I commented on Sable in the GP thread, but I’ll talk about it here now that I’ve finished it (no spoilers).
It took about 16 hours. I got almost all the achievements- I didn’t get one of the masks, partially because it was kind of bugged, and I didn’t want it, anyway. And I didn’t do the collection quest to the end. I got through 4 stages of it, and when there was a fifth, I noped out.
I really liked the game. The aesthetic was great, of course, like an ‘80s euro science-fantasy comic book come to life (though without the usual’ adult’ content), but more than that, the design was great. We were taking on the TTRPG thread a few months back about an essay Vincent Baker wrote, that he included this Ursula K LeGuin quote:
Conflict is one kind of behavior. There are others, equally important in any human life, such as relating, finding, losing, bearing, discovering, parting, changing.
and you know? That feels like the guiding design principle of this game. The game focuses on all those things (some more than others, of course), and leaves out conflict (except perhaps the protagonist’s internal monologe, occasionally).
It isn’t perfect, of course. The quest design is mostly simplistic, as are most of the puzzles. The characters all have nice personalities, as far as they go… which is not very. And yeah, there’s bugs. Nothing truly game-breaking, but they can be confusing and/or annoying- a lot of the bugs are related to menus, mostly buying and selling, but for a while I had problems coloring the parts of my bike. The framerate hitches. Riding the bike can be goofy, and whistling for it basically didn’t work at all. But again, those were all just minor annoyances.
I’d love to see what the team can do to expand this whole concept and world. Learning how their society works, and the history of the people on the planet was really neat.
