The game that I chose for this critical play is Sanabi, an action-platformer game with an amazing narrative and mystery component. This game was developed by WONDER POTION and published by NEOWIZ in 2021. The game is available on Nintendo Switch and Windows through Steam. I played this game through Steam on my laptop. In Sanabi, you play as an unnamed protagonist who is a legendary retired veteran, who is asked to return to complete one final mission. The premise of Sanabi is that there is a mega-city ruled by a corrupt conglomerate called Mago and you must hunt down Sanabi to uncover hints one at a time to figure out what is really happening behind the scenes. One of the main objectives in Sanabi as a player is to figure out who exactly the protagonist is through a series of flashbacks and conversations with other characters. The element of mystery arises when the player realizes that certain things seem to be off about the world and the people you interact with seem to know a bit more than they let on. A key element in the architecture of the game is how you start off with one initial flashback, then slowly start to uncover more and more of the protagonist’s memory until you are fully caught up at the end of the game. Then, in the final moments of the game, you get to decide what path to take. I find that Sanabi uses a combination of platforming, cut-scenes, and dialogue to weave in narrative while also keeping the mystery of the game a surprise until the last moments in the game.
Sanabi starts off with a cutscene in which the protagonist interacts with his young daughter in his home. The game fosters a strong emotional connection between the player and the daughter by making the tutorial of Sanabi itself led by the daughter in the form of a small game.
At the start of the game, the player has yet to realize what the mystery surrounding the game is about. In fact, the player does not know that there is even a mystery present until about halfway into the game. I find this to be a brilliant way of narrating the story because the player grows accustomed to characters and their personal idea of what the story is about, before the game starts to slowly undermine that idea and introduce new information. At the end of the tutorial and opening cut-scenes, the daughter runs off into the house saying that there is a present with the protagonist’s name on it. After a brief moment, she says that it is from “Sanabi” before the package explodes and the protagonist is brought back to the present.
From this point on until the middle of the game, the player is convinced that the culprit is Sanabi, and that the objective of the game is to figure out the identity of Sanabi. The player returns back to their former military base and after gearing up, is dropped off into the mega-city owned by Mago that Sanabi is supposedly residing in. After dropping into the town, the first hint at the mystery is revealed: All humans in the city have disappeared and only robots, like garbage disposal robots or police enforcement robots, used by the city remain. Although this may seem a bit suspicious, the player’s attention is immediately shifted to the robots that begin attacking them. The player then completes a number of platforming and battle levels before reaching the next stage. The game progresses in this manner, with the protagonist getting stronger and unveiling more hints, until the end of the game.
One of the most effective ways this game combines narrative and mystery is through its flashbacks and the contrast between black and red dialogue text colors. Occasionally, characters in the protagonist’s flashbacks will seem to glitch out, with the memory ending abruptly. Towards the beginning of the game, this happens much less, making the player think little of it. However, as the game progresses, the glitches become more common and more noticeable, clueing the player in on the true meaning of the game.
By incorporating a balance of challenging, discovery, and narrative fun, Sanabi is able to merge many different genres and ideas at once. While the player is focused on challenging platforming levels in certain stages, they also begin to look for hidden hints and information placed around the map. For example, the player comes to learn that humans have not actually disappeared from the city — only from his vision. This realization is hinted at throughout the game as he says things like, “This car was just used” or “How could this many people have just disappeared?”. However, even these small mysteries that the player solves are actually distractions to the true mystery surrounding the game. By sprinkling in little mini-mysteries, players must take a step back and realize how these different hints lead to a bigger picture. Another example of this is realizing that Mari, the companion to the protagonist in the city, is not just the only person the protagonist can see in the city — she is actually his daughter. With a series of smaller mysteries, the player is distracted from the biggest mystery: Who is Sanabi and who is the protagonist?
Piecing together all these seemingly disconnected clues leads to the final scene in the game, where the protagonist finally meets up with his old friends from the earlier cutscenes in the base. But they do not react in the same way as before — instead, they treat the protagonist in a hostile way and do not even seem to acknowledge him as a companion. After a futile attempt to convince them that he is the same person, he has a moment of realization before turning to look in a mirror and unveiling the final piece of the puzzle.
The true mystery, hidden through layers of gameplay, mechanics, and false memories, was that the protagonist was just a robot given altered memories of the “original” protagonist, who passed away in an earlier incident. The person who died at the house was not his daughter, but his wife, and Sanabi was just the idea of an enemy artificially implanted in his memory to motivate him to complete missions. The one behind this whole ordeal ended up being Mago, who intended to copy the data in the protagonist’s body and mass-produce military robots with the same legendary skill as the protagonist. The use of the concept of Sanabi is explained to be an experimental method to control these robots, such as the protagonist’s memory being altered to believe that Sanabi murdered his daughter, leading to him destroying an entire city. Mago intended to use Sanabi to program an army of robots to take down the government and take power for themselves.
This final mystery is uncovered through unique methods such as platforming through memory sequences and flashbacks to previous cutscenes from the perspective of those who are altering the memory files. There are also a lot more mysteries and sub-plots that I have not included here, but also are essential in immersing the player in the game and making them feel as though they know nothing as they enter the final scenes of the game.
