Back in 2023, South Korean developer Wonder Potion released Sanabi, a sleek, cyberpunk-themed action platformer that saw players slinging themselves around levels with a giant grappling hook. Favourably compared to Katana Zero, it received near-universal praise for its crisp pixel art, Bionic Commando-esque platforming challenges, and surprisingly involved storyline.
Two years on from Sanabi’s launch, Wonder Potion has now released an expansion for Sanabi. Titled Sanabi: A Haunted Day, it’s a prequel spinoff in which you play as a different character from the main game. Also, it’s completely free.
Sanabi: A Haunted Day puts players in the role of Major Song, who has a minor role in the base game. As mentioned, the DLC takes place before the events of Sanabi, with Song investigating a sprawling robots scrapyard which the DLC’s Steam page says is plagued by “strange phenomena”.
Alongside the new location, Song has a completely different moveset from the base game’s protagonist. While she lacks a grappling hook, she is nonetheless capable of “agile aerial manoeuvres” such as an infinitely replenishable mid-air jump. She also wields a massive shotgun—which I always find endearing in a videogame protagonist—while other weapons await discovery in the scrapyard’s bowels.
Wonder Potion doesn’t explain why it’s releasing the expansion for free. But it likely relates to promises made in the original’s game crowdfunding campaign, which raised 1.4 billion won on Korean crowdfunding site Tumblbug. According to a Steam post from September, one of Wonder Potion’s crowdfunding goals was to release two mini DLC episodes running between 20-30 minutes each.
Yet since Sanabi made a bigger splash than the developers anticipated, they “wanted to create something more meaningful” for players. Consequently, A Haunted Day is significantly longer than what Wonder Potion originally planned, apparently clocking in at a couple of hours. The DLC’s store page also refers to A Haunted Day as the “first” spin-off DLC, suggesting that a second expansion is still coming.
In any case, A Haunted Day has received similarly sweeping praise as the base game, with a 96% positive rating on Steam. “This lives up to the same quality standard set by the base game and adds a bit more to the characters from the story,” writes Wigglebot37, while FishTwo praises how Major Song’s moveset—which includes a shotgun dodge and a projectile parry alongside the double-jump—lives up to the vanilla game’s grappling hook. “This is the level of complexity you need to add to make up for removing the grappling hook, and they did it.”
While A Haunted Day is free, you do need to own the base game to play it. The good news is Sanabi is currently available on a 35% discount, bringing the price down to $9.74 (£7.40). That discount runs until December 10.
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