I like cute things, many can say the same and some would say the opposite, though I feel like that’s the major consensus everywhere now. Sometimes cute things are nice and harmless, sometimes cute things can cleanly bite through the neck of Sir Bors and Gawain. Speaking of killer rabbits… Let’s talk about Rabbit and Steel!

Mino_Dev created Rabbit and Steel with this being their second game sharing both the art style and the aerial battling aspect from their first game Maidens and Spells, though my assumption is only from a quick glance at both their store pages and noticing how both seem to have the same style of art and interface. Still, Rabbit and Steel is more of a party game & Maiden and Spell is a fighting game.

Rabbit and Steel blend together the patterned bullet hell boss fight akin to the 「 Touhou Project 」series, with the raid aspect that many usually attribute to MMOs such as Final Fantasy 14 as a more recent example with a dash of roguelike elements from games such as Dead Cells. Though I am not fully familiar with the raid aspect, I can see the angle they’re going from as a former RO Classic player, I feel old just saying that suddenly…

You can play solo or party up with 3 other bunnies to raid and conquer the 8 different areas, starting with the “Kingdom’s Outskirt” and ending with “The Pale Keep” and “Moonlit Pinnacle” always being the beginning and final stretch that one will visit when playing. A thing to note is that there are 4 modes to choose from: Cute, Normal, Hard and Lunar mode, each being harder than the last and Lunar mode being the “True Ending of the Story” route when you play solo.

Rabbit and Steel “has” a “story”, and I write it in heavy quotation marks as I haven’t exactly finished or have come close to finishing the story but from what I can gather through my multiple attempts throughout the different areas of the game is that the Moonlit Kingdom went incommunicado with the other kingdoms, the animal people of the kingdom going feral and attacking anyone who isn’t their own on sight and a giant white tower stretching up into the sky… Basically Final Fantasy IV.

Though the story of Rabbit and Steel may not be what most are here for but is a welcome addition when you don’t have anyone to play with as the story only starts and kinda happens whenever you play solo, which is a smart move by the dev so that there aren’t any spoilers when you do play multiplayer.

What most may be here for is the roguelike aspect and replayability of Rabbit and Steel as in the game, there are a ton of unlockables whenever you do a specific task in the game ranging from beating an area with a specific difficulty to taking no damage at all while equipping one trinket, it rewards the players by not only being good at the game but also knowing the ins and out of it’s mechanics as some of the requirements are quite specific such as to “Receive no rewards from a fight because you took too long to win” to unlock an equipment set.

I feel like if you give someone a controller and a pair to play with and tell them to “play this game” with Rabbit and Steel, a lot of people would ask who you are and how you get inside their houses but after some physical convincing, anyone who puts in the time to play this could imagine that it’s very much an easy to learn, hard to master type of game that I genuinely believe could be for anyone, be it young or old as there’s no crass language or any innuendos as far as I played.

Rabbit and Steel is somewhat in a weird place as an indie game, where it’s popular enough in that niche area of a Venn diagram where the circles of Bullet Hell fans, roguelike fans and MMO raid fans collide, but it’s genuinely one of the more polished and regularly updated games that I‘ve played in recent times that has been well worth the cheap price tag, with it being easy to get into and having a depth of complexity hidden underneath the first few tries. For those who stick with it, it offers a mixture of the better parts of both the roguelike and raiding elements combined into a distilled, streamlined yet still enjoyable experience.

I would recommend everyone to at least try out the free demo of this game, which is available on Steam, as it gives you a well-rounded portion of the content in the paid game, so you can at least gauge if the gameplay is right for you.