Saborus review for PC, Nintendo Switch, Xbox, PlayStation

I’ve been vegan for about twenty years now. Saborus is a game that’s about the horrors of the meat industry. In theory, it’s the kind of game that I should love, right?

You’d think so, but the reality is that there’s no way I could possibly recommend it, for the simple reason that it sucks.

How bad is it? Not to spoil the end of this review or anything, but I’m giving it a 2.5/10 – and that’s me being generous because I agree with the gist of the game’s message. In every other way – and arguably even in terms of its message, for reasons I’ll get to shortly – it’s an abysmal, unenjoyable slog.

The problem is that Saborus is a stealth puzzle-platformer where the stealth sections aren’t that interesting, the puzzles aren’t difficult, and the platforming is a mess. Playing as a chicken, you have to sneak by the line workers in a slaughterhouse who barely even notice you even if you’re running right in front of them, and even then it basically depends on you being in a section where the workers are allowed to run after you.

The puzzles don’t fare much better. Since, again, you’re literally a chicken, you don’t have things like opposable thumbs that allow you to do anything too complex, so it’s mainly just picking up random items and inserting them into the right spot. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that there’s not a lot of variety, and it gets dull awfully quickly.

As for the platforming, Saborus is hindered by the fact that not only are you a chicken, you’re the world’s most immobile chicken. You can barely jump anywhere other than straight up and down, and, unlike an actual chicken, you can’t even flutter your wings a little to slow your descent or extend your jump just a tiny bit. It also doesn’t help that if you fall from the wrong place, you’ll sustain massive damage that’s more likely than not to kill you and send you back to the last checkpoint.

And then there’s Saborus’ weird, muddled message. As I said up top, I’ve been vegan for a couple of decades, so I’m obviously sympathetic to anything that highlights the cruelty of the meat industry. But this game isn’t it. Mind you, I’m not totally sure that Saborus is aiming to be that, either, or that it’s even sure what it wants to be. On one hand, the game starts off with a corporate video about the game’s eponymous meat company that’s clearly supposed to be satirical, and it doesn’t shy away from showing a lot of the gore of a slaughterhouse killing floor. But at the same time, when your chicken dies the game lingers for a long, long time on its twitching corpse, leading me to suspect that the developers may not care all that much about animal rights, and just wanted to be edgy in some way that makes very little sense to anyone.

But even if Saborus had the purest of intentions and I loved everything about its message, that wouldn’t change the fact that it’s still a terrible game. It’s a frustrating mess that doesn’t do much of anything right, so you’re better off just avoiding it.

QUByte Interactive provided us with a Saborus PC code for review purposes.