A fair disclaimer: if you enjoy ball-bustingly hard platformers with strict margins of error and the idea(but not the promise) of high skill-cap action you may enjoy this game. Unfortunately in my experience it will fight you every step of the way. There's a reasonable game here, somewhere, for some people.
A crash course in how to make a terrible platformer, Bunny Must Die follows an adage that plagues this genre: if you can't make it good then make it hard. BMD isn't available on Steam anymore, a boon to its users, but it's also been updated and put on the Playstation store(4, 5, Vita.) I wouldn't want to see more money reach this developer for fear that they feel encouraged to repeat it and I'm not sure what there is to remaster in this nostalgic turd. Did they remake all of the controls, the terrible levels, the cheap bosses, the entire game? Though I am putting the clunky cart that can't turn before the flat-chested horse here.
BMD doesn't pretend to have a story. Bunny, or Chelsea, has fallen victim to anime memes circa the early 2000s and grown cat ears. Go to an indie dungeon full of timed completion sections and kill some unrelated devils to cure her. The only unifying theme across the game is the awful controls and making fun of Bunny's chest until you find an upgrade that lets you get a big bust and makes your controls worse when you use it. See, that's the one theme.
I try to maintain a polite impartiality in reviews, the idea that the developer put sincere effort into making the best game they could. I'm at a loss as to how Platine ran through these stages for testing and didn't think for even a second "I wish I could turn in a responsive way." "I died suddenly for no reason." "Maybe a game focused on precision jumping should have better air control, like a double jump." "I sure do miss my dash and wall jump inputs constantly." I've seen this before and to cut to the heart of the matter: I don't mind if a game demands precise input in a challenging fashion. I deeply resent a game that does and gives you bad controls. If the controls are supposed to be bad to increase the challenge then I offer a rebuttal of every good game in the genre.
BMD makes it ridiculously easy to be facing the wrong way because you turn with an unresponsive, unintuitive delay. Your jump is changed by whether or not you are moving and standing still or pressing up, or jump X times in a row, or... again, it's unreliable. Your dash requires a bafflingly designed double move input at the same time as you're likely trying not to jump incorrectly due to moving while jumping, or because you're standing on one tile and need to start a dash and within a split second jump before you run off the ledge. Why not a more forgiving dash button input so you can slap two buttons together as a good platformer would do like Mega Man X? There's wall-jumping later and surprise, it's affected by facing and you can't turn smoothly or reliably without futzing around on the ground with more stiffness than a Playstation 1 3rd-person tank-controls game.
Discussing the game feels like a waste. It's often competent but it's hard to see that when everything has to be experienced with the awful controls. Getting through tricky jumping sections feels like a matter of blind faith. Combat is tied to movement for dodging and mobile bosses so you'll be sour there too. Using your attacks tends to lock you in place and punish you for facing. Again, the one unifying theme in this game's design is the wish for better controls. Other little touches like having a "choice" of five weapons but not having reliable access to them blights this game. They do drop from the same torches every time and you can learn where those are but if there isn't one within a few rooms of your latest combat challenge you're not going to want to hoof it 2-3 zones back to get it. This creates charming scenarios like seeing a weapon drop and waiting 5+ seconds for it to vanish so you don't grab it or accidentally grabbing weapons you don't want and having to seriously consider reloading. Why not shrink the useless gear bar on the bottom of the screen and make them permanent collectables that can be switched?
Well, while I'm here, the game seems tailor-made to invoke the old flaws of the genre. Getting hit in the air stuns and throws you backwards about a mile, making mistakes in platforming with enemies compound fast. There's an overabundance of spikes, another ol' reliable of platformer poison. You also take random spikes... of damage from certain enemy attacks, touching enemies(but not all of them, at random) and so on. A boss having a stronger attack is fine but 6-8x times out of nowhere with the same graphics? Sometimes there's a thoughtful save point per room or platforming test and sometimes they're stretched out to force painful repetition if you fail on a later segment. It's a Metroidvania, explore and get power-ups to return to places you couldn't reach before, but it has no fast travel and it's a chore to backtrack with far too few shortcuts. A lot of the event cues are totally random, and I mean that. There's almost a hint of a story with a deuteragonist passing through areas near you and opening some barriers but it's a little too sparse. It doesn't mix well with some of the progress triggers you need to find being hidden in unmarked invisible walls and switches, the level design likely to wall all but the most obsessive explorers. Or those using guides. Wall humping outside of an old boomer shooter? My cup of nostalgia doth overflow! Alright, one more. There's a boss that spams an instant-kill attack if you're facing him when he does it. Tell me the developer wasn't aware of how bad the turning and movement is, hah.
This review is far surlier than usual but a rager like BMD deserves it. I certainly deserve the catharsis. A decade ago I gave this game a try and got bored of it and now as an older, significantly dumber man I decided to play through it until finished. I never felt joy or mastery when I accomplished anything in BMD, just relief or a need for jaded sneering. In the future if I see Platine has a hand in a game I will recoil like a vampire before a cross.
Once again I've hunkered down and gave an old game the attention it deserved by playing it through to the end and boy do I regret it.
