REVIEW – Indie developer Shedworks’ open world game Midden explores what it’s like to grow up, so it makes sense that you’d be in control of a teenage character. She’s on the road, and she’s no superhero. It’s a bootleg Journey, you could say, but it’s different; not everyone will be impressed by the visual style (true, it’s also a rip-off of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild).

Embark on a unique and unforgettable journey and guide Sable through her Gliding; a rite of passage that will take her across vast deserts and mesmerizing landscapes, crowned by the remains of spaceships and ancient wonders.

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So it’s a ritual game, as our heroine leaves her clan, discovers Midden, and along the way discovers what she will do later. It makes for an exciting and uncertain experience at the same time, with not much to offer in Sable. If something doesn’t have a metal surface, it can be climbed, but this requires the stamina so typical for the genre. The other means of transportation is an energy bubble, which can be used to glide to nearby locations. Later, a hover bike and a compass are added to the toolbox, and it’s only at the very beginning of the game that the tasks are set, from where the Shedworks product lets go. All we’re told to do is go to Burnt Oak Station, because that’s where Machinist will give us our first mission. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild was mentioned at the very beginning, and for good reason: the world unfolds in a similar way, essentially leaving it up to you to decide where to go and when, but it should be said that it can take two and a half hours to get to the end, but it can take several times that if you want to leave no stone unturned.

This way the experience of our trip around Midden is more apparent, as it can be quite atmospheric to turn the bike on and yourself off. The customizable and upgradeable bike is reminiscent of the anime Akira, as you can give it a bit of personality. Over time, you can get maps of parts of the world and see where and what you can find, but you also have to find the wreckage of the abandoned spaceship, for example, which is necessary to learn more about the backstory and the people on the planet. This is combined with a perhaps too minimalistic cel-shaded style, which either appeals because of its comic-like style or is rather distracting. Regardless of which region is otherwise unique and distinctive, the audience is left with this divisive feeling. This can be made better or worse by Sable’s directly restrained animation style, as it is not as fluid and dynamic as everything else around it. Artistically, it’s an interesting choice, but it can be bothersome later on.

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The world of Sable is not very lively, and this is one of its negatives, because the fact is that in many places there are no direct signs of life, and where there are others, the overall picture feels a bit sterile. The NPCs either don’t move at all or hardly move at all, but beyond that you can hardly communicate with them. In this aspect, the game has been thoroughly neglected. There is not much in the way of increasing your stamina, so it sometimes feels childishly amateurish to try to get to certain buildings when you should be going in that direction. You can get the feeling that you have to stick to the goal like a mule or you’ll get stuck. And that’s not good for the big picture, which includes getting three badges for a particular job and then getting the mask that goes with it.

You can be a guard in a large city, a bartender, a scavenger for valuable items, or one of the staff members overseeing the decaying technology. Some things are fairly easy to get, others aren’t difficult, and of course there’s a decision to be made at the end, but it’s a far cry from the level of excitement that the first Life is Strange installment gave us back in October 2015. There, someone (or several people) really had to be sacrificed at the very end of the story, regardless of what we had done up to that point, but here there is no such big impact to report. The soundtrack is not too bad, but of course it won’t carry Sable on its back.

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Sable gets a six and a half out of ten because it’s an average game, and so it’s no surprise that two years after its release, Sony has included it in the PlayStation Plus Essential 2023 December offer (that’s the only reason this bunch of characters is written; it was the decision of the management, the perpetrator of the character set is not willing and not interested in even looking at the site beyond), although it could have chosen bigger titles for subscribers who have already spent a lot of money on the service (which in some regions was as much as a 30% price increase. ..). So it’s not bad, but we can easily find something better.

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Publisher: Raw Fury

Developer: Shedworks

Style: Action RPG

Release: September 23, 2021.