Sable is such a flawed gem of a game. It's a beautiful experience that I really loved, but it's also plagued by technical issues and certain things feeling rushed that it takes away from the game just a bit, and that's really unfortunate because the good parts of this are truly great.
It would be very easy to dismiss Sable as an indie version of Breath of the Wild, and mechanically it's not far off - you're exploring an open world, climbing using a similar stamina system, searching for hidden collectibles, and doing self-contained shrine-like puzzles. I love Breath of the Wild, so none of that is a bad thing, but Sable's story and atmosphere are really what set it apart. It's an emotionally touching coming of age story that works in a way few game stories do, largely in thanks to two things. First, the dialogue does something I've never really seen but feels obvious in hindsight, you're shown Sable's own thoughts and feelings as she talks to people, and often this skips over the actual dialogue and just summarizes it. This really lets you connect with the character even with a minimal amount of dialogue in the game, it feels a lot more like reading a book, but in a good way rather than just dumping loads of text on you. The second thing is how well the story meshes with the gameplay. You control Sable on her Gliding, a chance to explore the world and find her place in it. Exploring is what you're doing for the whole game, there's no combat or extraneous systems, you're just meant to see the world, and sometimes help out the people you meet to get a sense of their roles they've chosen. If you're looking at this purely from a gameplay perspective, it's fun but doesn't really do anything unique, but it's the combination here of story and gameplay as one that's a special experience.
Unfortunately, that experience is marred by a large number of minor issues that took away from somewhat. Playing this a couple of months after launch I would've expected it to be cleaned up with some patches by now, and I kind of want to urge people to wait more but at this point I don't even know if most of this will ever be fixed. On the technical side you have things like awful performance in certain areas, glitchy animations while climbing (which you do a ton), objects you're climbing on going invisible, random very loud noises while you're driving around the world, quests constantly un-track themselves so you lose the quest marker, UI elements that are meant to be temporary get stuck on screen, when you restart the game your selected outfit and certain game settings get reset, I had NPCs fall through the world while talking to them, whenever performance dips (pretty often) the audio gets really choppy sounding, and I could go on more but the point is it's a very unpolished game. Aside from the technical stuff there's also some rushed feeling things that are there by design. For example, I missed the place that lets you upgrade your stamina for the majority of the game, and thought the climbing sections were just supposed to be difficult. There's only one location do do this at and as far as I can tell no quests or dialogue pointing to it. I knew I needed to turn in the upgrade items somewhere, but either pointing the player to this better or having more turn-in locations throughout the world would have gone a long way. Also certain things that appear in multiple areas across the game start to get a bit repetitive towards the end, especially if you're going for 100%. I feel like the designers probably would have had some more variety here if not for budget constraints, just a guess though. There's an item that helps you find collectibles that you get after completing the quest for collecting 100 of them. The bike customization is a cool idea, but you can get the fastest bike parts pretty early on and since the top speeds aren't really that fast and you'll be traveling with it a lot (especially if you choose to ignore fast travel like I did, I felt it would kind of ruin the point of the game) you really don't get much chance to experiment with others. Money can go from very tight to not at all a concern very quickly with how the item prices are balanced and how easy some high value items are to get once you find them. There's probably more I'm forgetting, but all of this to say that the game really feels like it could have used a few more months in development.
Despite the negatives, you've already seen my very high rating for this, and while the problems with it make me sad that it's not just a tiny bit better it's still not quite like anything else.
It would be very easy to dismiss Sable as an indie version of Breath of the Wild, and mechanically it's not far off - you're exploring an open world, climbing using a similar stamina system, searching for hidden collectibles, and doing self-contained shrine-like puzzles. I love Breath of the Wild, so none of that is a bad thing, but Sable's story and atmosphere are really what set it apart. It's an emotionally touching coming of age story that works in a way few game stories do, largely in thanks to two things. First, the dialogue does something I've never really seen but feels obvious in hindsight, you're shown Sable's own thoughts and feelings as she talks to people, and often this skips over the actual dialogue and just summarizes it. This really lets you connect with the character even with a minimal amount of dialogue in the game, it feels a lot more like reading a book, but in a good way rather than just dumping loads of text on you. The second thing is how well the story meshes with the gameplay. You control Sable on her Gliding, a chance to explore the world and find her place in it. Exploring is what you're doing for the whole game, there's no combat or extraneous systems, you're just meant to see the world, and sometimes help out the people you meet to get a sense of their roles they've chosen. If you're looking at this purely from a gameplay perspective, it's fun but doesn't really do anything unique, but it's the combination here of story and gameplay as one that's a special experience.
Unfortunately, that experience is marred by a large number of minor issues that took away from somewhat. Playing this a couple of months after launch I would've expected it to be cleaned up with some patches by now, and I kind of want to urge people to wait more but at this point I don't even know if most of this will ever be fixed. On the technical side you have things like awful performance in certain areas, glitchy animations while climbing (which you do a ton), objects you're climbing on going invisible, random very loud noises while you're driving around the world, quests constantly un-track themselves so you lose the quest marker, UI elements that are meant to be temporary get stuck on screen, when you restart the game your selected outfit and certain game settings get reset, I had NPCs fall through the world while talking to them, whenever performance dips (pretty often) the audio gets really choppy sounding, and I could go on more but the point is it's a very unpolished game. Aside from the technical stuff there's also some rushed feeling things that are there by design. For example, I missed the place that lets you upgrade your stamina for the majority of the game, and thought the climbing sections were just supposed to be difficult. There's only one location do do this at and as far as I can tell no quests or dialogue pointing to it. I knew I needed to turn in the upgrade items somewhere, but either pointing the player to this better or having more turn-in locations throughout the world would have gone a long way. Also certain things that appear in multiple areas across the game start to get a bit repetitive towards the end, especially if you're going for 100%. I feel like the designers probably would have had some more variety here if not for budget constraints, just a guess though. There's an item that helps you find collectibles that you get after completing the quest for collecting 100 of them. The bike customization is a cool idea, but you can get the fastest bike parts pretty early on and since the top speeds aren't really that fast and you'll be traveling with it a lot (especially if you choose to ignore fast travel like I did, I felt it would kind of ruin the point of the game) you really don't get much chance to experiment with others. Money can go from very tight to not at all a concern very quickly with how the item prices are balanced and how easy some high value items are to get once you find them. There's probably more I'm forgetting, but all of this to say that the game really feels like it could have used a few more months in development.
Despite the negatives, you've already seen my very high rating for this, and while the problems with it make me sad that it's not just a tiny bit better it's still not quite like anything else.