Before the rabbits inherited Earth there were humans, but they’re long gone and not a concern any more. Humanity wasn’t shy about leaving the broken remains of its civilization behind, though, and the rabbits have been raiding the scrap piles for centuries for anything that can make life in the ice age a little more comfortable. Stamp, known as Rusty to his friends, is a grizzled old bunny living the quiet life excavating Smokestack Mountain, listening to the secrets the junk is trying to tell him and minding his own business. His old life is gone but the new one isn’t so bad, and then one day a group of young rabbits known as the BBs come to town to see what they can find in the mountain. They may not be rivals but the BBs are definitely green, so it doesn’t take long for a lonely old rabbit to get dragged into their adventures whether he wants to or not.
A Rabbit In A Mech, The Most Dangerous Fusion Of Nature And Science
Rusty Rabbit is a metroivania-ish adventure through the scrap heap, featuring a middle aged explorer who may have withdrawn from the world but hasn’t given up on it. Stamp collects all the junk he can find while exploring the ruins from the cockpit of his mech, which makes getting around and dealing with the occasional robo-critter much easier than it would be for a bunny on foot. In standard metroivdania fashion the game opens up with the mech, which Rusty’s named Junkster, having a wide range of abilities that last just long enough to get through a basic tutorial before an accident breaks most of them. Junkster can still move and break blocks of scrap, but the dash, grapple, and other abilities will need to be repaired and new ones discovered in the adventure ahead.
While Rusty Rabbit’s gameplay will be comfortably familiar to anyone who’s ever done a little adventure-platforming, one of the surprising things about it is how heavily narrative the game promises to be. Of the hour the run through the demo took I’d say at least 30 minutes were dialogue, with Rusty and the BBs having plenty to say and willing to be chatty while saying it. Granted, it’s a bit of a mismatch between Rusty’s slower delivery making for dialogue scenes that last a bit longer than expected when compared with the faster action of the gameplay, but if you don’t mind sacrificing the voice acting you can just click through while reading the conversations to speed things up.
The Rusty Rabbit demo that released today on Steam, PS4/5, and Nintendo Switch is fairly short overall, but it’s a nice taste of the bunny and mech adventure, giving hints of a wider story ahead and a tech tree filled with upgrades that promise to expand nicely on the run/jump/drill gameplay. I got to play a bit farther than this demo goes at the 2024 PAX East, seeing some town interactions and options for using the scrap parts Rusty picks up, so can confirm there’s more to the game than this build shows off. Nicer as a little more gameplay would have been, though, Rusty Rabbit shows off just enough to put itself on the radar as one to remember for its April 17 release.
