Sable free on Epic Games Store this week, well worth your time

The next freebie on the Epic Games Store is not just worth your time — it’ll also respect your time. Sable, an open-world exploration game developed by Shedworks and released in 2021, is free now until July 3 and offers a desert to explore from the air-conditioned confines of your own home.

Sable first caught my attention not through its gameplay, but through its soundtrack. Composed by Japanese Breakfast, Sable’s music is full of extremely chill and calming bops, making it the perfect music for writing. After listening to it too many times to count and buying it on vinyl, I figured at some point I needed to check out the game behind the music and dove into Sable myself. What I found is an open world, exploration-focused journey that allows you to enjoy it for as long or as little as you want.

You play as Sable, a young woman who leaves her village to search for and discover what type of life she wants to live. Those answers come in the form of masks. Everyone in the desert world of Sable wears a mask, and those masks exemplify what a person does; some of the masks Sable can acquire include the cartographer’s mask, the machinist’s mask, and the guard’s mask. While the majority of the masks are purely cosmetic, they’re so much more important than just a new style of headgear for Sable; they represent the possible paths her life may take her.

Exploration is the main draw of Sable, and exploring its world rewards you with some of the more fun masks. You’ll find the sandwyrm mask after trudging through the dead husk of a sandwyrm, like you’re Boba Fett taking an afternoon stroll through the Sarlacc pit (except Sable doesn’t have to worry about being swallowed and digested). The orange dome of the whale ship mask is earned through exploring the hulls and wreckages of spaceships scattered around the world of Sable. While climbing rocks and canyons is fun, nothing beats wandering about a derelict ship, making those exploration sections some of my favorites. The game relies on environmental storytelling, not explicitly stating to whom those spaceships belonged or what happened to their people, though audio recordings found deep within the ships offer hints.

Sable grants you the freedom to explore at your own pace. You’ll spend most of the game flying about on Sable’s customizable glider, and the pastel colors and excellent shading of the planet will make you feel like you’re in a comic illustrated by Moebius. The visuals, working in conjunction with the game’s music, offer Sable and its world a personality that many open-world games — and their same-same forests or cities — don’t have.

Perhaps what makes Sable so inviting is its ability to offer you a conclusion at any time. Once Sable has acquired a mask, you can return to her village and initiate the conclusion to her story. Maybe you want her to be a merchant, one of the easier masks to obtain early on, and are ready to leave the world of Sable. Or maybe you want to collect every mask Sable has to offer.

There are some puzzles to solve and standard video game quests to complete, but the bulk of Sable — and the bulk of its appeal — is about enjoying the little moments that comprise its player-guided journey. The game respects your time and will allow you to finish it when you want, meaning you can snag it for free without consigning it to join your ever-growing backlog.

Sable is available for PS5, Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S