The Night of the Rabbit

The Night of the Rabbit follows the classic formula of the point-and-click adventure genre: it tries to immerse the player in a fantastical world, with a strong focus on story and atmosphere, while structuring the action around puzzle solving. Here, Daedelic Entertainment presents a fairy tale – with talking animals and evil magicians – and is successful in building an optimistic tone: embodied by the protagonist, this optimism is the main responsible for injecting energy into the story.

Jeremiah Hazelnut is a boy who lives far away from his colleagues, isolated with his mother on the edge of a forest. There are only two days of summer vacation left and his mission is to collect blackberries for a pie that should be ready for dinner. However, when he returns from the forest carrying a basket clogged with them, Jerry realizes that he has just received a magic flying letter: it describes a magic recipe that will invoke a magic trunk containing an equally magic rabbit. Lucky for Jerry, who has always dreamed of becoming the greatest magician of all time. The boy, therefore, doesn’t hesitate for a second and promptly starts the preparations to invoke the strange animal. The rabbit, called Marquis de Hoto, reveals that he is a Treewalker, a mystical being able to walk through the cracks that separate the various universes, and invites Jerry to embark on an adventure: he must travel to another world to be trained by the rabbit to become a Treewalker. And Jerry must return in time for dinner.

The story of The Night of the Rabbit has, in the beginning, a playful tone. The tutorial represents this aspect well. While the player is taught how everything works, Jerry hears a new radio program. “Imagine a small X floating in the air, you can click on it to drop out anytime,” the voice on the radio instructs. “Wow. When he says it like that, I can practically see the X floating in front of me,” the boy comments.

Jerry has a contagious adventurous personality. He is always willing to help the people he meets, regardless of the nature of their problems, and he faces each bizarre situation with an optimistic posture that fits perfectly well with the message given by the curious radio announcer: “Remember: there are no problems, only challenges!”

His imagination is as fruitful as it should be at his age – when he notices footprints going up to his house window, he ponders whether they were not left by a long-extinct mammal – the gremlinwolf –, while his taste for adventure is exemplified by the brilliant moment Marquis de Hoto warns Jerry that he will have to be alone for a while in a city totally inhabited by animals, and Jerry, instead of worry, just smiles happily.

The inhabitants of Mousewood are all eccentric. The player will find a postman frog who loves music, a rat who cooks and makes explosive biscuits, and reclusive dwarves who are always with the flu. The dialogues are humorous, working with the contrast between the world of Jerry and Mousewood: “Lab rat? That’s what they call scientists where you come from?” one of the rodents questions the protagonist at a certain point.

The Night of the Rabbit, however, gradually acquires a more serious tone, thanks to the tragic past of Marquis de Hoto, and finds time for reflections on the consequences of an adventure and the scars that can result from it. There are still some inspiring humorous moments spread throughout the most intense ones, though, to stop the narrative from becoming too heavy, and even the villains – a group of hapless lizards who try to hide their identities under masks and robes – often make the player laugh, since their apocalyptic dialogues (“We have arrived. We will be the solution“) render useless any attempt on their part to not look suspicious.

Regarding its gameplay, The Night of the Rabbit is a classic point-and-click adventure in which the player moves the protagonist by clicking where he should go, and finds important objects to solve puzzles with the same action. “One click – everything is just one click!” the speaker explains very well during the tutorial.

Puzzles, however, are the game’s weak point. A good part of the puzzles works with logic and a bit of imagination, but the other part only requires the creative aspect, requiring the player to come up with some contrived solutions to Jerry’s problems. Because they make little sense, such solutions will probably be achieved only on the basis of an arduous process of trial and error, as evidenced by the complex web of actions required to open a portal to a frozen area.

Not only that, but the difficulty curve is not very well built: one of the most complicated and laborious puzzles of the game is presented at the beginning of the adventure, when Jerry needs to follow the vague instructions of a magic card to invoke Marquis de Hoto. Such difficulty is further intensified by the arbitrary order in which some actions must be performed. It is only allowed to place a particular stone in the correct place, for instance, after the previous instructions have been followed to the letter. If the player solves the riddle of the stone first, their solution is not accepted. Unaware that timing matters, the player may simply think their answer was wrong and never try it again.

The art style chosen, composed of simple paintings full of vivid and saturated colors, emulates children’s books, matching perfectly with the fairy-tale tone of the story. The soundtrack is equally efficient, as it remains low in the background, never forcing a specific atmosphere into the environment, choosing only to complement it.

The Night of the Rabbit’s story and characters all share the same contagious energy. Its only problem, however, is serious: the puzzles do not always feel fair, demanding some great leaps of logic. Thereby, the game ends up contradicting one of the most repeated phrases during the adventure: “Anything is possible during a day in summer vacation.” After all, solving some of the puzzles without help – or a time-consuming method of trial and error – is hardly possible.

December 4, 2019.

Review originally published in Portuguese on July 20, 2016.