First Impressions - The Night of the Rabbit

The Night of the Rabbit has beautiful Curse of Monkey Island style visuals

I've had the game The Night of the Rabbit for some time now. I even played it several months ago but after multiple reformats and re-installs of the operating system I managed to lose the save game files (along with a whole bunch of other games). So, I started playing the game again as I'm way behind on my 2013 reviews (you read right, 2013 reviews) and it looks like I never typed up a First Impressions article for the first time I played the game. So here we go...

What I like

• Beautiful art style: This is definitely one of the strength with this game and indeed many Daedalic Entertainment games in general. The Night of the Rabbit has taken a leaf out of The Curse of Monkey Island's book and the results are spectacular.
• Fantasy world: The magical, fantasy world you get to explore would not feel out of place in a children's novel. There are lots of cute, talking critters you can interact with along the way.
• Voice acting: Seems to be a lot of British voice actors in this but Daedalic have done a good job in hiring talented voice actors.
• Music: Although the music can become repetitive at times, overall it's pretty good and suitably magical

What I don't like

• Scriptwriting: While the voice acting is pretty good the same can't be said for the scriptwriting – many times you'll get the feeling what you just heard was meant to be a joke but it instead falls flat on its face.
• Puzzles are starting to become convoluted: I wasn't having too much trouble with the puzzles until recently. I'm at a stage of the game where I've got a lot of inventory items and lots of places I can go and objects to interact with. So the old tactic of trying to manipulate everything in the environment with one of your inventory items is going to be tiresome and laborious if you happen to get stuck. Besides, that's not the real way to play a point 'n' click adventure anyway – it's best if you figure out the solution to a puzzle using wits not trial and error! Turns out that in my case the solution was using an inventory item I never thought of using because I live a way too sheltered life :) (not saying anyone who did figure out the solution are criminals or anything but it helps if you think with that mindset).
• Frame rate drops: On some screens there seems to frame rate drops which I found surprising for a 2D point 'n' click adventure game although normally it doesn't have a huge impact on performance.

Verdict

Usually I give up if I have to resort to using a walkthrough for a point 'n' click adventure and I've already done so. However, I'll raise the limit to three times before I consider throwing in the towel on this one. It truly is a magical adventure provided you're good at point 'n' click adventures (which I used to be, but not anymore I guess!)