Radical Rabbit Stew

Genre: Arcade / Puzzle

Players: 1-4 Competitive (Local)

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Review:

Radical Rabbit Stew is a family-friendly top-down Arcade-style game with Puzzle elements released on multiple platforms in 2020, including Nintendo Switch. This game has you playing as an intergalactic janitor-turned-chef who goes off on a quest to rescue other chefs after they’re kidnapped by evil intergalactic bunnies. This generally takes the form of using various implements to knock said bunnies into cooking pot-shaped spaceships.

With an absurd setup like that, needless to say, this is a game that doesn’t take itself too seriously, and the presentation here feels like a perfect fit, using colorful retro-style pixel art visuals with great animation to give the game a classic look, pairing it with an excellent energetic synthesized soundtrack. Overall, this game has the look and feel of something that could have come out during the golden age of gaming, and it’s a presentation that works well for the game.

The gameplay here also carries that “classic” feel to it, though it’s fairly unique. Players progress through stages and must fill all of said stages pots with bunnies, and doing so often involves some elaborate series of springs, blocks that need to be busted through, or other series of obstacles the player must work through. This game does a good job of making a basic set of rules and then making those rules interact with each other in interesting ways.

At one point, for example, players get a grappling hook hand, which you discover gets rebounded by springs and redirected by curves the same as flying bunnies do. And players using the metal spoon can launch themselves using a spring just as easily as they can launch bunnies. The mechanics here are really clever, and make for some interesting puzzles on occasion. Then, there’s the boss fights, which are also pretty creative, not only making use of the player’s accumulated skills, but putting them to the test in interesting ways.

In addition to the normal campaign mode, there’s also an excellent free-for-all 4-player mode where players scramble to put the most bunnies in a giant pot by the time a timer ticks down. This mode is a lot of fun in its own right, giving players opportunities to steal each other’s bunnies or mess with one another. However, I will say that the multiplayer mode is one of two places where this game disappointed me – with only four stages to select, and no ability to change game options, this seems like a huge missed opportunity, and I really wish more effort had been made to expand this mode.

The other source of disappointment for me is this game’s stage editor mode. Ordinarily, I applaud any inclusion of a stage editor as a way to extend the life of a game. However, once again this feels like a missed opportunity. Stages built in this editor can apparently only be played within this editor. They can’t be shared online, and can’t be played in the game’s multiplayer mode. I feel like that last bit is the biggest shame – allowing players to design their own multiplayer stages would have given both game modes a huge boost in value. Without this option, this mode feels like a great hint at what could have been.

While there are certainly areas where Radical Rabbit Stew could have been improved upon, make no mistake – this is still a fantastic game that’s unique, fun, and full of personality. The single-player campaign is delightfully inventive, and even though the multiplayer mode is terribly limited, it’s still plenty of fun as well. Hopefully someday we’ll see a Radical Rabbit Stew 2, but in the meantime, this is an excellent game well worth having, even with the missed opportunities here.

tl;dr – Radical Rabbit Stew is a family-friendly top-down Arcade-style game with Puzzle elements where players need to knock rabbits into cooking pot-shaped spaceships. It’s a fun and refreshingly unique game with some great old-school sensibilities, and the competitive multiplayer here is a lot of fun too. Unfortunately, that multiplayer is lacking in content, and the limited use of a stage builder feels like a huge missed opportunity too. This is still overall an excellent game, but it feels like a bit of added content here would have made it an absolute must-have.

Grade: B+

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