My Brother Rabbit

I have a soft spot for games that know exactly what they are and refuse to apologize for it, and My Brother Rabbit sits comfortably in that rare category. It is a static-screen point-and-click adventure from Artifex Mundi, but describing it that way undersells what the studio actually built here. Rather than the studio's usual gothic hidden-object formula, this one draws from a quieter lineage - think Samorost or The Tiny Bang Story rather than a junkpile hunt-fest. The result is something that feels genuinely handcrafted and emotionally purposeful. The premise operates on two layers simultaneously. In the real world, a young girl is seriously ill, cycling through hospital visits and treatments her brother can barely comprehend. In the imagination, her stuffed rabbit becomes a protagonist on a quest to nurse a frail flower-creature back to health through five surreal lands filled with robo-moose, melting clocks, floating baobabs, and color-coded spiders. The connection between the two layers is never stated out loud - there is no dialogue anywhere in the game - but the watercolor animated vignettes between chapters do the emotional heavy lifting with genuine restraint. It handles a child's illness without tipping into sentimentality, which is harder than it sounds. Gameplay breaks into three interlocking types: collection hunts where you search each screen for a specific number of items like butterflies or ladybirds, item-use puzzles that stay self-contained to the screen you are on, and standalone logic puzzles at chapter gates - tangrams, weight balancers, rotating rings, color-ordering challenges, jigsaw variants. Crucially, there is no hint button and no puzzle skip, which distinguishes it from almost every other Artifex Mundi release. A screen indicator tells you whether items you need are present in your current view, which cuts the aimless back-and-forth that makes lesser games in the genre feel punishing. The puzzle variety is real: no two feel identical, and a few late-game ones require careful attention to clues scattered across earlier screens. The flip side is that some puzzles communicate their logic through pictogram instructions alone, and when those pictograms are ambiguous, you are on your own. The soundscape deserves its own sentence. The score carries a keyboard-and-accordion wistfulness that sits just below cheerful - melancholy without being oppressive. The opening song, performed by Emi Evans (the vocalist behind the NieR: Automata soundtrack), sets a tone the rest of the audio works hard to sustain. Most stages reward close listening. The art is equally considered: hand-drawn scenes that read like Dali filtered through a child's logic, dense with details that reward slow exploration and also serve as the puzzle field you are hunting through. The honest criticisms are real but manageable. The game runs five to six hours on a first playthrough, and replayability is thin once object placement is memorized. Some reviewers found the hunt-and-collect loop repetitive in the back half, and a small number of puzzles lean on oblique logic that will stop some players cold with no recourse. The pacing is intentionally slow, which is a defensible choice for the subject matter, but players seeking urgency will feel the drag. What you will not find here is the big emotional payoff of a sprawling narrative game - the story is a mood and a metaphor, not a plot with twists. If that trade-off sounds acceptable, the craft on display more than earns the time.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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