What the heck is Radical Rabbit Stew? If the title isn’t enough to put you off immediately, you’ll find that this new title from Pugstorm AB and publisher Sold-Out Software is a quirky little puzzle/action game with a strange premise and surprisingly endearing gameplay. The name might actually be keeping this game from getting more traction though, as there’s a lot more here than the display image and title might suggest!
In Radical Rabbit Stew, you play an, um, space diner’s cleaning boy. Yeah. Really. Apparently the food is really good at this place, so good that an evil Rabbit Queen decides she’s tired of her bland food and kidnaps all the cooks! It’s left to you, a tiny boy that looks like a blue gingerbread man to save the cooks from the queen’s clutches and restore the diner! The premise is ridiculous, but with the excellent professional pixel artwork, it feels more like a lost 90s game from the intro than anything else.
That 90s vibe is reinforced by the game itself, a multi-level endeavor to vanquish your lagomorphic foes and rescue your friends! You start out with just a wooden spoon, able to whack rabbits. If they see you, they rush you, but the spoon sends them tumbling away to bounce off of any red springs in their paths or slam into walls dazed, allowing you to whack them again. The goal is to piledrive them into the waiting bowls of stew, thus clearing a path to the next area and sending them packing. It’s unclear whether the evil hench-rabbits get consumed or not, but it’s definitely nicer to assume so.
The spoon mechanic is the basis for most of the game. As you progress through the levels, you’ll find hearts to increase your life and odd, unique spoons for more versatile attacks and puzzle solving. There are four different spoons available over the course of the game with varied functions. Eventually you’ll end up using a combination of the spoons to solve the various puzzles each stage presents. First off are the single screen affairs, small stages that usually have a simple puzzle to solve. Whack the rabbit into the stew and you’re golden. The stage automatically ends when all the stew pots are filled with rabbits, so if you’re still walking around, you definitely missed something. Then there are the multi-screen stages, large, complex affairs where a variety of techniques and spoons are usually required to proceed. As Radical Rabbit Stew progresses, the larger stages tend to get more frequent and more difficult. Finally, there are the boss stages.
Boss stages are comprised of mini-bosses and final bosses, as per the 90s theme that Radical Rabbit Stew follows. Mini-bosses are encountered about halfway through each level, presenting a sudden challenge when you’re not expecting it. Final bosses are at the end of each world, and are naturally more challenging than the mini-bosses. Both are single screen affairs, locking you into increasingly more difficult situations as you fight the weird bunny-themed enemies of Radical Rabbit Stew.
Unfortunately, difficulty is one of the key areas where the game falls a bit flat. Most games of this style tend to have a slow ramp-up in difficulty, with puzzles getting harder as the game continues. They tend to be challenging, yet approachable, forcing the player to try just a bit harder each time. Radical Rabbit Stew has taken a slightly more chaotic approach to difficulty, one that is similar to the excellent Evan’s Remains, another indie puzzle title we reviewed here. Stages in Radical Rabbit Stew initially slowly ramp up difficulty. As more and more concepts are introduced, the stages get a bit tougher. However, after the first world, the difficultly varies greatly from stage to stage and random levels are incredibly challenging while others are ridiculously easy and only take a minute or two.
This difficulty is primarily due to the random elements introduced in Radical Rabbit Stew. As you play, enemies start to pop out of spawn points at regular intervals. The worst of these are bombs and flying enemies. Bombs land pretty much wherever you’re standing, forcing you to move, be hit, or get hurt. They choreograph their landing point with a flashing red square for a few seconds, but for a game like this, dodging bombs while trying to smack rabbits into hard-to-reach stew pots and walking across single space pathways is a bit of a juggling act. Most of the bomb stages felt irritatingly rushed, and while they lengthen the game because you’ll die frequently, they’re mostly just irritating. The same goes for flying enemies, which immediately assault you if you get near them. In later stages there are small swarms of them, or they’re constantly spawning while you walk across platforms, try to whack rabbits about, and perform other tasks, all while fighting off flying rabbit after flying rabbit. It’s almost rage inducing in a few levels, where you’ll end up repeating them until your teeth grind.
Aside from the difficulty fluctuations, Radical Rabbit Stew also has some weird stage design choices, artificially increasing the stage sizes just so the devs could make larger levels, even though you don’t do anything in them. Many stages feature areas where you use a spoon to fling yourself down a path of blocks, but it’s just like watching a series of dominoes fall and actually accomplishes nothing other than you sitting and waiting to be able to play again. This is particularly irritating if you perish on a level , as you have to start over and get through the tedious environmental hazards and travel again to get back to where you were. Honestly, this is simply poor level design thrown in for effect as it has absolutely no impact on gameplay. It would have made more sense if these areas got you to blue coins, which are the optional collectibles included in Radical Rabbit Stew for completists, but that’s not always the case.
Collecting the blue coins isn’t all that fun by the way, so unless you’re a compulsive achievement collector, don’t bother. However, overall, Radical Rabbit Stew is pretty fun, surprisingly so even. Visually, this is a great game with a wonderful throwback retro feel to it and it’s just creative enough and irreverent enough to be a refreshingly fun experience. The music is decent, but nothing outstanding. You probably won’t be hunting down the soundtrack on this one, but it’s still solid and works well with the game. There are several different worlds in the game with a wide variety of areas, environmental effects, and an oddly variable stage count. Just like the oddly inconsistent stage difficulties, there are an oddly inconsistent number of stages and each world is a different size. This isn’t an incredibly long game either, so unless you get stuck on a level with bombs or birds, you’ll probably blow through this one in around 4 or 5 hours tops.
However, in addition to the main campaign, Pugstorm has also included a versus mode, which was not played during the course of this review but allows up to 4 players locally. To further expand its longevity, Radical Rabbit Stew also includes a full level editor, allowing you to create and play your own stages, allowing aspiring game designers to play their hearts out in levels they’ve created. It’s a nice addition, even if not everyone will use it, and allows for use of basically everything you play in the campaign mode.
Radical Rabbit Stew is simply fun! There’s a lot of clever design work here, it’s a neat premise that sounds ridiculous but somehow works, there’s some great cheesy comedy with bunny butts, subtle nods to Monty Python and other great stuff. There are also a few design choices that make the whole experience a little more uneven than it should be, and occasionally quite frustrating. All in all, it’s much more positive than negative though, and for a shorter puzzle game, it really feels like an enjoyable experience. At the relatively low price point of $16, you will definitely get your money’s worth, and with the game just released, it’s still 10% off! Hop on over and check it out!
This review is based on a digital copy of Radical Rabbit Stew provided by the publisher. It was played on a Nintendo Switch in both docked and undocked modes and played great in both! All screenshots are of actual gameplay. Radical Rabbit Stew is also available for PS4, Xbox One, and PC on Steam! Don’t forget to check out the online Radical Rabbit Recipes on the game’s website either, an awesome little addition for a cooking-adjacent game!