I started playing Sable last month and immediately had a great time:

Sable is extremely cool, hits you right at the start with dope visuals and immediately feels super satisfying to play

— fisch (@foxtrot_j) December 23, 2021

notable for feeling breath of the wild inspired but also extremely original. and michelle zauner absolutely kills it with the soundtrack

— fisch (@foxtrot_j) December 23, 2021

After posting that, I was a little concerned I’d end up regretting it if the game didn’t live up to its first half hour. Fortunately, the rest of the game absolutely delivers, and I think my early observation about Sable drawing from Breath of the Wild helps explain a lot of why that is.

A common gameplay loop in moden open world games is:

• Climb to a tall vantage point
• See something cool
• Walk, fly, or ride over to it
• Repeat

Breath of the Wild didn’t invent this style of play – I think the earliest I can remember seeing it is Skyrim, which combined big variation in altitudes with huge draw distances that previously weren’t technically feasible in older games. But Skyrim’s game design emphasizes fast travel and objective markers too much to really make the exploration loop a core part of the gameplay.

But Breath of the Wild makes a few decisions that make exploration a much bigger part of the gameplay experience: fast travel is harder (and you can’t take your horse with you), you place markers on the map using your Sheikah Slate as a scope, and you can climb things. Climbing in particular is a huge deal for exploration, because it makes scaling tall things a natural part of gameplay instead of a hack to avoid hiking on sections of mountain trails.

Sable borrows a lot from Breath of the Wild’s exploration loop: your character can climb, you have a hover-bike that fills the same niche as Breath of the Wild’s horse, and your character has a “Gliding Stone” that allows you to float gently down from tall heights.

But Sable takes a bet that Breath of the Wild doesn’t; the titular main character has no health bar, and no enemies to fight. Exploration – climbing a tall thing, spotting other stuff, and exploring that stuff – is the game.

Two elements of the game help reinforce the focus on exploration, without really fundamentally changing the dynamics of how the game plays. The obvious one is Chum eggs, an in-game resource that you find in odd spots all over the map, which can be redeemed to increase your stamina bar, in turn making exploration easier. I suspect that Chum eggs are borrowed from Breath of the Wild’s Korok seeds, and because they show up at viewpoints and in odd parts of the map they give the player a direct reward for following the exploration loop.

The second element is the quest system; in Sable, you meet other characters who will give you quests that usually involve going to some location and either finding or doing something – pretty standard RPG fare. This helps give structure to the game by giving you things to do as you travel around the map, but because Sable has no main story quest the onus is still on the player to find characters who will give them quests.

Combining those two things, I ended up wandering between the sections of the map, first finding cartographers who would sell me detailed maps of the local area, then finding populated areas to get people to give me quests, then spreading out and exploring the countryside both to finish quests and find as many Chum eggs as I could. It took me around ten hours to explore the entire map, and I covered a lot of ground without ever feeling like I was grinding or bored with the gameplay.

I expected the lack of main story to be a drag, but it had the opposite effect. In a lot of open world games, the race to save the world pulls you away from doing the things in the game that are actually fun, and you end up in incongruous situations where everyone is yelling at you to go kill the dragon and save the city while you wander around the countryside picking flowers because you know that, in the game, the dragon and the city aren’t going anywhere until you get to the right place and start the right quest.

This is easy to leave as a side note but I think it’s actually a really core part of what makes Sable work; slow and playful exploration isn’t just part of the gameplay, it’s a core theme in the story. Sable is, after all, a coming of age story: in the game, your character is completing her “gliding”, a time when young people depart from their home to explore, do tasks, and decide their vocation by choosing a mask at the end of the game. The exploration loop works so well because of that ludonarrative synergy, where both the player and the protagonist are traveling the game’s world for the first time and observing without being expected to change it.

If you play Breath of the Wild, you’ll probably notice that it has a little bit for everyone; great exploration, good combat for people who like to fight in games, new lore for the Zelda nerds, and lots of little annoying tasks to do for sicko completionists. In comparison, Sable feels like a game that focuses just on the openness of open world gameplay. It’s a delightful experience and playing it reminded me of how glad I am that we have independent studios willing to take a risk on making this kind of game.