SANABI

I went into SANABI expecting a kinetic grappling toy with a thin revenge plot wrapped around it. What I got was something that sat with me for days after the credits rolled, which is rare enough for any game and genuinely surprising for one this compact. WONDER POTION is a small South Korean studio, and this is unmistakably a small-team game, but the craft on display is the kind that makes you forget you ever worried about the budget. The mechanical core is a chain-hook prosthetic arm, and it is the single input that does everything: traversal, combat, and momentum management all collapse into one satisfying verb. Aim with the left stick, fire with the trigger, swing, boost, redirect, repeat. Early stages ease you in gently, but the game steadily adds wrinkles, shielded cybernetic samurai who only open up during specific attack windows, drone enemies, electrified floors that punish sloppy arcs, and movable cover platforms that need to be kicked into enemies by chaining a late-game dash off your own swing. The levels of Mago City are surprisingly vertical, and learning to treat every enemy as a momentum node rather than an obstacle to stand still and fight is when the whole thing clicks into something that feels genuinely expressive. A brief time-slow assist for precision targeting keeps the difficulty accessible rather than punishing, and a four-hit health block system means you feel consequences without constant instant deaths. The honest caveat is pacing, and it is a real one. SANABI is deeply committed to its story, which means you will spend extended stretches in dialogue-heavy cutscenes between action runs. Some reviewers found this rhythm genuinely disruptive, and they are not wrong that the swing between sprinting across rooftops and then walking slowly through a conversation can feel jarring. But here is my defense: the story earns it. The relationship between the gruff veteran general and Mari, a young hacker prodigy who becomes his reluctant partner, starts as functional banter and quietly grows into something with real emotional weight. Around the 75 percent mark, the narrative reveals itself to have been foreshadowing something the whole time, and the payoff hit harder than almost anything I encountered in that year's indie releases. If you skip the cutscenes, you are removing the reason the action scenes feel like they matter. Visually, this is handcrafted pixel work that earns its comparisons to the better end of the 2D renaissance. Character sprites are deliberately simple and readable against dense, detailed dystopian backdrops, which is a smart contrast choice that keeps you oriented during fast swings while still giving the world architectural presence. Boss encounters scale up dramatically, pitting your small, nimble figure against machines many times your size, and the sense of scale is handled with genuine confidence for a game this size. The electronic soundtrack is thumping and precise, building into harder grooves during combat without ever drowning out the quiet moments of the story. Play it with headphones. It matters. The free prequel DLC, The Revenant, adds a shorter standalone chapter that rewards players who finished the main game and want to understand more of the world's history. It is a generous addition that shows WONDER POTION thinking about players rather than just units. One legitimate frustration some players have flagged is slow respawn loading screens on death, which can interrupt flow in trickier sections. Worth knowing before you sit down with it.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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