How A Horror Game Set In A Slaughterhouse Took Me Back To The Days Of The ZX Spectrum

Horror games take on all shapes and sizes, yet not many come smaller than the star of High Room Studio’s Saborus. In an ingenious twist, the player is a chicken, one of the millions of creatures that serve merely as potential food for our plates. Awaking in a slaughterhouse, this brave fowl makes a bid for its freedom, dodging conveyors, masked humans and other creatures, each out to mutiliate it and ultimately consume its tender flesh.

It’s a novel concept, and being semi-realistic, there’s no chance of this chicken picking up a semi-automatic and taking the fight to those horrible humans. All it can do is run, hide and pick up light objects. And operate a computer. And jump.

Jumping was a key part of the Eighties gaming scene. Games such as Manic Miner (itself inspired by the old Atari classic, Miner 2049er) utilised the mechanic with relentless enthusiasm. You jumped over gaps, enemies, deadly plants, and up onto higher platforms. Developers constructed whole games around the idea that hurling yourself into the air was fun.

For many gamers, it was. Manic Miner’s follow-up, Jet Set Willy, expanded the genre to an open, explorable world, and rivals imitated the sequel’s style following its dramatic success. But for me, the genre had an edge that I didn’t like. Difficulty spikes were common, with some areas or rooms presenting seemingly impossible layouts. The notorious pixel-perfect jumping was rife. And should you miss the platform and drop more than a couple of centimetres, it would be another life gone, or worse, game over.

Matthew Smith’s Manic Miner

It’s a gameplay design that continues today in some retro 2D platformers, but has reappeared here in 3D form thanks to Saborus. Your chicken, bless its little heart, must negotiate the ledges, desks, platforms and shelving of a dangerously stacked abbatoir if it is to escape this dark nightmare. There’s no free-flowing jumping here, boosted by a double-tap multi-jump. Even though, in the context of controlling a chicken, that would, for once, actually make sense. You need to take special care, as falling too far—like in those old platform games—has a terminal result.

But wait—unlike Miner Willy, chickens can fly, right? Well, yes and no, as it turns out. Weakened by decades of domestication and factory breeding, your average chicken struggles to even get off the ground these days, especially if it’s been fattened up in the thigh and breast areas. Saborus’s lean model might be able to hover and even fly for a short distance, but it’s entirely likely its fragile frame would suffer from falling even a medium distance.

Interestingly, Manic Miner’s author, Matthew Smith, apparently had a thing for chickens: his comeback game, Attack Of The Mutant Zombie Flesh Eating Chickens From Mars, threatened to turn the tables, the alien fowl landing in Arizona, with only a small dog standing in the way of their conquest of Earth. Unfortunately, like many battery hens, it never saw the light of day.

Back to Saborus, and sadly it means the old frustrations crept in. I was no longer a chicken, working my way through hazardous corridors and rooms in a 3D environment; I was back in my bedroom in 1985, swearing like a stevedore as I failed once more to get past the dreaded Solar Power Generator. I didn’t have much patience back then, and decades of videogame tutorials and hand-holding have blunted it further.

It’s a shame, as Saborus offers a unique perspective on the survival horror genre, a sad walk—and jump!—through an unpleasant world that most of us try not to think about while we’re tucking in to our evening meal.

Don’t blame me. Blame Manic Miner.

Saborus is available on Xbox Series X/S, PC and PlayStation 4 & 5.