The guys at Artifex Mundi sure do like a fantastical point ‘n’ click. From Nightmares of the Deep to Enigmatis, the Switch eShop has got a bunch of them in its library now, and that’s a range which My Brother Rabbit also sits in.
Visually this is very similar to both of those games, with a distinct art style and formula of making your way through the story by solving mini-puzzles and navigating back and forth between screens to uncover items which may not have been usable the first time you passed. It’s definitely an Artifex Mundi world.
The game is structured as a series of hunt-and-collect challenges which, when completed, do their bit to open up your path to the next stage of the narrative. You’ll come across a puzzle which requires a certain number of a specific object, whether it be egg timers, ladybirds or jigsaw pieces. You’ll likely have seen the majority of the items you need to collect blended in with the scenery you’ve already explored, but it will nonetheless turn out to be a case of clicking on every available inch of the environment in order to find that last elusive piece.
But, in a pretty puzzling decision, this is all done with the control stick to move the cursor and the A button to select. This seems the perfect sort of game to show off the Switch’s touch-screen capabilities, but for some reason they haven’t been included, and that’s a major oversight. Revving the A button on every bit of the screen can get pretty difficult on your right thumb after a while.
The game is split into four or so main sections, meaning that once you’ve completed all of the collectathons in one area you no longer have to plod through the same scenes again, which is handy for the times when you can’t find an elusive final item for the life of you. The repetitive music is a little too much to bear, too.
Fortunately, the mini-puzzles, which range from tile-sliders to flat-pack furniture-like set-pieces which have you picking up objects from the surroundings before putting them in the right place according to instructions found somewhere on the screen, can be a welcome break, though some ideas are stronger than others.
My Brother Rabbit also suffers from a weird disconnect between its hand-drawn story sections and its gameplay. The story is about two siblings, with the sister falling ill and the brother taking care of her in her sorry state. It’s the brother’s toy rabbit which then somehow appears in the fantasy world – the story itself seems to almost run independently from the bits you play.
Despite the criticisms, My Brother Rabbit is a decently entertaining seek-and-locate game for its short run time. Artifex Mundi have better offerings elsewhere on the eShop, though.
My Brother Rabbit £13.49
Summary
My Brother Rabbit is a short experience which is oddly missing touch controls, but is enjoyable while it lasts. There’s room for improvement, though.