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Sable Turns Five with a Design Works Reprint
Five years ago today, Sable was released into the world. It was a culmination of many talented people supporting us on a long journey from viral twitter gifs to announcing on stage at E3, hitting the front page of Reddit, through to award nominations and wins. It’s not an exaggeration to say it changed my life in many ways and I’m so grateful for it.
To celebrate, Lost In Cult has agreed to reprint the Sable Design Works in the coming months - keep an eye out for future updates from us in your inbox or sign up on Lost In Cult's site directly.
When we first started the project, it came from a place of ‘why not?’ - we’d spent three years working in my parents' shed, scrimping away money from contract work and mobile game projects that never came close to breaking even - games that we learnt a lot from but never felt like they tapped into our interests or why we ever wanted to make games to begin with. Sable was never meant to be a success, it was just what we wanted to make and I hope that comes through.
On launch day, I had no idea what to expect. Game launches are always fraught periods, times where you go through a lot of emotional ups and downs. The negative things people say have a habit of getting caught in the nooks of your brain in a way the positive things don’t seem to. We came in very hot, we had no time to playtest the game outside of our internal and publishing teams and with a narrative exploration game, it’s very hard to test yourself. There is no way to surprise yourself, no way to truly emulate the feeling of playing the game or navigating an environment when you have laid it out yourself. The closest I get to feeling what a player experiences is when I forget that something is in the game as I play it again.
All I truly knew is I’d left nothing out there, I had put all I could into the project and I could be proud of that. Though I still get a knot in my stomach when I watch someone else play the game, I am also able to be very proud of the response we got, not only the critical reflections but every email, private message or conversation I have with someone who says that the game impacted them, some in extremely profound ways, makes that process worth the travails.
I’m also really proud of the Sable Design Works I got to make with Lost In Cult. It was a lot of work to collate and write up all the material for the book but it’s been an amazing way to show people who don’t play games the worlds I am obsessively living in over years and years. I also hope it’ll be a great time capsule of that time of my life.
I wanted to include three fantastic pieces about the game that stuck with me over the years. There have been many many kind words written about the game, but I thought I’d limit it to only three to keep things concise:
Natalie Clayton