SANABI Review | The Grappling Hook Platformer That Punches Way Above Its Weight

SANABI opens with a retired soldier dragged back into action by the disappearance of an entire city’s population. Within minutes, you are swinging across skyscrapers with a prosthetic grappling arm, smashing through enemies mid-flight, and wondering how a small Korean studio made movement feel this good. That feeling never fades across the entire runtime.

What Is SANABI?

Developed by Wonder Potion and published by NEOWIZ, SANABI launched on November 8, 2023 on Steam and Nintendo Switch. It costs $14.99. The game holds an Overwhelmingly Positive rating on Steam (95% of 4,500+ reviews) and an 82 on OpenCritic.

You play as a retired military commander pulled back into service to investigate Mago City, a high-tech metropolis controlled by a corrupt mega-corporation. After a mysterious blackout, every citizen vanished. Your only lead is a name: SANABI. Along the way, a teenage hacker named Mari joins you, and the relationship between these two characters becomes the emotional core of the entire game.

What Works

The grappling hook is perfect. Point your prosthetic arm at any surface, launch yourself toward it, then boost off in any direction. The controls are tight, responsive, and satisfying from the first swing. Once you master the momentum system, you feel unstoppable. You can grapple into enemies to kill them instantly and chain that into a directional boost, turning combat encounters into fluid, high-speed sequences. Few games have made a single traversal mechanic feel this good. If you loved swinging in Hollow Knight or the aerial movement in games like Dead Cells, SANABI takes that feeling and cranks it up.

The story earns its twists. Most action platformers treat narrative as window dressing. SANABI does the opposite. The cyberpunk setting tackles corporate greed and personal loss with genuine weight. The dynamic between the gruff veteran and Mari evolves naturally across the campaign, and the late-game revelations recontextualize everything you have done. One particular twist near the end landed harder than most big-budget RPG stories manage.

Boss fights are spectacular. Each boss requires you to read attack patterns, find grapple points during chaos, and exploit small windows of vulnerability. They feel like puzzles wrapped in action sequences. The encounters ramp up in complexity without ever feeling unfair, and defeating each one delivers a genuine rush.

The pixel art carries real personality. SANABI’s visual style blends detailed pixel environments with expressive character animations. Mago City shifts between neon-drenched corporate towers, crumbling industrial zones, and eerie abandoned districts. Each area has a distinct atmosphere that reinforces the narrative’s growing tension.

Room to Grow

Pacing stumbles between action and story. This is SANABI’s most divisive element. The game regularly interrupts high-octane grappling sections with lengthy dialogue sequences that can stretch 10 to 15 minutes. The story is excellent, but the transitions feel abrupt. You will go from swinging at full speed to reading text boxes for an extended stretch, and the momentum loss is real. Some players will love the narrative depth. Others will reach for the skip button.

Combat variety is limited. Your moveset stays largely the same throughout the game. You grapple, you boost, you slam into enemies. The boss fights are varied, but regular enemies do not demand much tactical adaptation beyond “grapple into them.” A few more tools or abilities unlocked over the campaign would have kept encounters fresher across the 8 to 10 hour runtime.

Some platforming sections rely on trial and error. A handful of late-game sequences throw instant-death hazards at you with minimal visual telegraphing. The checkpointing is generous enough that frustration stays manageable, but a few rooms feel designed to kill you before you can react.

The Bottom Line

SANABI is a game that knows exactly what it wants to be and executes with remarkable precision. The grappling hook is one of the best traversal mechanics in any indie platformer. The cyberpunk story is more than set dressing. And at $14.99 for a complete, polished experience with no microtransactions and no padding, the value proposition is outstanding.

The pacing issues are real. If you have zero patience for narrative interludes, SANABI will test you. But if you are willing to let the story breathe between the action, you will find a game that rewards your investment with one of the most satisfying emotional payoffs in the genre.

Wonder Potion built something special here. SANABI deserves to be mentioned alongside the best indie action platformers of the past decade.

SANABI scores an 8 out of 10.

SANABI is available on Steam and Nintendo Switch for $14.99. A free DLC expansion, SANABI: A Haunted Day, launched November 2025 and adds additional story content.