![Jerp plays Sable [demo] - Well, the dialogue's charming, at least... (2021-06-19)](/images/yt/yx/jerp-plays-sable-demo-well-the-dialogues-charming-at-least-8j-1.jpg)
Jerp plays Sable [demo] - Well, the dialogue's charming, at least... (2021-06-19)
1I didn’t really know much about Sable going into this demo outside of it apparently being a well-regarded upcoming game with an interesting art style and something to do with traveling on a hoverbike of some sort.
The game begins with your character returning to their camp to begin a quest known as the Gliding, where you acquire (or I suppose, unlock) the ability to concentrate and slow your descent while falling. It seems that jumping from heights is a common pastime for your clan and part of their coming of age.
Much of the game’s over-arching story doesn’t appear to be introduced to any real degree in the demo, outside of there being some sort of post-apocalyptic scenario where you’re scavenging technology left behind by a former civilization. Instead, there’s a focus on smaller dialogue moments and advancing through a series of somewhat bland fetch quests. While the game does have some interesting world elements and presentation, the pacing of the demo could be excruciatingly slow.
The game running at 30fps was a constant bother mostly as it makes the camera feel pretty sluggish. To be clear, I’m not calling out the game’s animation style which could be likened to the recent Arc System Works games which use non-interpolated (or at least less-interpolated) animation to mimic an animated style. In fact, Arc System Works had mentioned that they decided on a fully smooth camera in their GDC video where they discuss the initial implementation of that style for Guilty Gear Xrd ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhGjCzxJV3E ). I later found out that there was an option to remove the frame rate restriction but I hear it causes a few issues and causes the game’s character animations to have issues (is it actually tied to frame rate rather than delta time?).
The demo really needed to show some additional variety or more interesting gameplay situations to grab me - so far the majority of what I’ve seen that’s interesting was some of the smaller, moment to moment dialogue and introspection which was charming, if sparse.
Sable will be available on PC: https://www.shed-works.co.uk/sable
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