[Played on Xbox Series S.]

I really wanted to like this. I did! And I feel bad about the way it ended, like a relationship with a sweet girl who you ultimately just don’t match up that well with, if that girl also asked you to do annoying fetch quests for beetles.  

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I know I’m going to get some shit for this, but I haven’t finished Sable, and I don’t know if I ever will. That stings a bit – the game is gorgeous, and has an interesting premise, with your character exploring a beautiful desert world on the way to finding her own path in life. The dialogue is artsy but not irritably so, and, again, those graphics. Wow.

Minor quibbles first – the character animation is a little choppy, particularly when moving around on foot, and your stamina bar is woefully tiny to begin with. These can all be dealt with (by, respectively, ignoring it and upgrading your stamina).

I was having fun meandering around the starting village, meeting its masked residents and figuring out what this society’s whole, you know, deal was, when I encountered my first red flag. A character who was ostensibly supposed to present me with a new jetbike instead offered up an old, half-broken one, with dialogue that heavily implied a fetch quest (albeit one cloaked in the guise of a discovery-oriented trek through a distant structure).

Hooray.

Thankfully, this quest wasn’t half bad – just a quick jaunt through some sandswept ruins to snag a new item that acts something like Breath of the Wild’s glider. Cool. Back to town on my shitty bike. There was probably some world-building in there I missed out on, but I was anxious to get out into the wider world and explore.

Upon my return to town, I spoke to the chief of the camp, who informed me – to my great delight – that she’ll help me build a new jetbike to replace the shitty one! All it’ll take is…three more fetch quests.[1]

OK, I thought. Fine. I can deal with these – they seem pretty straightforward, and might lead to interesting exploration opportunities. And – as I may or may not have mentioned – the graphics are really pretty.

So I drove my shitty bike out to some sort of…dam? I think it was a dam. It looked, at the very least, to be dam-adjacent in its construction. There was probably some backstory there that I didn’t care enough to parse out.[2] After some cursory platforming, I snagged the googaw from the whatsit and went back to the other side of town to raid a wrecked spaceship for the second MacGuffin I needed.

My heart sank a bit when the game cheerily informed me that there was nothing at all useful in the shipwreck. I meandered around for a while nonetheless and found an audio log (my favorite thing since stubbed toes), before traipsing outside with my proverbial tail between my legs.

Then some little kid (I think it was a kid; it’s hard to tell with the masks all the characters are wearing) scampered up to me and informed me that they had, in fact, stolen the item I needed from the ship, because fuck you, you thought you got to have fun in this game?

The cackling shithead thereafter informed me that they were happy to give me the part they’d stolen…if I caught three beetles for them. The smug little twerp also informed me that they stole the part for no real reason other than to be a pain in my ass, specifically, because…fuck you, again, I guess?

The game then told me to go back to town and ask around for advice on how to catch beetles.

It was at this point that I said, “Nope. Fuck you,” quit out, and uninstalled the game.[3] I don’t have time for that bullshit, and neither should you. Such bald-faced disrespect for the player’s time – throwing arbitrary, boring hurdles in the way for no real discernible reason besides dicking the player around – goes a long way towards hamstringing a title that could otherwise be enjoyable. Here’s an idea: rework the opening quests to be more streamlined – I’m thinking more along the lines of the first adventure I went on, to get the floaty bullshit stone – and excise the in-your-face fetch quests, particularly the ones that add unnecessary steps just because some juvenile shitstain wants the player to go find them beetles. The game even narrates your character considering beating the kid up and taking the part you need right off the bat! It was like the game developers were pointing and laughing at me while waiting to see how much of my time I was willing to waste.[4] There’s probably a lot of interesting exploration to be done in Sable’s wider world, but it sure as hell isn’t worth the beetles.

I’m not going to give this one a traditional score, because I, you know, didn’t play through it all the way (and don’t have any plans to). That said, it’s on Game Pass, and it is really pretty. I can’t tell you not to check it out, if only for a few minutes, and just for the artwork. If you can make it through the beetles, there might be something fun on the other end. Alternatively, there might just be more beetles.

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[1] I’m defining “fetch quest” somewhat loosely here, but at the end of the day, you have to go somewhere the questgiver tells you to go, fetch something, and bring it back. Thus, “fetch quest”.

[2] You may notice a theme developing.

[3] Then I patted myself on the back for taking a stand for something. You don’t wake up in the morning knowing you’re going to be a hero; sometimes it just happens.

[4] Joke’s on you, motherfuckers! Instead of spending five minutes figuring out how to catch virtual beetles, I spent two hours writing and editing a takedown piece about the concept.