The Most Relaxing Open-World Game Ever Is Free On PC For A Limited Time

Exploration in games often feels like a way to make the world less mysterious. Climb the tower so you can fill your map with location markers. Follow a waypoint so you can see what’s waiting for you at the end of a predefined path. Every once in a while, though, a game comes along that nails the true feeling of exploration, and one of the best to ever do it is now free on PC for a limited time.

Sable made quite an impression when it first launched in 2021. Its eye-catching visual style calls to mind a version of The Wind Waker set in a vast desert rather than a boundless ocean, and its soundtrack by the band Japanese Breakfast garnered it even more attention. What really makes Sable special isn’t anything on the surface, but the feeling of discovery and growth that only comes after hours of roaming through its gorgeous, serene world.

Sable’s slow pace and the originality of its world make it feel timeless. It’s lost nothing in the few years since its release, and now is a great chance to check it out if you haven’t already. From June 26 to July 3, Sable is free to claim on the Epic Games Store.

At the outset of Sable, you’re leaving home for your Gliding, a rite of passage that will see you explore the surrounding desert and decide where you want to spend the rest of your life now that you’ve reached adulthood. That means hopping on the back of your hoverbike, heading out into the desert, and just sort of vibing it out for as long as you’d like. You’ll run into guilds of engineers, cartographers, and explorers, get a taste of what life is like for them, and see if you can prove you’re cut out for the jobs they’re devoted to. There’s no combat in Sable — there’s hardly even conflict — and the challenges posed by the guilds are more about testing how you want to spend your time than whether you can survive them. Whenever you decide you’ve found your place in the world, you just head back home to tell your people and that’s that.

Sable is a testament to the idea that the journey is worth more than the destination. You’re not going to save the world or even reach any dramatic conclusions about it by finishing the game. Instead, it’s a personal story about heroine Sable coming of age and seeing for the first time just how much possibility there is beyond her hometown. It’s a journey that should feel familiar to most players, a somewhat more fantastical version of finishing school and suddenly finding the guardrails that have defined your life to that point falling away. You can look for a job, head to the big city, or just drift for a while and figure out what calls to you, only in Sable, your safety and how you’re supposed to afford life on your own aren’t pressing concerns.

Wandering a vast desert may not sound like the most relaxing activity, but that freedom from worry makes it so. Maybe you’ll dedicate yourself to completing climbing challenges or try to solve the puzzles scattered through the wastes. Maybe you’ll collect scrap and try to build the ultimate hoverbike. There’s a chance of failing at any of these things — not a game over screen and a forced restart, but simply not accomplishing what you set out to do — but no matter what, you won’t be punished for not hitting some set-in-stone objective. The sense of relaxation in Sable comes from knowing that you’re truly in control of how you spend your time, and what you get out of it is up to you.

It certainly helps that the hoverbike that makes this journey possible is a lot of fun to control. Cruising across the dunes feels somewhat like skating or snowboarding, and customizing your craft can turn it from leisurely to speedy, adding a sense of momentum to your ambling. Even when you don’t know quite where you’re headed, the hoverbike is a joy to ride that always makes the journey feel worthwhile.

Sable is available now on PlayStation, Xbox, and PC. It’s free on Epic Games until July 3.