Sonny

Armor Games' listing for Sonny currently shows a 95 out of 100 across more than 31,000 ratings — the kind of number that, on a modern storefront, would be treated as an outlier worth investigating. On a 2007 Flash portal it meant something slightly different: a single developer, Jakrin Juangbhanich, working under the handle Krin, had put a turn-based combat system with real resource management into a genre — the browser action game — that mostly wasn't attempting one, and the portal's own audience noticed immediately. It went up on Armor Games on 29 December 2007 (a companion Kongregate listing from April 2008 is best read as a later mirror, not the original release), and it is worth being precise about that date, because the game it is most often discussed alongside — Sonny 2 — arrived almost exactly a year later and quietly became the version most people mean when they say "Sonny."

The system that carries the whole game

Sonny puts the player in a fairly conventional turn-based structure — a world map, a roaming mode for managing inventory and party between fights, and battle screens where Sonny and up to a few allies trade turns with zombies and worse — and then makes the whole thing work on the back of one resource: Focus. Focus is spent on Sonny's stronger offensive and defensive abilities, and unlike his four other attributes (Vitality, Strength, Instinct, Speed), it can't simply be raised with level-up points. It has to be earned mid-fight, usually by landing specific moves that generate it as a side effect, before it can be spent on the moves that actually turn a fight around. That single design choice is what separates Sonny's combat from picking the biggest number on a menu every turn: the interesting decision in most fights isn't which attack to use, it's whether to spend the Focus you have now or hold it for the ability that needs more of it later.

Layered on top of that is a genuine build system. Four starting classes — Destroyer (melee, high health, slow and unmagical), Guardian (a slower hybrid of physical and magic), Assassin (fast, high-damage, fragile), and Gunslinger (a spell-damage specialist with a thin health pool) — give attribute points to spend across five stats, and the game lets a player respec up to five times a day if an early build turns out wrong. For a free browser game released at the end of 2007, that's a meaningfully deep character system, closer to what a small commercial RPG would offer than what most Flash combat games of the era bothered attempting.

A specific, committed setting

The story earns more credit than "zombie RPG" as a two-word pitch suggests it should. Sonny is revived, mysteriously, by a mentor figure called Louis the Blind aboard a ship; when Louis is killed by agents of the Zombie Pest Control Incorporated, Sonny flees with a mysterious object referred to only as "the Tape," moving through a haunted beach called Ishiguro's Rest and a plains region called Gadi'Kala toward a city, Hew, and an eventual confrontation with a mind-controlling zombie overlord, Baron Brixius. None of that is groundbreaking on its own terms — it's B-movie zombie fiction wearing an RPG's vocabulary — but it's specific, internally consistent, and clearly building toward something bigger than the game in front of you, which turned out to be true literally as well as narratively once Sonny 2 continued it directly.

Where the sketch shows

The honest limitation sitting underneath both of the above systems is that Sonny only commits to them partway. All four classes pull their available abilities from a single, shared ability tree — the actual difference between playing a Destroyer and playing a Gunslinger is mostly which attributes you've raised, not which set of moves you have access to. That's a real gap next to how distinct the four classes sound on paper, and it's exactly the problem Sonny 2 solved a year later by giving each class its own tree (Psychological, Biological, Hydraulic), letting two characters of the same class diverge into genuinely different builds depending on which branch they favoured. The campaign itself is short by the same comparison: three story zones and one bonus zone, against Sonny 2's five story and two bonus zones. Neither of those is a flaw exactly — a first game being smaller and less refined than its sequel is normal — but it does mean Sonny today reads less like a complete statement and more like the working draft for one, and a reviewer owes readers that context rather than treating it as a finished, freestanding classic on its own.

Playability today

Sonny went dark along with the rest of Armor Games' Flash catalogue when browsers dropped Flash support in 2020, and came back on 28 February 2023, when Armor Games restored more than 300 of its old games — Sonny among them — running through the Ruffle Flash emulator, per the portal's own announcement. Flashpoint's archive also preserves it for offline play, and is specifically useful here because community discussion of Krin's games notes Flashpoint can surface site-exclusive content that a mirror site sometimes couldn't. One caveat worth naming plainly: a still-open Ruffle project issue documents an out-of-memory crash affecting Sonny 2's Armor Games–hosted Ruffle build on at least one reported hardware configuration, which points to a shared-engine risk that may not be fully resolved for Sonny 1 either — I could not confirm a report specific to this game, only to its sequel, so treat "restored" as "mostly working," not "guaranteed stable." For anyone who wants a version with a lower chance of emulation trouble, the Sonny Legacy Collection — a 2024 remaster bundling Sonny, Sonny 2 and a new third chapter — is sold on Steam as a native, maintained alternative, though it is a modernised package rather than the original artifact this review is about.

What I couldn't verify

I could not confirm who did the original game's artwork; Sonny 2's credits list a separate graphics artist (Joan C.G.), but no equivalent credit turned up for this first game, and Krin has described working largely solo before later projects brought on collaborators — that's a reasonable inference, not a sourced fact, so I'm not asserting he drew it himself. I also could not find a Newgrounds listing for Sonny, despite Krin's other series appearing there, and I don't know why; it may simply never have been cross-posted. Two pieces of retrospective coverage that would have been useful for reception context — a Medium essay on the game's legacy and a TouchArcade piece previewing the 2017 mobile remake — returned access errors during research and could only be read as search-engine summaries, so no direct quote from either appears here.

Final verdict

Sonny is a well-built first attempt at an idea its own sequel would execute more completely: a Focus-based turn-based combat system with real tactical weight, wrapped around attribute-driven character building that was genuinely ahead of most Flash combat games in December 2007. The audience it found on Armor Games was not wrong to rate it as highly as it did. But a shared ability tree across four classes and a three-zone campaign are real, visible limits, and both were fixed within a year by Sonny 2 — which makes this one, today, most valuable as the first chapter of a story worth reading rather than the destination in its own right. A 7.0 reflects a genuinely good browser RPG that its own sequel has mostly, if not entirely, superseded.