Saborus launches with a wholesome advert for fresh, nutritious food, juxtaposing happy, healthy families gathered around the dinner table with happy, healthy animals grazing in the fields of a sunny green farm. A gentle-voiced narrator describes the farm to table process with an increasingly sinister emphasis on the animals’ destiny to become food. It abruptly snaps to a horrific scene of a bloody slaughterhouse, in which you are a chicken lucky enough to tumble from a conveyor belt and attempt to escape.

This introduction teases a noble yet chilling puzzle platformer and stealth horror game, placing you at the centre of the atrocious exploitation of contemporary factory farms. Unfortunately, not one element of Saborus lives up to its implied promises.

It loses all tension immediately. Your chicken falls to the floor and, despite the numerous slaughterhouse staff around, none of them react to you no matter how close you get to them running around looking for the exit. The way the chicken interacts with the world around it is awkward in every possible way. Invisible barriers cut a hard line in places that don’t make sense, and you can’t fit your chicken through gaps that definitely have sufficient space. Pallets are arranged at angles that make them look like inviting slopes to a new level, but instead you bump uncomfortably against the air when you try to step onto them.

The puzzles are thoroughly underwhelming, typically consisting of picking up one item and moving it to another place, which triggers access to the next space. However, there are multiple times when the thing you have to move will glitch through a wall or floor out of existence, and you’ll have to start the whole game over again. You can’t select a previous save point to return to if the game autosaves after a point at which you’ve lost your essential macguffin. 

The stealth elements are equally miserable. It’s anyone’s guess whether a human will bother to look at you on any given floor. In the spaces where they do notice and chase you, they follow a set route that is fairly easy to evade. The key difficulty in avoiding them is the footsteps sound effect, which is used for both the human boots and the chicken’s feet, making it impossible to know if you’re about to get caught or you’re hearing your own (ostensibly much lighter, and not booted) footsteps. 

If a human ever does see you, there’s no point fleeing unless it is a specifically scripted chase scene. Outside of set sections, you won’t escape and you will get beaten to death. The way the chicken twitches after being bludgeoned is incredibly creepy, but even that is undermined by the obviously stolen Dark Souls ‘You Died’ screen that fades in over your bloody corpse. If this was an attempt at humour by referencing the meme that asset has become, it falls flat and instead looks like just brazen plagiarism. 

The design of the slaughterhouse, with its plunging shadows and crates of imprisoned animals, is creepy, but is incredibly shallow. Aside from creating a maze to run around, there is essentially no other way of interacting with your environment. There is potential here for a more complex story, with the caged animals helping you—or holding you back because they’ve bought into their own oppression. If society has learned anything from Chicken Run, this is a situation where everyone has to work together to overcome a more powerful foe.

Instead, Saborus doesn’t seem to want to tell a compelling story at all. Any message it has is undermined by a weird sense of humour that seems to delight in the chickens’ death. Achievements pop up when you die in specific ways or a specific number of times, with darkly silly names that make it feel like you’re not supposed to escape at all so much as find all the different ways you can get your chicken murdered.

The weird tone is not helped by the dialogue. The voice acting doesn’t feel human, with unusual rhythm and odd emphasis at the wrong point in a sentence. The way the word ‘Saborus’ is pronounced multiple different ways in just the opening animation makes it seem like the voices are AI generated with little creative oversight from a person. Overall, it feels like very little effort went into making this game fun or even playable.