Sable is a game about taking your time, and it is worth yours. Shedworks built a desert planet called Midden, handed the player a hoverbike and a mask, and then declined to tell anyone what to do next. There is no combat. There is no set storyline. You glide, climb, and wander until the wandering means something.
A Rite of Passage on Midden
You play as Sable, a young girl who leaves her nomadic clan on a rite of passage. The goal is simple to state and slow to finish: she must find an appropriate mask and return home. That is the whole spine of the game. Everything else — the ruins, the nomads, the shipwrecks — is what you find while getting there.
The planet is the real character. Midden is a desert world capped by the remains of spaceships and ancient wonders, and Sable crosses it on a hoverbike. The art style is the first thing anyone notices and the last thing anyone forgets.
No Combat, No Set Storyline
Sable has no combat and no set storyline. The narrative arrives through NPC dialogue and environmental cues — remnants of an ancient civilization left to interpretation. That is a deliberate choice, and it holds.
The game is non-linear by design. You roam and adventure in whatever order you like. Puzzle-solving is simple rather than punishing, and platforming runs through a stamina gauge that governs running, climbing, and the ability to glide in mid-air. The gauge is the closest thing to pressure the game has.
Hoverbike Parts and Story-Driven Masks
Parts of Sable are customizable. The hoverbike and Sable’s clothing can both be changed, including the story-driven masks. Hoverbike parts and clothing come from exploring the world or from quests handed out by an array of characters, which often revolve around collecting small materials such as bugs or fruit. Clothing is purely cosmetic, with a few mask exceptions. Hoverbike parts are not: different parts affect how you traverse Midden, offering varying degrees of maneuverability, acceleration and top speed.
That distinction matters. One upgrade system is decoration. The other changes how the desert feels under you.
The Japanese Breakfast Soundtrack
The original soundtrack is by Japanese Breakfast, and it does more work than a soundtrack usually gets credit for. It sets the register for a game that asks you to move slowly through a large space and pay attention.
Explore the dunes on your hoverbike, scale monumental ruins and encounter other nomads as you unearth mysteries long forgotten and discover who she really is behind her mask.
That is the pitch, and the game delivers on it. The mystery is not a puzzle box with a solution at the bottom. It is a place you walk through.
What the Desert Gets Right
The best thing Sable does is trust the player. It puts a girl on a bike in a ruined world and refuses to hurry her. The environmental storytelling — ship remains, old structures, the leftovers of a civilization nobody explains — rewards looking rather than completing.
The stamina gauge turns climbing into a small negotiation. You can run, you can climb, you can glide, and the gauge decides how far each gets you. It is not a hard system, but it gives traversal a texture that a free-climb would have lost.
The mask hunt gives the open world a destination without giving it a checklist. Sable is searching for her place in the world, and the game lets that search be literal.
Where Sable Slows Down
The same restraint that makes Sable distinctive also leaves gaps. A game with no combat and no set storyline has to carry everything on exploration, dialogue and atmosphere, and that load is heavy. When the quests reduce to collecting bugs or fruit, the loop thins out.
The non-linear structure means momentum is yours to build or lose. Players who want a hand on the wheel will find Midden vast and quiet in a way that reads as empty rather than open. That is not a flaw in the design so much as the cost of it.
The customization split is the clearest example. Cosmetic clothing is fine. Cosmetic clothing next to hoverbike parts that actually change maneuverability, acceleration and top speed makes the clothing feel like filler in a game that otherwise wastes nothing.
The Verdict on Sable
Sable earns its 8.3 out of 10 by being exactly what it claims to be and refusing to apologize for it. The art style and the Japanese Breakfast soundtrack carry the atmosphere. The stamina-based platforming and the hoverbike upgrades give the traversal real weight. The mask rite gives the whole thing a point.
What holds it back is the thinness underneath the beauty. Collecting fruit and bugs is not a satisfying quest structure, and a game this open needs more than scenery to keep a player moving. The desert is gorgeous. Some stretches of it are also just stretches.
This is a coming-of-age story told through landscape rather than plot, and it works because Shedworks committed to the slow version. Play it when you have time to waste. It rewards the waste.
The Numbers
- Title: Sable
- Developer: Shedworks
- Publisher: Raw Fury
- Release date: 23 September 2021 (Microsoft Windows, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S)
- PlayStation 5 release: 29 November 2022
- Platforms: Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4, PC (Microsoft Windows), PlayStation 5, Xbox One
- Genres: Platform, Puzzle, Role-playing (RPG), Adventure, Indie
- Modes: Single player
- Perspective: Third person
- Score: 8.3/10, the IGDB critic aggregate across 7 outlets
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