Bunny Must Die! Chelsea and the 7 Devils

There is something quietly remarkable about a one-person Japanese indie project that spent years circulating in fan-translation circles before anyone in the West even knew to ask for it. Bunny Must Die originally surfaced in 2006 as a doujin Windows title from Platine Dispositif, the same solo creator behind the Gundemonium bullet-hell series. The Steam release brought updated visuals, an optional remastered soundtrack, and a wider audience, though the game's essential DNA, weird, handcrafted, and stubbornly idiosyncratic, stayed intact. At its core this is a metroidvania. You guide Bunny, a woman cursed with cat ears against her will, through a semi-open labyrinth divided into seven color-coded zones: the Forest of Fools, the Forbidden Purrmodynamic Power Plant, the Palace of Folly, and four equally unhinged destinations beyond. The map unlocks gradually as you collect abilities, and the backtracking is genuinely pleasant rather than obligatory, because the world has a visual personality that rewards looking around. Weapons swap in and out Castlevania-style: the Automated Shooter for range, the Spiked Hammer for close-range piercing, the Faust Samurai demon katana for players who want flair, the Black Wing boomerang, the homing Roppongi Missile. Each has a specific use case, and swapping mid-fight matters. On top of that sits a time-manipulation system: you can stop time, rewind it, or push it into a slow crawl, but the resource pool is limited, so it demands actual thought rather than casual button-pressing. Complete Bunny's campaign by collecting all seven time power-ups and you unlock Chelsea's campaign, where the tone shifts. Chelsea destroys gates that Bunny had to unlock with careful key management, hovers through spike corridors that would have ended Bunny's run, and fires a straight-line charged shot rather than cycling a weapon inventory. The two characters play differently enough that the shared map genuinely feels designed for both of them, which is an engineering feat that a lot of bigger-budget games quietly fail. The honest caveat, and the community has been saying it since 2012, is the controls. The jumping requires a full stop before certain high jumps, doors open on timers that punish the same careful platforming the jump physics demand, and the movement language takes genuine time to internalize. Some players hit that wall and never come back. But there is a flip side worth defending: the control scheme has its own internal logic, and once that logic clicks, especially once wall-jumping and the backstep chain feel natural, the friction dissolves into something that reads as precision rather than punishment. The game-feel rewards learning it rather than fighting it. The soundtrack, whether you choose the original chiptune compositions or the arranged versions included in the remaster, does the heavy lifting that a small indie world always needs its audio to do. Bosses like the vampire-adjacent Baron Vladmu and the giant kitten devil Nuko Do Maron are introduced with dialogue that is genuinely funny, the good kind of Japanese-weird funny, not the localization-paste-a-grin-on-it kind. The whole thing sits in that rare space where cult status feels earned rather than assigned.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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