Every part of my bike has a story. A stabilizer powered by crystals mined on a storm-stricken plateau, a sleek kit hood I picked up at a market in Eclair, a primitive ancient engine scavenged from a spaceship older than history. It handles like a dream, but at the same time it is a living record. I can imagine my Sable looking at it with nostalgia, even when the adventure becomes a distant memory and thick dust covers the chassis of the old bike.

The shocking debut of developer Shedworks, Sable is an open-world RPG in a style heavily inspired by The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. In fact, Sable is heavily influenced by Zelda, from the stamina bars and free climbing to the musical cues. Shedworks, however, has rejected combat altogether, and the story ignores traditional fantasy adventure. Sable is not here to save the world. She is simply taking the gap year of a lifetime.

There is a rite of passage known as "gliding" among the people of Midden. Leaving home and family behind, the youth spend time on themselves, figuring out what they want to be, literally trying on new faces in the form of masks, before returning home to take on new roles in society. As Sable approaches glide, this ritual becomes the blueprint for the rest of the game. They travel through the desert, performing odd jobs for strangers, earning badges and transforming into new masks.

An hour-long tutorial with the clan Ibexii introduces two essential tools for the journey: one is a gliding stone that, once activated, allows you to float almost indefinitely in a protective bubble (though throwing yourself off a cliff does not carry a fall damage penalty), and the other is a mask that allows you to wear a mask for the first time. When you return from the ritual to get the masks, the nomadic clans have moved on, leaving only you and your motorcycle facing the vast desert.

The desert area of Midden is vast and almost empty. As befits the landscape, your bike glides rather than spins, and is lighter than Destiny's sparrow. The engine whines softly as it floats over the dunes, creaking as it hits rocks. Often awkward, but never obnoxious, it is a playful, somewhat rugged companion reminiscent of the bouncing jeep in Halo.

Its bike is your life, even a little alive in its own right. Sable can whistle to switch between straight ahead mode and strafing (moving freely, albeit slowly, in all directions) and can even jump on her back like a horse to summon a bike to glide toward her. Midden is not as overwhelming in scale as BOTW's Hyrule, but the desert is too vast to traverse on foot. With a bike, you can not only manage that distance, but make it enjoyable.

The more you travel, the more parts you have to customize your bike and the more you can paint it with new color schemes. The bike becomes as personal as the mask, an extension of the same customizable clothing. But while you may find the occasional jacket or engine part on the road, most of the time you'll need a cold hard cut (cash).

You may find train stations, outposts, and towns bustling with people running errands. Everyone around here knows that gliders have a lot of spare time on their hands. What kind of work they do depends on who is asking. A climber may need you to rescue a buddy from a deep well, or a mechanic may order you to fix the local generator. The town guard may involve you in a great chain of investigations where you gather evidence, narrow down the suspects, and then come to your own conclusions.

As a reward for these, you will receive a badge for each of these professions. If you earn three badges of the same type, the mysterious mask caster will present you with a new mask. However, the acquisition of the mask is not always official. Scrap dealers would give me a badge just for turning in junk I found on an abandoned ship, and when I tracked down a single mask, I became a mythical creature. Using their unnatural gaze and local superstition, they would follow cryptic signs around the city to find where the previous owner had hidden the constantly flashing mask.

Much of the sable, however, is enjoyed between spaces. Explore vast ancient spaceships and discover mysterious ruins. Cartographers sit atop towering spires, their maps giving an overview of the land without specific place names. There is an ecosystem of bugs that behave in a variety of ways. You will only interact with these bugs once or twice, but each encounter is unforgettable. More mysterious secrets lie in wait in the wasteland, and the puzzles require a little more brain power to solve. Six hours after clearing the game, I am still trying to figure out the identity of that giant worm (I know it when I see it).

Somehow, I've gotten this far without mentioning a very gorgeous world inspired by French cartoonist Jean "Mobius" Giraud. This is not just cell shading. Shedworks took great care to make every frame feel like it came out of a graphic novel. Every region, every time of day, is given the utmost attention to palette and line weight. Distant landscapes use a muted palette and gentle line work to draw attention to the foreground. Even Sable's animation is time-shifted to give her movements a more jerky, parapara-manga feel.

The only weakness is that at night with certain interiors, the game's palette flattens out and becomes pure line art. There are also places where the implementation of certain shaders struggles, and in the evening, distant mountains become translucent for some reason. Misplaced props, audio bugs, and driving stuttering (which the developer promises to fix within weeks of release) are also reminders that "Sable" is a game made by a handful of people.

But that reality is quickly forgotten as you ride your bike against a bold sunset or climb towering ruins sketched with an illustrator's flair. And while Shedworks builds a fairly expansive open world, Sable is created on a limited scale and feels refreshingly manageable compared to the bloated open worlds of larger games. Every region is just the right size, packing a welcome handful of strange and unique landmarks to discover, while also making you acutely aware of the importance of leaving much of the land empty.

There's a gentle warmth to Sable's world, and you never feel hostile as you wade through plumes of sulfur ash. This warmth extends to the game's writing as well. Not only are the early stages of the game a microcosm of how quests and exploration work in this world, but it also strives to make Ibesii feel like family. The scene where the little kid of the clan (who has stolen one of the engine parts you need) confesses that he was simply afraid you would be gone from the world is heartbreaking.

Sable is, after all, a game that needs space to understand itself. Sable is still a child, and the story sets no stakes beyond understanding who she wants to be. When she talks to the guards and mechanics, she imagines herself in their shoes. More importantly, Sable knows that it doesn't stop when the gliding is over. Gliding is a personal and intimate ritual that everyone in this world has experienced (some more than others). And while some people may be stubborn, and some may see you as a fallback hand, everyone is ultimately rooting for the sable to figure itself out.

Even RPG conventions, like trying on new clothes or choosing how to talk to people, reflect this theme. My sable has literally tried many different faces, from supernatural tricksters to spaceship spelunkers. The game also has fast travel, but I highly recommend not using fast travel.

Before you set out on your journey, your clanmate Hilal gives you some important advice along with a magic glide bubble. There is a lot of talk in the world about ritual and independence, but if you put joy first, the world will be an easier place."

That's Sable for me. There are sites to explore, people to meet, errands to run, all sorts of knick-knacks to collect. But if you want to relax while riding a hoverbike through the pastel-colored desert and listening to Japanese breakfast melodies, that's fine, too.