The Night of the Rabbit

A big fan of Daedalic I am, and I always expect their games to have a cinematic, story-driven approach. However, this game takes the opposite route - puzzles, puzzles and more puzzles at the expense of good pacing. While puzzles are not a bad thing, there should be a limit. In this game, I never felt like I was progressing enough. Every puzzle I solve brings another puzzle instead of story progression. The story itself is nothing special. There is no magical redeeming quality, no emotional connection to the characters and the world (since there are waay too many characters to properly flesh them out), and most of the story is told in exposition instead of us being the centre of the tale. All of this makes for an OK game with some interesting tidbits here and there, but it never rises to the greatness of The Whispered World, Chains of satinav, A New Begining or Deponia.

I'm pretty new to these kinds of games, but I loved it. I LOVED the story. It was suspenseful and had interesting twists that made me smile right up to the end. I'm not excellent with the logic of these games yet, so I had to use some help with walkthroughs and such, but it was totally worth it. It has the childlike wonder of a fairytale, while having a mature and endearing story. I HIGHLY recommend it.

The Night of the Rabbit has much charm; technically, it impresses: It has the most beautiful graphics ever in a point&click game, all hand-drawn, including very complex animation work. The music is excellent too, and the (German) voice acting does its job well. Story-wise it feels like an update for the 2010s of stories by Michael Ende, such as the Neverending Story and Momo. Like these, it has a philosophical and even political dimension, discussing the question of whether the doctrine of neverending economic growth and development is really without alternative and will truly make people happy. Fortunately though, the game avoids being annoyingly pedagogic (again see Ende). My main criticism is that these darker tones appear much too late in the game. While in the first half some hints are dropped about "something sinister", most of the actual game in that half feels like busywork; your tasks mainly require dealing with mundane everyday problems. That the dark parts of the game begin so late also has the side effect that too much needs to be explained in a long cutscene at the end of the game, instead of letting the player discover it gradually. As many have criticised, the puzzles are sometimes illogical or require knowledge that first time players simply cannot have. This high difficulty contrasts strangely with the fact that in the first half the general tone of the game is as in a picture book for six year olds; everything is friendly and harmless and boring. Classics like Simon the Sorcerer did a better job there with their humorous depiction of a fairytale world. This contrast makes it unclear who this game is actually aimed at. The plot could have been more streamlined. While it works well overall, it has too many unnecessary branches and introduces more agents than needed or plausible. The game has a few mildly annoying bugs, but nothing game-breaking. Despite all this, the game does something unique and beautiful enough to deserve 5/5 stars.

I'm only about 7 hours in right now, so here are some "first impressions", rather than a real review. What I like: -beautiful art absolutely everywhere -amazing music -entertaining story, I've never been a good judge of stories, but this is enough to keep me invested in the game -puzzles are reasonable. I'm not a big point and click fan, so I'm happy to say the puzzles have made sense for the most part, with minimal pixel hunting bs. -good voice acting. Not the best I've ever heard, but definitely good -the setting is great, I love the world this game takes place in What I didn't love so much: -I've spent a lot of time walking between screens, but there is a fast-travel system that fixed that eventually -the frame rate is inconsistent. On some screens, I would drop below 40 fps, and I don't have a bad pc. This shouldn't happen on a 2d game, especially not a point and click game