It turns out this may be a regular/semi-regular series. Low-effort posts are enjoyable to write from time to time, and as I’m currently visiting friends in Oklahoma this nicely fits nicely into my schedule.
I forget exactly how I found this game, but it’s likely I did it by poking through some Google or YouTube searches of “Moebius art” (I’m too lazy to do the ligature in searches). Mœbius is probably my favorite artist, and a game based off of his style would be a unique approach to the design language. The gameplay is a bit like Journey—the 2012 game, not the band Journey’s video game from the early 80s—but with dialogue and a little more story.
I would expect Sable to be what it is: open-world exploration and puzzle solving, but there’s no reason you could make any kind of game with this art style. Something horror-based wouldn’t fit, but horror is awful to begin with so I don’t mind the exclusion.
Since it’s a rite of passage story, the series of quests feel meaningful. In a standard RPG they would be sidequests, and they too often in that context feel like the writers’ way of making the player explore the world in finer detail. Sable is a coming-of-age story, and to a young teenager like the namesake protagonist, the world of adults can feel simultaneously pointless and daunting. Everything feels like a Macguffin, and if the narrative and the game mechanics allow you to place yourself in the protagonists role well enough, the “do x and get y then move on to z” is sensible way of storytelling. One way, at least.
2 Comments
Oklahoma????!!!!!
Haha, correct!