Amnesia is one of visual novel storytelling’s oldest crutches, a way to hand a blank protagonist to the player without doing the harder work of building someone from scratch. I’ve seen it deployed lazily often enough that I go in braced for filler, waiting for a reveal to feel earned rather than convenient.
That skepticism followed me straight into Sani Yang’s Laboratory, and it took longer than expected to loosen its grip. Waking up on a lab table with no memory of your own name is a rough place to start, especially with a mountain of medical debt already stacked against you before you’ve even remembered who’s supposed to be paying it off. The debt belongs to a lab in the world of the Therio, anthropomorphic people who’ve built a civilization as advanced as any human one, and working it off means signing on as a test subject for the very place that saved your life.
That lab belongs to Professor Sani, who everyone just calls Sani Yang, a self-described genius who’s stopped bothering to correct the people who assume mad scientist instead. Her assistant Namo carries a steadier, warmer energy that made drifting from stranger to something more feel like the most natural of the three routes, while Kiwi pulls in the opposite direction entirely, tangled up in a ghost story that runs alongside the romance instead of underneath it. Where Namo’s route settled into something comfortable early, Kiwi’s kept swinging between unsettling and sweet often enough that I never fully relaxed into it the way I had with Namo’s.
Running the lab day to day turns out lighter than the framing suggests, recruiting graduate students and cycling them through research tasks until enough time passes to trigger the next story beat. The real hook sits in the infiltration missions, where the protagonist gets sent undercover into the human world alongside a chosen heroine, and it’s through repeating those missions with the same researcher that a route actually opens up. That structure turns route progress into something earned through repetition rather than handed over by a single dialogue choice, and it kept me choosing to spend more time with a heroine because I wanted her missions, not because the game demanded it.
TALESSHOP Co., Ltd. built the game with Smilegate co-publishing, marking the studio’s first project centered entirely on furry characters, with any eighteen-plus content sold separately as optional DLC rather than folded into the base release. Korea got it first through the STOVE platform in December of 2024, and a wider Steam release followed the following September, adding English, Japanese, Korean, and both Simplified and Traditional Chinese, though audio and interface support vary by language.
Between story scenes, the presentation shifts registers on purpose, full CG illustrations carrying the weight of major heroine moments while day to day lab management runs through smaller, expressive 3D and 2D chibi renderings of the same cast. That contrast works better than it has any right to, letting the game get away with a surprisingly goofy overworld without undercutting the sincerity of its bigger emotional beats.
Every one of the three heroines is fully voiced, and so are all eighteen supporting researchers scattered through the lab’s side stories, an unusually large cast for a story built around one protagonist’s choices. Moon Yoo-jeong carries Sani’s performance across a route that asks real range of her, sliding between warmth, unease, and something closer to grief without ever losing the thread of who Sani actually is underneath the mad scientist routine.
None of that would land without the amnesia hanging over every scene, though the writing plays it as more than the shortcut I expected going in. Not knowing your own history while everyone around you clearly does creates a specific kind of dependence, and the script leans into that instead of rushing past it, letting trust in these characters build the way trust actually has to when you’ve got nothing else to go on. Kiwi’s thread does the most with that unease, folding real dread into scenes that could have stayed purely playful, and I found myself more invested in figuring out what she wasn’t saying than in most of the game’s bigger plot questions.
The base release keeps things to revealing outfits and mildly suggestive text rather than anything explicit, and it never felt like the romance was straining against that boundary to make its beats work.
Verdict
Sani Yang’s Laboratory earns its charm honestly. Three heroines carry distinct emotional registers of their own, a voice cast large enough to make the whole roster feel lived-in, and a management loop that never asks for more attention than the story actually deserves. Kiwi’s uneasy edges kept me guessing in ways Namo’s warmth and Sani’s chaos never quite managed on their own, and the amnesia framing that usually makes me brace for filler turned into the thing holding the whole cast together instead. It’s a big cast built around a premise with more curiosity behind it than its goofy overworld first lets on.
