We feel like we’re going mad. Not quite ‘Rabbit Crazy’ mad, but close. You see, we’ve just finished reviewing an indie platformer called Fruit Adventure, which released on the same day as The Rabbit Crazy Adventure. We hopped from that game to this one, and, confusingly, they are almost identical. The sprites might be different, but it features the same key, which unlocks the same gate to slam the same POW block at the end of the level. There are the same Thwomp-like blocks, the same collectible stars and the same spinning platforms. It’s even got the same level layouts. We played vast swathes of levels that were repeated from one title to the other.
But we check the Xbox store cards and The Rabbit Crazy Adventure is made by Rafael Valim Fernandes, while Fruit Adventure is from Joffre Macedo Neto. So, what’s happening here? Has ChatGPT got into gaming? Are we seeing the beginning of Skynet? Or are these two mates who are swapping code and ideas? We can’t tell you. What we can tell you is that we’ve spent two evenings with feelings of deja vu, playing basically the same game twice over.
There’s no doubt in our minds about which is the ugliest. The Rabbit Crazy Adventure is the malformed cousin to Fruit Adventure, with a raggedy rabbit that could have been a character in Five Night At Freddy’s. We find him a little unsettling, to be honest. He’s got a low but long jumping arc that we suppose is correct, based on him being a rabbit and all.
The rest of the game doesn’t look much better. Where Fruit Adventure was colourful and coherent in its theming – you’re a fruit looking to defeat fast food – the rabbit here is fighting bees, rocks and ghosts. There might be a pattern, but we’re buggered if we’re seeing it. And none of it is what we’d call attractive. Even the Thwomp-style blocks look a little like a decapitated Mr Blobby.
There are fifty levels here (ten more than Fruit Adventure, woo!) and they are simple as pie. You start on the left-hand side of the screen, and your task is to find a key on the way to unlocking a gate at the end of the level. That gate contains the switch that marks the level as done, and ticks off one of the fifty.
In your way are platforms and enemies. It’s the usual cast of moving platforms, temporary platforms and platforms that move like a windmill round a central point. On occasion, big blocks drop down to crush you, but if you move fast or take a step backward, they will be out of action and a potential future platform. The enemies, as mentioned, are a motley bunch, and either crawl or fly at you. All of them are dispatched with a single bottom-bounce to the forehead.
There’s something a little off about the bottom-bouncing. The collision detection isn’t quite right, so it’s perfectly possible to get hurt by a ghost or bee because you haven’t quite jumped as high as The Rabbit Crazy Adventure thinks you need to. We lost a few hearts this way.
But it doesn’t really matter. We didn’t lose a single life to enemies in The Rabbit Crazy Adventure, mainly because you have three hearts to lose and there’s barely more than three enemies in a level. You’d have to be willfully failing to get nobbled by enemies. Falling on spikes or dropping down pits is far more likely, but even then we didn’t trigger the ‘Die 10 times’ achievement before the end of the game.
Which is something of a problem in our view. The Rabbit Crazy Adventure is about as difficult as drunkenly putting your keys in a keyhole. It might take a couple of goes, and it’s going to feel clumsy, but you’re going to get there eventually. After forty minutes, The Rabbit Crazy Adventure was done with absolute zero prospect of a replay.
And like Fruit Adventure, it’s got severe problems with repetition. It repeats in a way that we haven’t experienced in any game other than Fruit Adventure: whole sections of level are repeated, to the pixel, from one level to the next. We even played one Thwomp-filled section four levels in a row. Did they think we wouldn’t notice or wouldn’t care? You at least get good at it, we suppose.
It’s incredibly strange as there are level constructions that look like our eight-year old daughter put them together in Super Mario Maker. Honestly, she’s handed us levels in that game which are more precise and better constructed than this. But the designers clearly liked what they made, as they repeated it three levels on the trot. Maybe we were right about the whole ChatGPT thing.
We were confused by the wrong order of adjectives in the title (surely it’s The Crazy Rabbit Adventure?) and it only went downhill from there. Because this is a bare bones platformer, one that feels like half-hearted programming coursework.
Sure, The Rabbit Crazy Adventure is functional, and we managed to cross the finish line (only 1000G rather than Fruit Adventure’s 2000G, it should be noted), but that’s no measure of a good game. It’s about as crazy as those people who say ‘you have to be crazy to work here’. In all, we’re fairly sure you can keep your £4.19 in your pocket.
