My Brother Rabbit is a unique adventure game with hand-painted graphics and personality for days, developed by indie studio Artifex Mundi.
We play as a cute but cranky rabbit, the star of a story a little boy tells his sick sister to help her deal with her illness. The titular rabbit leaves his cozy, underground home to help his friend, a flower, so she can feel better and bloom again.
To save his friend, the rabbit has to use his wits and logic to resolve mysteries and solve puzzles inspired by the classic point-and-click games of yesteryear. You can pick up items, and use them to overcome the different puzzles. You can even combine items in your inventory to create new ones.
The game features many problems to solve, and some of them are separate minigames. One minigame I played was very similar to a popular mobile game where you need to connect colored nodes without crossing the lines. According to the developers, there will be 30 minigames when the game releases.
The beautiful, hand-crafted graphics and the pleasant melodies (courtesy of Arkadiusz Reikowski, the composer of Layers of Fear) will spark your imagination. Most importantly, all the characters in the game speak in a sort of gibberish, so the story and puzzles don’t rely on speech to provide information.
The combination of classic point-and-click gameplay with a cartoony art style that isn’t dependent on language makes a game that can genuinely be played with the whole family, together at the same time. Artifex Mundi advises playing My Brother Rabbit with children between the ages of “small” and “smaller,” even if they are not familiar with the English language yet. The game is genuinely universal and can transcend the language and even age carriers.
The devs have implemented tools that will help players solve puzzles without getting discouraged. Your current goal is always present in the upper right corner of the screen, and there’s even an indication if you can achieve that goal in your current location. It’s an engaging hint system that doesn’t use language and does not tell you outright what to do – an excellent middle-ground for all types of players.
My Brother Rabbit is full of that magical sense of wonderment children bring to everything. It looks like a perfect game for young parents to play with their kids and teach them about problem-solving in a fun way. Because this is 2018, and books are still not interactive enough.
My Brother Rabbit arrives September 21 to PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Switch.
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