Gliding Through Self-Discovery: How Japanese Breakfast Guided My Procellous Journey With ‘Sable’
Sable captured the hearts, minds, and imaginations of indie game fans everywhere upon its announcement back in 2018. The game features lulling landscapes of barren desert, lurching mountain peaks, and an earthy palette of warm colors that shift with the time of day. Sable is a game about exploration and discovery, both in terms of the expansive landscape ripe with opportunities to discover secrets and hidden areas, and in terms of personal identity – determining where you best fit within the many conflicting demands of adult life in a complex world. This lofty promise is masterfully executed throughout Sable’s flexible runtime, and I found my time gliding around its world to be one of the most valuable and intimate gaming experiences of the past year.
Above all, I was drawn to Sable for the idiosyncratic cell shaded art style that feels instantly recognizable from the industry’s often drab attempts at realism. When I launched the demo during a Steam event last year, I was surprised at the sharpness of Sable’s writing, as well as its Breath of the Wild style climbing and stamina mechanics. Sable embodies an ethos of exploration that I rarely encounter in games due to the ubiquity of pathfinding landmarks, mini-maps, and other efforts to streamline open world games. With Sable, there is a map and a compass with which you can set waypoints and streamline your traversal into linear objectives, but Sable never made me feel the need to rush or accomplish anything in a specified order. Instead, it simply kept teasing my interest, inviting me to see what distant silhouette was hinted at on my horizon.
Procrastinating Sable For Musical Whims
It’s an open secret at Epilogue that I’ll play anything that looks pretty, and to that effect, Sable was another case of judging a book by its lustrous cover. I knew I wanted to get my hands on this unique blend of an experience, but the moment I was sold was at Geoff Keighley’s Summer Games Fest 2021, in which the composer for Sable’s soundtrack, Japanese Breakfast, performed an indelible and powerful version of their song, “Glider.” Strangely enough, in retrospect, I remember not immediately falling for Michelle Zauner’s tinny timbre, but the presentation of Glider was so beautiful, unique, and powerfully delivered that it stuck with me. Sable already had my impulsive curiosity, but Japanese Breakfast captured my lasting attention as well.
Soon, “Glider” appeared in my YouTube suggestions of recommended music, and I found myself putting it on when I wanted to lose myself in an ambient headspace, remembering this game that was yet to be released. As the weeks whittled on, I poked into Japanese Breakfast’s discography and I fell in love. What struck me as a compelling live performance was only enhanced by the studio versions of their music, and when Bandcamp Friday rolled around, I purchased their most recent album, Jubilee, which has not left my weekly rotation ever since.
But then Sable released and I got swept into other games that launched around the same fall 2021 window: Lost Judgment, Life is Strange: True Colors, SkateBIRD, and the list goes on. Despite my musical obsession with Japanese Breakfast continuing, Sable was forgotten like an oasis drying up in the desert. I started viewing Sable as a game I’d wait until I was in the mood to play, hoping the music would carry my interest along, but that moment didn’t arrive until late December on my winter break.
Jubilee‘s Sonic Distractions
In the interim, Jubilee had gotten its melodic hooks into me. The musical arc of Jubilee is something that brought constant comfort on sleepless nights or frigid winter mornings. When Zauner’s voice ascends into the chorus of “Paprika” with, “How’s it feel to be at the center of magic, to linger in tones and words?” I feel like I’m being swept up on an introspective journey before it crashes back down, “But alone, it feels like dying,” strangely reminding me lyrically of “Glider,” which shares a parallel line about the feeling of flying. Their song, “Kokomo, IN,” vocalizes anxious emotional impulses like, “Manifesting like the fear of an oven left on,” little turns of phrase that give me just enough of a mental visual to chew on while I listen.
One of the songs that kept me returning to Jubilee on the daily instead of starting Sable was “Posing in Bondage,” an initial favorite with an evocative music video performance. What initially sounds like a rhythmic BDSM kink personified, “Closeness, proximity, I needed, bondage,” evolves under scrutiny to manifest some unspoken trauma: “When the world divides into two people, those who have felt pain, and those who have yet to, and I can’t unsee it, although I would like to.” The album’s closing track, “Posing for Cars,” touches on an idea that has haunted me for upwards of a decade: “They say that time, it is the only certainty, but it’s been one o’clock for hours. Oh, the day is long, untangling.” And I feel the platonic hand of the clock ticking.
With every day, I grew closer to Japanese Breakfast, and paradoxically further from Sable. But on every morning walk, every hum-along shower, I kept juggling the notion of playing it against other well acclaimed 2021 releases that were similarly untouched: Unpacking, Inscryption, The Forgotten City, and so on. For inexplicable reasons, Sable kept collecting dust on my digital bookshelf, waiting to be played.
Crying in H Mart and Emotional Catharsis
As my winter break began, I suddenly had two weeks to myself in which I could catch up on all sorts of media I had been piling up with neglect throughout the fall months. Thus, I found myself cracking open the impulsively purchased Crying in H Mart, a heartfelt memoir written by Michelle Zauner of Japanese Breakfast, exploring the complicated relationship she had severed and reforged with her mother. Zauner’s book describes her childhood resentment and rejection of her Korean heritage and how that antagonism suddenly transformed under the threat of her mother’s diagnosis with terminal cancer. I picked up H Mart one Saturday afternoon, thinking I’d read a few chapters, and suddenly I was closing the book next to a pile of tissues, my face puffy from sobbing for a hundred-odd pages.
Crying in H Mart shook me to my core in the way that a book hasn’t done since I finished Mia Violet’s Yes, You Are Trans Enough, another memoir – albeit about a completely different emotionally turbulent experience. While I have no immediate reference point with which to connect to the precise descriptions of Korean food recipes and cultural mores, Zauner’s creative writing made me feel embedded in this experience such that I felt like I was sharing a part of the pain that my excerpt from “Posing in Bondage” above captures so clearly. And though there may be some superficial and cultural boundaries drawn around Zauner’s own story, I saw myself in her writing more often than I didn’t, particularly in terms of the complicated closeness towards her overbearing mother, her estranged stiffness with her distant father, an irresistible impulse towards artistic expression as a means of building a career, and much more.
By the end of H Mart, the prolonged suffering of bargaining with the impending loss of one’s only reference point in the world – the guidance of one’s mother – left me speechless, inescapably drawn back into Jubilee once more. I felt like I needed to make something as a grief object in response to the book. And that’s when the song, “Be Sweet,” hit me completely differently. I have little reason to imagine that the song is in any way about Zauner and her mother, but fresh off the pages of H Mart, all I could hear was heartbreak. What could be first read as an ultimatum to a spurning lover suddenly felt like an empathetic exercise that parents must constantly grapple with: the experience of ungratefulness and even rejection by one’s own children, only for the inevitable phone call when an emergency arises. It’s difficult to pin down logically why I was suddenly hearing Zauner’s grief towards her mother in this song, but I couldn’t remove that layer once I heard it.
I started tuning up my guitar. For the first time in a few years, I started learning a song – “Be Sweet” – and resolved to get down the slightly awkward and unfamiliar chord progression before returning to work. Days went by, and I finally sat down one Sunday to hit record. My cat was determined to meow during the first dozen or so takes, but eventually she quieted down long enough for me to pluck my way through a stripped down cover of this otherwise upbeat song. When I stopped the recording, it was time to play Sable.
Readers of Epilogue may be unfamiliar with my history as a musician – the career path I had decided upon when I was wrapping up high school, one which I promptly abandoned when falling in love with philosophy in later years. Picking up the guitar felt like putting on an old mask, one that no longer fully belonged but nonetheless one that felt appropriately nostalgic. When I finished a take I was happy with – without giving into perfectionism, at least – I uploaded the cover to a place where my friends could listen. While the video was processing, I pulled my controller off the charging dock.
Deciding It Was Finally Time To Play Sable
I do not think it’s meaningful to discuss why Sable impacted me so greatly without retracing this circuitous journey towards sitting down with the game, because Sable’s titular protagonist undergoes a journey that I cannot help but parallel with my own. I bought a copy of Sable at a period of my life in which I was briefly undergoing an existential reevaluation of some key aspects of my life, notably the kind of future I want to carve out for myself. Towards the beginning of the winter months, I found myself in conversation with someone who provoked me to think about whether my chosen career was, in fact, the most aligned to my skill sets, interests, and sources of daily meaning in life. I broke down crying one day during my break because I felt ill fitted to any of my ongoing projects in life. And while I pitifully lamented the state of things, I started to write about the future that I wanted to create. And when I wasn’t writing, I was gliding.
Sable is the first game I played and finished this year. Familiar in origin because of my time completing the demo the year prior, Sable offered initial comfort. I had already done what the demo was asking before, and the strange comfort of more efficiently breezing through a story enabled me to get back in the groove of the game quite quickly. Completing the opening ritual once again, assembling a glider of Sable’s own, and embarking out beyond the game’s initial area, the Ibex Camp, was cathartic in a strange way. The ambient ambling, the familiarity, and the subtle interweaving tracks of the soundtrack – again, composed by Japanese Breakfast, albeit absent of most of the vocals that make their music so special to me – was comfort food, but for my gaming palate.
Slipping into the comforts of the familiar was its own kind of bliss, but leaving the Ibex Camp to the tune of “Glider” was practically a transcendent experience for me. The world presented itself with endless horizons of yet uncharted territory ripe for discovery. I floated along the sand dunes, wound between rock formations, and arrived at my first makeshift marker of civilization – another camp in which I could speak to adults and tradespeople of varying vocations. I didn’t immediately leave the camp with a new map marker, but I suddenly had an alcove where I could anchor my sense of place in an otherwise unmarked expanse of wilderness. It was time to drift onward, elsewhere.
Soon, I found some almost supernatural wonders: a cave that housed the Queen chum, a sort of antlered glow worm, desert rings of an implied abandoned racing circuit, futuristic puzzle rooms and ancient temples. Sable is simply teeming with the unknown and the mysterious. Unlike so many other open world games, none of the locations in Sable feel copy-pasted. There are no outposts to clear out, there are very few collectibles required for any sort of progression, and though the rewards for seeking out the game’s many masks and trinkets are worth the effort, none of it feels like an obligatory checklist. Whereas so many open world games feel formulaic and stretched, Sable’s quiet world feels fresh with possibility.
Another beloved aspect of Sable that stuck me as a wise – if vulnerable and risky – design choice was the minimalistic approach to story completion. Sable goes off on her journey to collect masks of varying professions: a cartographer, a machinist, a guard, a scrapper, a merchant, and so on. In order to experience the story’s conclusion, Sable must collect at least three of these masks. (There are dozens of masks and several corresponding mask variations to collect.) Many of these masks can be acquired through simple errand-fetching quests or through the natural exploratory urge that this game so masterfully commands. When I encountered any cartographer’s balloon resting atop an area’s apex, I always stopped whatever I happened to be doing to ascend the peak and purchase any maps on hand. This helped reveal new areas of the map but also set me up to receive my first official mask: that of the cartographer. Soon, I had enough to finish the story at any point I pleased.
Better the Mask
As a result of this open-ended and player driven design philosophy, some players might drift towards the credits quite a bit sooner than others. In my neverending attempt to ensure that I play basically everything I am interested in, I can’t deny that the temptation was there as soon as my quest log in Sable gave me the option to bring the story to its conclusion. I looked wistfully at my map with about three or four unexplored quadrants, and I thought about how much I was enjoying the game. I decided to steer myself towards the Ibex Camp once again and see the credits roll. But never once on the journey back did I think that this conclusion would be the finale of my story, of Sable’s story.
Instead, I arrived back at the camp overwhelmed with emotion. The characters in Sable aren’t so fleshed out that you feel like you know them, but they are written with enough personality and precision that I lamented the reality of having my coming-of-age journey reach its natural conclusion. Sable has to choose her own path in life as she matures into an adult. Like so many of us, she is torn between multiple possibilities for how she can see her life successfully unfolding. This notion of choosing one’s life path represented symbolically as a mask – with all the connotations of personas and identities, authenticity and performance, of the arbitrary designation of one’s social group signified through one’s job class, etc., spoke to me in a way that undoubtedly wouldn’t have if I had played Sable right at release. The distance and space that I gave myself to wait until I was ready to play it, the limited way I played it in coherent little bursts, all contributed to the greater appreciation that I left the experience with.
I ended my run of Sable by choosing the Cartographer’s mask. It was the mask that felt most appropriate for the kind of Sable that I played as. It reflected the values that I had as a player, not to mention that the mask has a quirky animation of ticking like a clockwork machine. But in the same arbitrary way that young people are punted out of high school into adulthood, fully expected to have readily decided a singular linear career path with which to follow for their remaining years, so too is Sable expected to find her own path in a seemingly insignificant span of time. By choosing the Cartographer’s mask, I was gesturing for Sable and myself to keep exploring, charting those unknown possibilities out in the distance. And while I wasn’t convinced that I made the best decision, it was true to how I played Sable during the roughly 11 hours I spent with the game.
How Sable Hit Me At The Right Time
Playing Sable during an existential revaluation was perhaps the greatest way to pair those two experiences. Sable, the character, has to literally choose a mask from which her future self will follow a set life path. This life path will be seen by others as the mask she wears, and her identity – and all its multifaceted complexities – will be reduced to what people see, the facade of her profession. It’s an issue of seeing being in the Heideggerian sense, being-as-noun and being-as-verb, or even being-as-becoming. Playing Sable at a period of my life where I feel uncertain of the various masks with which I wear and which others use to perceive me, Sable’s journey spoke to me in a manner that Japanese Breakfast’s own music and Michelle Zauner’s H Mart did in their respective mediums.
By the time the game started feeding me a few concluding cutscenes, the music took over and I was once again washed in the solace of Japanese Breakfast’s soundtrack. It felt like collapsing in bed after a meaningful, exhausting day. So much of the moment-to-moment experience of Sable was spent in relative silence and ambient world sounds that this final swell of music and vocals brought me to tears. The stunningly delivered conclusion to Sable feels fitting and authentic, peaceful and hopeful in equal measure. The final song, “Better the Mask,” so accurately encapsulates and reflects my experience that I will let the lyrics speak for the emotions that Sable left me pondering:
Something happens every day
Whether not you’re part
No matter if you wait
But if you’re bold and trying to find
Whatever waits, whichever end
You play a part
And if in time you found that you’ve doubled back
Learn to rely on a future you made
In which it gets better.
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