Merry Glade

I went in expecting something gentle. The pastel colours, the round-cheeked bunny, the top-down forest glades - nothing about the visual presentation prepares you for what Anatoliy Loginovskikh has actually built here. Merry Glade is a single-developer, mouse-only action-puzzle game where each level asks you to guide Bunny to his beloved Carrot while an increasingly hostile world tries to end him in elaborate, gory ways. Explosions, acid pools, mines, traps, and what the community cheerfully describes as maniac elks are all waiting to make Bunny very, very flat. The contrast between the whimsical hand-drawn aesthetic and the graphic violence is not a bug - it is the entire joke, and Loginovskikh commits to it completely. The controls are about as stripped-back as it gets: mouse only, top-down perspective, no keyboard shortcuts needed to play (though the community has noted hidden functions tucked away for achievement hunters). That simplicity is a double-edged thing. On one hand it means the game is genuinely accessible to anyone with a working mouse and a tolerance for cartoon carnage. On the other, the controls carry a deliberate clunkiness that some players will find charming and others will find frustrating - it feeds into the slapstick spirit of the whole thing rather than feeling like a technical oversight. Levels vary in difficulty from breezy to legitimately fiddly, and there is a final boss encounter that players on the Steam community boards have called pretty challenging despite the game's casual framing. What holds Merry Glade together is the soundtrack. Loginovskikh composed the music himself, and it received enough love to warrant a separately sold original soundtrack release. The score sits in that particular register - slightly absurd, slightly melancholy - that only solo developers seem to find. It gives the carnage an odd warmth. Community tags like "Great Soundtrack" and "Atmospheric" showing up alongside "Gore" and "Violent" tells you something real about the tonal balancing act happening here. There is also a generous achievement system with over 75 achievements, several tied to hunting specific mushroom types by hovering your cursor over them across the levels, which is the kind of quietly inventive detail that rewards players who actually pay attention. Where Merry Glade falls short is scope. This is a short game, probably completable in one or two sittings for most players, and there is no replay hook once the levels are done. The mouse-only control scheme, praised on Steam as accessible, will occasionally feel imprecise at moments the game asks for accuracy. And the surreal tone - potato-like creatures, pigs, outer space sequences showing up in gameplay footage - can feel scattershot rather than purposefully weird if you are not already sympathetic to Loginovskikh's particular brand of absurdism. His catalog across other titles suggests this is consistent authorial vision rather than randomness, but first-time players may need a moment to recalibrate. For the price point this sits at, Merry Glade is a genuinely handcrafted curiosity. It knows what it is. It does not overstay its welcome. If you have any affection for small, strange, one-person games that have a specific sense of humour and mean exactly what they show you, this glade is worth a visit.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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