(18+) Started off well, but ended with Zhuchka's dream. A review of the domestic visual novel Tiny Bunny
Tiny Bunny tells the story of a young man exiled to the Russian outback who has to survive in the conditions of school reality and the occurring hellishness. The story is divided into five episodes, where in the first four you can still understand what is happening, while the fifth completely disorients you. Why did this happen and did the game deserve the negativity - we will find out in the review.
Back to the past
The game takes place in the period after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Then adults desperately tried to survive, and young people discovered a new world. The game demonstrates in detail the foreign films and cartoons, game consoles, and chemical goodies that appeared among the population. The characters are dressed in accordance with the fashion of the time. The younger generation can open an in-game dictionary that describes the mentioned elements.
The focus is on a young family who, due to a difficult financial situation, had to move to their grandmother's inherited house. The story is told from the perspective of Anton, a bespectacled boy who can draw well. The most important person for Anton is his younger sister named Olya, whom her parents do not let out of the house, and she has to spend her days watching cartoons and playing video games.
The first episode reveals the nuances of family life:
- Father and mother are constantly arguing, which makes the children afraid to hear the terrible word starting with "D" (divorce);
- The holidays will soon be over, and it will be time for Anton to go to school, where it is difficult for the boy to make friends with his compatriots;
- Anton is stuffed with pills and constantly sees something.
The horror component of the game is supported by the location of the house near the forest. At night, the forest is a good source of nightmares, which makes you wonder: were the images shown by the game fantasy or reality? Olya also complains that she is haunted by an owl at night. It gets even scarier when a policeman comes and reports the disappearance of a child.
Further episodes tell the story from the point of view of realism and hellishness.
Realism
Considerable attention is paid to Anton's visit to the school, to which he has to make his way through the forest. At school, Anton is bullied by a nasty fat bully. The player is free to fight back or endure everything. But his two accomplices always make themselves known - a sociopath named Roma and his hyena-laughing sycophant. You can start a so-called "friendship" with the bullies or stand in opposition, but most of them will poison the player's life with their existence until the very end.
Anton is free to start relationships with his peers. A girl named Polina became interested in him, who is engaged in music, dreams of moving out of the city and enjoys the suffering of dogs. In the fifth episode, the game forcibly pushes a love line with a girl named Katya. It gets worse from the fact that this love line leads to nothing. In a conversation with female characters, Anton is revealed as a disgusting person when he thinks about how he wants to "drink Polina". Usually boys his age have other interests, but apparently this accelerator started puberty early...
Rare mini-games are associated with female characters - you can play a parody of Duck Hunt with your sister, play the guitar with Polina, or fry cutlets with Katya.
The tragedies that occur are down to earth. A maniac who drags a garage around the Taiga is accused of the disappearance of children. A hired killer sent by Anton's father's former colleagues also makes himself known. All these illogical events are attributed to Anton's unhealthy mental state, who suffers from hallucinations. The question keeps you in suspense: "Do the pills he takes help his mind, or are they the source of visions?"
Hellishness
On his first trip to school, Anton meets a girl in a realistic fox mask. Lisa the Fox claims to live in the forest and lures Anton with promises of unlimited sweets. A mongrel dog named Zhuchka is constantly hanging around near Lisa. In fact, Zhuchka is a background character that is needed to get some of the endings. But for some reason, more time is devoted to her existence than to some of the main characters.
As he progresses, Anton meets new children in animal masks, which only he and his sister see. The animals pretend to be friendly and constantly offer to play in the forest. The paranormal component of the game is based on the fact that these creatures are connected with the disappearances.
It will be no secret to anyone that these suspicious individuals were monsters that obey the Master of the Forest. The monsters crave human flesh, and by the time they "tear off their masks", they want Anton to get meat for them. The player's choices determine: "will the protagonist be able to maintain humanity in this situation".
Fifth episode
For more than two years, loyal fans have been waiting for the end of the game. Before the release of the fifth episode, the game enjoyed positive reviews, but the exit from early access led to a massive appearance of negative reviews. Players were furious that the 20 endings associated with the fifth episode did not complete the plot, but deprived the events of any meaning and generated thousands of new questions. To make it easier to understand the cause of the disaster, I will give an example of the 1992 game Otogiriso.
Otogiriso is a Japanese visual novel that tells the story of a young couple who encountered hellishness. A feature of the game is the branching, which changes the events that occur. The setting and characters remain the same, but due to the player's actions, different stories are told that have a logical and consistent beginning, middle and end.
In Tiny Bunny, many actions and plot moves do not have a satisfying result. With the only exception - friendship or enmity with bullies ends the same way. Pursuing a love line with Polina or Katya leads to the same result, when Anton has to take or not take the pills. The lack of choice is compensated by the cruelty of the scenes that are associated with refusing to take the pills.
The endings contradict each other and are confusing:
- In the endings with hellishness, it is shown that the monsters do not care about ordinary weapons, and their power allowed them to bite off pieces of the Moon in the past. At the same time, the Moon shown in the same branches of the plot is not bitten off;
- In other endings, characters confirmed as monsters are disposed of with ordinary weapons;
- In the more "realistic" endings, it turns out that the main culprit was a man on a tractor or the main character. At the same time, the game aggressively hints that the occult was happening in parallel. It's just that bloodthirsty monsters massively decided to sit quietly during the events.
I refused to get some of the endings because I had to sacrifice Zhuchka or my sister for them. Fortunately, there is a video on the Internet with all the endings. From it you can find out that in the remaining ones the level of madness is even higher, which in itself is an achievement!
It is frustrating that the vast majority of endings are bad and heavily rely on scenes of violence. In the good one, Olya has a family, but even there there is a catch! I consider the one where they allow you to sacrifice Roma to be good - I only felt this good in The Walking Dead from Telltale Games, when the game finally allowed me to shoot Kenny!
Diagnosis
"The Bunny" suffers from the lack of a clear direction in the narrative. The plot simultaneously tries to be serious and down-to-earth; to scare with horrors from folklore; to pretend that what is happening is a hallucination; to make monsters a threat of galactic scale that can devour planets. Due to the fact that the game is trying to cover everything, it does not succeed properly in anything.
You can ignore the problems of the fifth episode, enjoy the views and atmosphere from the recent past, as well as the work of the voice actors. The Bunny can be praised for not being afraid to show violent scenes, but the game is spoiled by a terrible decision for a horror game, when all the characters were made unpleasant - ESPECIALLY the main character. When you only worry about the fate of Olya out of all the characters, then the fate of the rest does not cause any special emotions - and therefore no interest.
The developers claim that they have heard the complaints of the players and are working on bringing the fifth episode in order. It remains to wish them good luck from the bottom of my heart, since this task will require no less titanic efforts than the creation of the game itself!
