In the desert of Atacama, a giant hand, 11 meters tall, reaches out from the sand. Its presence, along the Pan-American Highway in a remote section of Chile, seems inexplicable. The area is a wilderness of salt flats, so bone-dry that NASA have used it as a test location for Mars expeditions. It is a place that appears largely devoid of life, bar the strange concrete hand of some submerged being, grasping towards the light.

The Mano del Desierto statue was created by the artist Mario Irarrázabal. Its meaning is intriguingly ambiguous. If it was dedicated to an individual or an event, it would still attract attention but its power is amplified by its mysterious quality. A traveller chancing upon it can project or interpret all manner of things. The awe or the melancholy they might find in viewing it is precisely down to the fact it is an unresolved puzzle.

Above all, Sable has a curious quality of seeming utterly alien yet strangely familiar. This was an alien world I had not seen before and yet there were recognizable fragments. There was the clean line fantasia-style of the French comic book artist Moebius , the light trail motion of Akira, the real-life stone ruins of Khmer, Egyptian, and Mesoamerican civilisations, and the eerie immersive environments of games from Another World to Journey.

That same sense of unresolved wonder kept bringing me back to Sable. When I first saw the then-unnamed project from Shedworks’ Gregorios Kythreotis in 2017, during an event at London’s V&A Museum where we discussed game environments as we played them, it appeared meditative, patient, and artful. It was unafraid to pause in contemplation. There was space to breath within it and yet it had none of the tedium associated with the more lethargic walking simulators. Instead, it seemed to glide in a smooth fluid way, more akin to classic racing games like Wipeout or the speeders of Star Wars. It was exploration with velocity and without overblown pyrotechnics. Since then, Kythreotis has unveiled the game to the world as Sable , with a release date set for later this year.

For Kythereotis, the feeling of discovery that has driven humanity to travel for thousands of years is the core of Sable. “This sense of discovery doesn’t just apply to places either, it's something we think applies to characters and culture too. Games, in particular, are so much about learning, whether it is learning pure mechanical systems, learning how to solve a puzzle or what a particular narrative is.”

“There's definitely a moment when you see, say, a mysterious silhouette on the distant horizon, where it could be anything and you find your curiosity piqued,” says Kythreotis. “This is the moment that we've tried to gear the design of the game around as much as possible. Beyond that it's about hopefully making the destination worth the journey and not a disappointment.”

Crucial to its appeal is Sable’s ability to raise as-yet unanswered questions. What are the stories behind the spaceship-wrecks and the colossal skeletons in the desert? Are the streaks of light across the sky shooting stars or something darker? What was the origin of the stone relics and ruins, reminiscent of the Mano del Desierto, left behind by earlier cultures? These touches give the game a multi-layered and far-reaching feel, as if there were vast deep territories not just of space but also time, just out of reach and out of sight. While we’ve grown used to colossal breadth, in terms of open world games, the insinuation of depth, through the creation of half-buried histories, is a very different skill.

The vast desert setting of Sable offered atmosphere, a sense of the infinite, and, in a practical sense, the ability to turn limitations into advantages. “Having such a small team meant we needed a space that we could populate in a believable way but still let us play with scale and evoke a sense of loneliness,” Kythreotis notes, “so having a lot of sparse areas wouldn't feel dissonant or take someone out of the experience. The thought of driving around on a hoverbike and exploring monuments that could be vast distances away felt really exciting.

This sense of discovery has, of course, long been paramount in gaming, and in art more broadly. You could make the case that many 3D exploration games are descendants of Caspar David Friedrich’s Romantic painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818) in terms of perspective and seeking out the unknown. There is poetry in the dark places. Perhaps poetry is the dark places, as the Romantic poet Keats defined it in his concept of ‘Negative Capability,’ “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

The most effective games of this kind are those which combine the allure or dread of the unknown with traces of iconography from the real past. This anchors what might otherwise seem too fanciful, while tapping into deep-seated cultural memories. The ruins of the isometric puzzle and exploration game Pavilion resonate because they are assembled from centuries-old architectural styles, via the dark symbolist prism of Arnold Böcklin paintings such as his Isle of the Dead series (1880-1886). Likewise, games as disparate as Dark Souls and Monument Valley have absorbed and transformed existing architecture from gothic cathedrals in Milan to stepwells in Jaipur.

"We all live in a culture that is simultaneously futuristic and ancient." - Meg Jayanth

Even ruins are subject to the changes of time and context. History is rarely inert but rather a series of shifting layers. With sites like Angkor Wat, in the Cambodian jungle, the form and function of the place was transformed and repurposed over generations and centuries. In medieval times, the Colosseum in Rome was even used as a stone quarry for new buildings. The past, in other words, is still with us and still evolving.

“We all live in a culture that is simultaneously futuristic and ancient,” Meg Jayanth, writer on Sable, points out. Having worked on 80 Days and Sunless Sea, she has experience creating worlds as multi-layered as the one around us. “I mean, think about London: it's both the London Eye and it's Westminster Abbey. I live in East London for most of the year, and it's this weirdly modern landscape that only makes sense when we think about how it was bombed during the Blitz in World War II and rebuilt.”

Jayanth hopes to bring this style of layered history to Sable. “At the moment, we're looking at something as ancient as time as a desert encampment and we're turning it over and remaking it from something familiar into something that makes sense for Sable's specific place and time. It's a back and forth, with futuristic norms and technology influencing architecture and environment and all of that feeding back into narrative thinking.”