My Brother Rabbit melds hidden object and point and click mechanics in a short but emotionally charged tale of a sibling relationship and overcoming illness. It’s an intriguing and cleverly designed puzzler that delights with its whimsical world but one that only narrowly dodges repetition.
Indeed, My Brother Rabbit teeters on the precipice of a trap that many in this genre fall in: repetition. In particular, once you encountered a mechanic or concept, it’s then reused throughout the rest of the experience with little to no evolution. My Brother Rabbit struggles with this after the first level, but fortunately the short overall experience helps mitigate this, moreover, each level’s fantastical setting helps provide something fresh to otherwise amuse and delight you.
While the tale is about a young girl with an illness and her young brother, both dealing with the illness along with their parents, the brother creates magical stories that revolve around hers and his experience through this, painting a terrifically unusual world that mirrors reality with animal characters and over-the-top, creative ways to help cure the girl or otherwise help move her to hospitals and the like. It’s a captivating set of levels and wondrous things to see and interact with, with a tinge of sadness and fear underneath. It’s quite beautiful.
It’s your job to complete a list of objectives within each level that revolve around collecting items and using specific items in the right place, therefore changing the environment, often by building or rebuilding something, and providing additional areas to search and solve these hidden object and point and click challenges within. And it’s very much ‘point and click’, with no playable character and instead you’re moving between rooms and scenes within each level with a button press and moving a cursor around to interact with objects.
These objectives are communicated to you with images, foregoing any voice cues, these either indicate what it is you’re searching for and how many you need and already have, or a somewhere within the level you need to interact with. It’s initially and little confusing and vague but once the first level is sussed out, the other stick to this logic and reuse concepts, making it a relatively easy title.
Overall, My Brother Rabbit only takes a couple of hours to complete, with the majority of the challenge coming from the hidden object aspect, with finding things that blend into the environment or are otherwise hidden in draws, boxes, etc. being frustrating and time consuming. The few puzzles on offer are fairly self-explanatory and pose no real challenge. However, despite this being such a short game, seeing each level and the imaginative, Alice in Wonderland-esque design of its representations of the real world happenings for this family, is compelling enough and clever enough to make the experience a highly satisfying one.
Thanks to Xbox and Artifex Mundi for supporting Thumbstix
