wordbending

The Elaine With Back Pain 🏳️‍⚧️

@wordbending

#1 Alphys Stan

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wordbending
@wordbending
austin
@austin
mousefountain
@mousefountain

The narrative work in Sable was really underrated. The side stories are playful but always grounded in the world and it has such a consistently gentle and humane tone. I think that's so interesting for a big adventure type game in a fantasy setting!

It was such a smart move to make it a coming of age story about a character trying to find their place in the world because it dovetails so well with an open world structure and provides a hook for getting the player to engage and be curious.

mousefountain
@mousefountain

To expand on that a little, I wish we had more games that put you in an immersive setting where the goal was to explore and learn about it, rather than master it. Games in this space tend to have a kind of pioneer mentality or else hang a lot on big, hard to relate to genre tropes like unlocking your hidden powers, building up to facing a big evil thing, prophecies. etc. It's refreshing to have something with fun worldbuilding and a wide horizon feeling that's also focused on something like: 'what's it like to live here.'

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in reply to @mousefountain's post:

Ragisufle
@Ragisufle

I need to give Sable another try because the 5 hours I played it, I LOVED what the game promised: go into the world, try a bunch of jobs, and figure out what you want to be, come back to commit to it.

But I really, really didn't like the execution: it only remember a bunch of barely disguised fetch quests with little flavor; weighted down by a 100 tiny awkward cinematics where ingame events would have worked. I was hoping for an exploration that was more specific, more arcane or more playful - and more alive. It felt like the game had blown its initial scope to become a 'proper game' but didn't know what to do with all that space and playing time.

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in reply to @mousefountain's post:

mousefountain
@mousefountain

Yes! My favourite! I think it really threads the needle of not making them just like everyone else but also not exotifying them. Like, there are these people, they and their way of life is very different from ours and that's cool and worthy.

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vforvalensa
@vforvalensa

Oh my god yes. I've been kicking around a concept for a while about how that game's choice to have no combat or anything that can harm you works really well to portray the cultural practice of the coming of age journey since the narrative and the mechanics both reaffirm the idea that the journey is an experience that allows the culture's young people to explore the world and themselves in a way that is ultimately safe

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gryme
@gryme

i'm constantly thinking about the machinists in that game and how their whole relationship with technology is so different from ours where "progress" seems to be the only thing that matters.
the game also just hits the open world stuff really well, like the moment when you leave the gate of the starting area and that japanese breakfast song plays is forever seared into my brain.

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