Game Reviews

The Night of the Rabbit is a fairy tale: whimsical, wondrous, brimming with talking animals, hidden dangers, and a hundred reasons to lose a few hours to its depths. A point-and-click adventure very much in the spirit of those old Sierra games, The Night of the Rabbit puts you in control of 12-year old Jeremiah Hazelnut who somehow finds himself apprenticed to a talking rabbit named Marquis de Hotto in the last days of summer and on route towards the adventure of a lifetime.

One thing The Night of the Rabbit has going for it is an excess of charm. Hand-drawn, well-detailed graphics and judicious usage of soft filters give the impression that developer Daedalic Entertainment plucked this one right out of a children’s book. The music is competent but not overwhelming, and the voice acting is spot-on. Neither melodramatic nor bland, and ever-so-delicately dusted with English accents, the whole affair is gorgeously reminiscent of a high-definition version of Kenneth Grahame's Wind in the Willows.Of course, the image is helped along by the fact that the menagerie of characters is, quite literally, an actual menagerie. Made up of hedgehogs, mice, and towering owls, the woodland cast is both innocuous and mildly eccentric. Here, we have the pink-garbed Anja, a mouse who believes in roller blades, a snotty charge named Humbert, and exploding cookies. There, we have an old squirrel who believes books are best arranged by color. In between all of these bipedal critters and their respective crises, we have Jeremiah, ever ready to accomplish whatever is needed to help further his study of the thaumaturgical arts.

Along the way, both he and you will learn that this is no utopian setting. Slowly and surely, darker undertones and hints of what is going on beneath the surface begin bleeding into the tale, providing substance and urgency to what may otherwise have been a saccharine performance. Who is the Marquis de Hotto? What are his real intentions? Why have crows taken to assaulting to Mousewood and who are the lizard-like creatures who constantly reassure Jerry that they are, in fact, the solution to an unknown problem? While The Night of the Rabbit ultimately trickles into an unsatisfying epilogue, the journey to that end is still a marvelous, maddening one.

Enchanting as the environment may be, The Night of the Rabbit is still, at its core, a point-and-click adventure game in the grandest tradition of the phrase. It’s filled with puzzles of all shapes and sorts. Some are straightforward while others will demand you suspend normal logic in favor of the kind of thinking the Monkey Island franchise required of its players. Nonetheless, this isn’t necessarily a terrible thing - victory is often sweetest when plucked from the jaws of dizzying confusion? That said, I’m not sure if I like how they’ve handled progression.

Unlike most point-and-click adventures, The Night of the Rabbit will not shepherd you doggedly through the story, steering you from one plot point to another. Instead, it functions more like a tangled ball of yarn: you’re going to have to determine which conundrum out of many needs to be resolved first before anything noteworthy can take place. It’s an interesting approach that will, at times, facilitate the sensation that Mousewood is a living, breathing place and that you’re more than just an onlooker but also one that can evoke frustration. That leprechaun you just bested, for example, might not have anything to do with the precocious kid that’s blocking your way but everything to do with something that happens five puzzles after that.

Though hint systems exist, you'll still largely be on your own. The Marquis de Hotto can be summoned to offer clues as to how to proceed, but his advice is all but worthless. The magic coin that you acquire at the beginning is infinitely more useful. By pressing the space bar, you'll be immediately made privy to all the clickable hotspots within your immediate area. It's not much, but at least it's not the generic blathering of a red-eyed bunny.

Had The Night of the Rabbit simply chosen to stick with just being your regular (albeit extremely pretty) point & click adventure, I'd have been happy enough. However, the developers chose to up the ante by layering in spells you can cast, collectibles (find enough dewdrops, stickers or what-have-you and you'll be able to unlock bonus material), a day/night cycle (people act differently depending on the time of day) and even a rudimentary card game. Naturally, none of this is terribly complex - you won’t need to jump through flaming hoops to talk to a squirrel-faced piece of architecture or to turn day into night, you’ll just have to left-click the appropriate spell - but that doesn’t lessen the delightfulness of all of these extra little touches.

Dreamy, a little unsettling, often frustrating, but almost always rather magical, The Night of the Rabbit is the end-of-summer adventure authors like Enid Blyton tend to write about...except, you know, interactive. You might need a certain kind of disposition to be able to handle some of the more frustrating puzzle sequences, but it’s certainly more than worth the hair you’ll pull out.