Sable review: better than your action packed adventure

On Saber, you can sit and enjoy the view. No, don’t just stand there until an idle animation causes your character to squat down. You can press a button to make the main character in the red cape sit cross-legged. This little flourish is not the key to completing the game, you don’t need it for quests or to solve puzzles, but it captures the spirit of the game perfectly. SaberThe world is beautiful and vast, and part of the joy of playing is simply taking a moment to sit back and take it all in.

Saber is the debut game by Shedworks – a UK-based two-person team consisting of Daniel Fineberg and Gregorios Kythreotis. It’s a sweeping third-person open-world adventure set in a vast desert landscape where you play as a masked girl named Sable. Throughout the game, you will explore their world by climbing and sliding. Breath of the wild-style, plus humming into your hovercraft. Saber However, it is not your typical action-packed adventure, it is a game whose beauty comes from the pleasure of slowing down and appreciating the present moment of life.

The game begins by sending Sable on his rite of passage called “Gliding”. In this ritual, Sable obtains a stone imbued with a power that allows him to slide through the sky in an orange-red bubble. With this power, you can leave your small village and see the larger world, embarking on a journey to discover what kind of life you would like to live. The solemnity of leaving Sable’s camp for the first time, mixed with the sense of possibility, reminded me of leaving home to go to college. I still remember getting out of the driveway and the bittersweet anticipation of where it might go.

You leave Sable’s camp to explore dazzling landscapes, created with detailed lines and graphics and cell shadow images inspired by movies like Hayao Miyazaki’s. Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. The first region I explored was filled with subtle pinks, oranges, and reds that reminded me of a sunset; Each region has its own color palette and theme. The world is large and full of possibility, with a map dotted with giant decaying machinery, merchant camps, and quirky landforms like towering crystalline pillars, brambles forests, and eroded rock formations looking straight out from the American Southwest.

On Saber, exploration is its own motivator. You don’t fight. Instead, most of the time you wander from one place to another, using your hovercraft to travel great distances. If you see something of interest, like a giant abandoned spaceship partially buried in the sand or an ancient temple, you can get off your bike and explore it on foot. Most of the exploration is done by climbing cliffs and other architectural oddities, as well as jumping from high points and gliding in its glowing bubble from place to place. All the while, your journey is accompanied by a cerebral ambient music soundtrack composed by Japanese Breakfast.

Venturing on foot is a joy. You get to express a certain kind of creativity with the climbs, almost as if reaching the top was your own puzzle. The climb is short and punctuated, with many staggered sections. While you can upgrade Sable’s stamina bar, most climbs can be done with the standard amount of energy. Often I would explore a specific monument or cliff with my hovercraft and then plan a tentative route to get up there and do my best to get to the top.

Sable’s limited stamina made the world even more attractive to me. In a similar game, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, some of the magic is lost in the late game when you power up beyond imagination and can climb almost anywhere. You get to a point where Link is so strong that you don’t need to create a strategy, while in Sable strategy is still a fundamental part of the game. And while there are some bugs, they weren’t a huge impediment to my enjoyment. (The game’s beautiful line style can make cliff corners difficult to see, leading me to fall unnecessarily at times. There were also times when the game crashed and it wouldn’t let me go from sliding to climbing. , so it would hit a cliff face and just fall.)

SaberThe elements of exploration are all beautifully tied to Sable’s journey of maturity. In each city, you can visit a mystical mask craftsman: there are masks of a cartographer or a merchant, for example, each representative of different jobs or identities in the world at large. You also meet various people whose stories motivate you on your journey, such as a character named Elisabet, who says she rushed to join an illustrious guard force in a large city. This decision is filled with regret: speeding up her journey meant giving up things like swimming in underground lakes or going to see the Hakoa region.

These character encounters shine thanks to the game’s excellent writing and unique dialogue system. Throughout the game, players not only read the other character’s dialogue, but can also read a separate side narration from Sable (indicated with a different font). For example, when Sable meets the chief merchant of a large city for the first time, the player can read Sable’s thoughts: “I can feel his eyes narrow and imagine the drag of his tongue along his upper teeth. She doesn’t really like me. “This does more than just add a poetic edge to the game. It also gives us a better understanding of what Sable sees in the world around her.

At the end of the day, Saber it shows us that we grow not by conquering the world, but by taking a moment to enjoy the beauty and knowledge of it. It’s okay not to rush into growing up and doing the next thing, or chasing the next achievement. Growth can come simply by enjoying the beautiful moments in life. It may come at a time when you sit and appreciate a view or spend time with someone else. You can come with walking and catching insects all day. It can come gliding through a peaceful landscape.

The game reminded me that perfection is not a prerequisite for an artwork to be meaningful or for a young person to be valued and supported. Saber, mistakes and all, is the perfect example of that.

Saber It was released on September 23 on Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X. The game was reviewed on Xbox. Vox Media has affiliate associations. These do not influence editorial content, although Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased through affiliate links. You can find Additional information on Polygon’s ethics policy here.