The KFC Double Down was an abomination crafted by evil scientists and I’d probably commit minor acts of violence to have another. The insanity of replacing bread with fried chicken – an item designed to hurt you if you touch it – and then put cheese and bacon between it was a cocaine concept birthed by a cardiologist who wanted to buy another house. Yet it was so popular it actually made its way to Japanese KFC, where chicken are smaller, more expensive and actively disappointed that you’re not eating something healthier. Humanity has no problem with destroying every other species on Earth in the most pointless ways possible as long as it gives us an endorphin rush to stave off existential dread for a few seconds. Saborus wants to try and address this madness directly, but the Switch was not the platform to broadcast the message.

In a game that might as well have been made by PETA, you play a chicken who is trying to escape a massive meat mill. You happen to slip the conveyor belt that was bringing you to your grisly demise and, because this factory is understaffed with only the finest psychopaths, your safety is ensured only as long as the workers have something else to occupy their attention. Over the course of your escape, you learn details of the bizarre and horrifying experiments happening within, and you…well, you’re a chicken. You don’t really make a decision to do anything other than try and escape. You have some lucky choices where you end up sabotaging the industrial poultry complex, but that’s more the game director’s prerogative and not the moral compass of an avian goldfish. Do things well, and maybe you can shut down this factory for good! Or die. Either can happen.

Saborus is a stealth survival horror where you, a chicken, will gradually figure a way out through happenstance and sheer dumb luck. You have to constantly avoid being kicked, stabbed and otherwise attacked by the denizens of this slaughterhouse, and it speaks volumes that no one realizes a chicken has literally evaded execution unless the bird is in front of them. The difficulty level that you assign at the beginning of the game denotes how tenacious your pursuers will be. On the highest level, being spotted at all is basically a recipe for game over, and on the easiest it’s a minor inconvenience where you have to hide somewhere for a second while the hazmat horror just sort of gets bored and goes elsewhere. You need to figure out some minor puzzles (like moving electrical plugs or certain other sequences) to progress, culminating in a real Rube Goldberg finale.

I personally have a lot of issues with Saborus for many reasons, but please wait a moment for me to address the console port. In spite of the hardware and platform, the main gripe I have with Saborus is that it never seems to figure out where it is tonally. On the one hand, it gets very visceral in how it wants to present some of the very real issues that exist within this industry. The dismemberment, the various gore, the fact that the pits of animal remains are crawling with bugs and more are all accurate and deeply upsetting notions for how a major component of many people’s diets are handled. In some ways, High Room Studio is really hellbent on getting people to acknowledge the terrible state of meat handling and, by proxy, animal cruelty without expressly demonizing one particular company, or advertising one specific charity.

On the other hand, these ideas are also bandied about with some very atonal moments that seem to undermine the greater message. Yes, you’re a chicken, and chickens are ridiculous creatures. But there doesn’t need to be, for example, a cartoonish villain behind the scenes who are making giant chickens to get more meat cheaper. It harkens back to the old Patton Oswalt story about the KFC “Mega Leg,” which had as much veracity as the “all skin chicken” that was purportedly being made. Oh, or the fact that the computers that the chicken “hacks” just have arbitrary screen savers of underwear and swimsuit models. Like, there’s nothing to be gained here by adding these details, but it really pulls focus from the greater message, and was just sort of an odd move. It was silly without being funny, if that makes sense.

Gameplay wise, Saborus is a short jaunt that doesn’t present much challenge in the game itself. For the most part, the chicken needs to figure out how to open doors, and that’s usually done by picking up a thing, moving it to another place, and putting down the thing. Sometimes you’ll charge up some energy and use it to activate devices, sometimes you’ll use buckets to jam up fans and slip into the ducts (genuinely a cool moment), but mostly you’ll walk around and try not to get murdered in a typical fashion. But, wait, wouldn’t the workers just capture the chicken and return it to the cages? Why would you risk your job security to take out your rage on a fowl run afoul? Oh, right, everyone who works in these places are terrible people and just want an excuse to kill something.

Still, the constant back and forth can be tiresome. Find a spark plug, put the spark plug in a slot. Go find another spark plug. Continue to move items from point A to point B until you can proceed. In the meanwhile, don’t get killed and don’t get caught. For a game that’s only a handful of hours, it can still feel like a slog at times because it does repeat a lot of the same ideas and concepts against different backgrounds and areas. You can’t help but realize you’re doing the same puzzle time after time, just in a different room or part of the factory, with different lighting and sometimes different animals. I was not happy to see the piggies being slaughtered, but that’s the nature of this game, so be prepared if you don’t enjoy animal deaths.

The soundscape of the game is perfectly fine, though it can be distressing at times. The musical stings when you’re suddenly confronted by a worker, or the foreboding ambience is fun, no doubt, and there’s plenty of atmospheric sounds that keep you locked into the moment. But there’s also a lot of constant animal sounds, including animals being very unhappy, and that can be upsetting. I know, a game about animal slaughter has a score of unhappy noises, shocker. I just feel I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that squeals, squawks and bleats are a part of the audio journey, and they make you feel bad.

Lastly, yes, Saborus should not be on the Switch. Now officially the underpowered grandfather of the last generation, the Nintendo Switch has had plenty of success displaying and sharing all types of games and ideas, with some technical marvels having been showcased even up to today. Saborus is not optimized or ideal for the Switch, especially the standard and Lite models. The darks are so cloudy that you can’t really see where you are or where you’re going in the more shadowy parts of the factory. This rarely resulted in deaths, but it did result in wasted time walking into walls. Moreover, the assets are seriously more blurry than the PC counterpart, resulting in some of the shock and awe over reveals of viscera being diminished because it just looks like red lumps at times.

Additionally, it just runs poorly. Load times are long, and I can tell that there was effort put into making the game itself run as smoothly as possible. The chicken can maneuver well throughout and there’s no stuttering or slowdown when you begin to flee, which is good. But there are moments of odd frame stutters that make the chicken look like it’s getting electrical shocks when standing still. The camera will sometimes pivot into the wall and force you to guess where you’re going, and, when the camera decides to stop moving at all, you really are left up a creek. And it creates moments of unintentional hilarity, like when a guard’s knife disappeared, so it just looked like he was Donkey Kong slapping a chicken to death. This is an interesting concept with an important message, and it shouldn’t be diluted as an attempt to get a broader audience.

Saborus is certainly memorable, but so is the first time I found a bone in a chicken nugget. It has potential, but you can’t explore it on the Switch, and the tonal shift and odd choices might take away from the overall effect. Truth be told, if it does help someone better understand animal rights and start the steps towards either reforming the industry or at least making more informed choices, then I’d chalk it up as a win. But please keep in mind: this “horror” title is only scary when you remember the true monster is mankind! Or something like that.

Graphics: 5.5 While some assets are clean and unique, everything is very muddy and blurred on the Switch. Additional dark and light balance issues really ruins the atmospheric presence of the game.	Gameplay: 6.0 A short stealth puzzle where you try not to get stabbed or get annoyed at how often you can’t go someplace you think a chicken should be able to reach. After the first ten minutes, you understand the entire game.
Sound: 7.0 Solid ambience with truly upsetting sound effects dropped in. It’s not the voice actors’ fault the script can be hokey, but the errant clips of them talking down about their customers and insulting animals just felt unnecessary.	Fun Factor: 5.0 It was certainly something, and it did make an impression, but I just don’t think it’s the one the developers were hoping to leave with me.
Final Verdict: 5.5

Saborus is available now on Steam, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.

Reviewed on Nintendo Switch.

A copy of Saborus was provided by the publisher.