn't skip a single line of dialogue in this game. The characters are all charming and unique and feel fleshed out, there were reoccurring characters I completely fell in love with (like Eliizabeth, who has to be the most interesting character I've met in a game) and I cannot put into words how good the prose of this game is. The story is so well done and everything fits together so well.
To summarize the premise a bit: when the people in the world of Sable turn a certain age, they prepare for a journey they make through the lands to find out what they want to do. They travel to the cities in the surrounding desert, help people and find out what they like doing, and are challenged to find something they are passionate about and earn the respective mask for that occupation. Once they have chosen what they want to be, they return home to make their choice. This is the premise all character interactions, quests and encounters are based on and everything you do works towards finding your own place in the world. This allows the game to tell so many interesting stories about finding your place in the world and what the people in this world do and how the world works. Also, without spoiling too much: the end of the game REALLY makes you reminisce about all the memorable parts of your journey, and I think the developers really pulled every lever to make you melancholic about characters and quests and places you visited. To me, the game's finale was so impactful, and it felt like I wasn't only making a choice for myself, but also for the character I had grown to care about so much. I can't say I have ever before felt so immersed into a world and a choice as I was with this game. I can *really* recommend the game for the last ~15 minutes alone.
On a surface level, the game controls similar to breath of the wild, but Sable has a vastly different approach to how exploration in the game works. Sable really nails the "points of interest" in the world: everything you see on the map that looks unusual is actually something you are encouraged to go to, which works so well, because there are *way* less landmarks than e.g. breath of the wild has, but the landmarks in Sable all hold way more importance than, e.g. finding a shrine in breath of the wild. Every landmark is filled with secret passages, steep climbs, charming NPCs, creative puzzles, and great rewards. The game also doesn't over-do it with its mechanics, which is great, because it really lets you focus on exploring the world. While your only mechanics are climbing, floating and riding a hover bike, these three mechanics never got boring, because you always found new interesting ways to use them. (riding a bike was a bit buggy, which honestly made it less enjoyable, but more to that in a bit)
The thing I heads-over-heels fell in love with was the bug-catching mechanic. It was SUCH a creative approach to a mechanic you have seen in so many games already: while you usually just have to press "A" to catch a bug, the challenge in Sable is to figure out, what is so challenging about catching the bug in the first place. A bug that lives on the ceiling of a cave can be knocked down by creating smoke below the bug and another bug always burrows away when you get close, so you have to lure it somewhere where it can't burrow into the sand. Catching a bug was more of a creative puzzle than a simple "Press A to catch the bug" and I always go SO excited when someone wanted me to catch a bug for them.
The quests were all such a joy to play and the game is SO reasonably scoped (I'd estimate there were about ~30 landmarks and ~20 quests), that I got all 53 achievements for the game in one playthrough without even intending to. It has a really great length where I was neither like "Oh, I thought that was a bit short" nor "Okay, I think I'm just going to end the game now, because I don't want to do the rest of the content anymore". It was such a well-rounded experience that was fun, felt challenging and delivered some emotional punches to an absolute GREAT soundtrack and insane visuals.
The only thing I had issues with were the controls (which I got used to, but the game does not work very intuitively on keyboard) and a lot of minor to medium bugs. In some bigger locations or when I was riding my hover bike too fast, the game got extremely laggy. There also was a quest I actually had to google, because I had a bug, where a switch couldn't be interacted with, which made me have to reload the area to be able to do the puzzle. For about 10% of the characters there was no interaction UI shown, and sometimes my hover bike would struggle SO hard to drive that I think I would have had a *lot* more fun with the hover bike if it hadn't been that bugged and laggy. While I really hope the devs might patch this at some point, I still have an insane amount of respect for the team, because I initially was *way* more salty about the bugs and lag until I saw the credits screen and saw how few people worked on this game. The fact that this game functions so well and made me have such a great time with it is insane, given that the credits rolled for about 30 seconds.
I cannot over-emphasize how much I loved exploring this world and how much I will treasure the experience of playing this game, please consider buying it.