Rabbit Escape

Creativity is the driving force in the video games industry, although less and less so in the last few years. The indie scene may have been the delicate stem of a shy flower at first, but nowadays it’s more of an obnoxious bush that keeps growing and choking everything around it. Hence, since it only takes a few days to code and publish a game, there are many developers that prefer to steal ideas and rebrand them instead of coming up with something original, just to get a few bucks on the AppStore or on Google Play.

  Rabbit Escape looks a tad sketchy at first, probably because of the graphics, but it quickly wins you over once you tackle a level or two and see what it’s actually got to offer. In short, this is a puzzle game akin to Lemmings, and the goal is to help a handful or rabbits get to the end of every level by performing certain actions in order to break walls, dig holes, or even build ramps.   The rabbits fall from the top of the screen at the beginning of each level, and they start to move in a predictable fashion across the maze. If they hit an obstacle they switch directions and continue moving, but only if the said obstacle is a wall, otherwise they can fall and die, or end up in many other nasty traps. Thankfully, there are special abilities that can be used to avoid all these unpleasant situations.

As such, you can instruct rabbits to dig, climb, build ramps, or simply stand in a certain spot and redirect the flux of incoming furry friends. Naturally, doing so can sometimes result in some of the rabbits not being able to get to the exit because of their tasks, which is kind of a bummer. However, you only need to rescue a certain number of them in order to complete the levels, so there’s always room for error, depending of course on the difficulty level.   Since the game was designed to run on mobile devices as well, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that it’s not the best-looking project out there. In fact, the graphics are anything but pretty, but then again they do not really matter in this case. One of the actual problems is the lack of tooltips for the different abilities, since you can have a hard time figuring things out at first if you happen to miss one of the written hints.

In the end, Rabbit Escape does feel a bit too much like Lemmings or similar games, but then again it also adds its own flavor to the whole ordeal. Hence, it can easily keep you occupied for a few hours, not to mention the fact that it comes with an integrated level editor if you are feeling particularly creative at some point.