PixlBit

I'm not too familiar with the point-and-click genre, so I wasn't sure what to expect when I recieved a review code for My Brother Rabbit. From what I do know, having played through the excellent Tormentum: Dark Sorrow and about an hour or so of Double Fine's Broken Age, I doubt My Brother Rabbit is breaking new ground, but it has some cool features. Find out why I think the positives and negatives of My Brother Rabbit result in an average game by watching the included video review or read the text review, if you'd prefer. 

My Brother Rabbit is a fairly short point-and-click game, with fairly standard gameplay, but it has its charms. While it doesn’t break much new ground, an intriguing art style, relaxing music and atmosphere, and a couple clever mechanics keep it from being disposable, though nothing here elevates the game to greatness either.

As someone with limited experience in the point-and-click genre, I can’t really tell you whether certain mechanics in the game are freshly-conceived ideas or not, but they worked well enough for me. For instance, any items you may need are either highlighted or grayed out, depending on what area you’re searching in. While this doesn’t always mean you should leave a certain area – there are items you’ll need to find the game may not have highlighted for you yet, marked by what look like fireflies – it does cut down on the time wasted playing I Spy that can plague many point-and-click games.Once you’ve found the items you need, the game tells you exactly where you need to drop those items in order to start a puzzle. Some might find this to be patronizing hand-holding, but when it comes to finding things, I’m personally ok with this, since spending hours searching for small objects ad nauseum is one of my least favorite things to do in a game.

Having said this, the I Spy aspect of the game can still be annoying, especially when you need only one more item to start a puzzle or advance, the game is telling you you’re in the right area to look for it, but you won’t be able to get to that item until you’ve solved a different puzzle altogether, or started searching for a different set of items. While I was still able to find whatever I was supposed to be looking for fairly quickly, I would have liked some sort of hint system to guide me after overlong stretches of these mindless scavenger hunts. This was especially true when tiny objects I was meant to find blended a bit too well into the game’s backgrounds.

As for the puzzles themselves, none of them were too hard, even if some of them took me longer to figure out than I’d like to admit. Most of the puzzles you unlock by finding item sets are some variation on sliding tiles, color matching etc. and the game features plenty of standard point-and-click puzzles involving combining objects to form keys and knives and such you’ll need to unlock treasure chests or get access to new items.

Most of these puzzles were balanced enough for me to feel a sense of accomplishment without banging my head against the wall. I solved some puzzles with trial and error when I got lazy, though it was always faster to do things the proper way.

There isn’t much more to the gameplay in My Brother Rabbit, so if you need more variety than finding objects and solving puzzles, you should probably skip this one. The art style is appealing and calming and what little story is here is cute enough, but aside from some neat, potentially time-saving ideas, there really isn’t much on offer here I could see being absent from any standard point-and-click adventure. Plus, the story is incredibly anticlimactic. I almost felt the game was mocking me for having taken so long to finish it, since its ending had all the gravity of an afternoon special or a Power Rangers PSA about friendship.

If you really like the art style and love point-and-clicks, however, you might find something to like here if the game pops up in a Steam sale. It’s a fairly standard, average game, but it’s certainly not bad and I enjoyed my time with it well enough when I was in need of something a bit more clicky and a bit less shooty-stabby than what else is on the market. Just don’t go in expecting this game to wow you in any significant way.