Thank you Scoopy Studios for providing us with a review code!

Bunny’s Buddy… Buddy’s Bunny. The former is weird to say out loud because my brain wants to say the latter. This strange entry into the action-adventure genre is created by Ishan Mandal and published by Scoopy Studios. One peek at the Steam page and I immediately knew it was going to be one of those games. Seems like Steam will publish almost anything these days. Don’t get me wrong, that ends up being more of a good thing than bad as games that would otherwise never come out have the chance to find an audience, but due to the frequency of how often games are released on the client, many will end up buried so it can end up as a double-edged sword.

Bunny’s Buddy stars Bunny (technically the bunny is unnamed but we’ll call it Bunny) who is on a noble goal to save a friend from a purplish-blue vampire. An old man named Old Man will assist Bunny in the increasingly absurd tasks that it will have to accomplish before it comes face-to-face with the villainous vampire. For an unexplained reason, Bunny can shoot fireballs, but only if Bunny collects them scattered throughout the area first. Some of the objectives to complete include racing a deer, capturing ghosts while fending off a horde of zombies, finding merchants to buy ghosts, piloting a UFO, and then finally confronting the vampire to save your friend. All of these objectives are in between fairly long stretches of traveling and collecting fireballs. The tone is completely absurd and is all over the place—which ends up being pretty funny.

The controls are pretty simple as Bunny can move around, sprint, jump, shoot fireballs, and aim with a red reticle shaped like an X. Bunny’s controls are responsive as you’ll never have the problem of dead inputs. Bunny has a jump that carries momentum so there is a commitment when jumping in any given direction. Now, the game can use either keyboard+mouse or gamepad but neither option is the best one as they have problems unique to the setting. If you use keyboard, you’ll have to position your middle and pinky finger on the W and Shift key and hold them down for long stretches. The area is large, and combined with Bunny’s rather slow traversal speed, it’s going to feel uncomfortable. I can’t exactly blame Bunny for moving slow, bunnies only move fast when they’re being hunted. With a gamepad, movement is more comfortable while sacrificing some fluidity when aiming and shooting. Swapping between the two is instant so I’d recommend using controls for the drawn-out navigation sections, and keyboard when you’re required to shoot.

On the other hand, there is a weird ghost level with UFOs, and those controls for that segment are genuinely some of the worst controls I’ve ever experienced in any video game. I don’t understand how they function because they’re inverted, but not at the same time. You can only move forward and back. There’s the option to speed up, but the moment you do that, the controls go completely out of wack. It doesn’t help that the boss at the end of the section leaves me completely stumped as to how to beat it. If you aim anywhere that isn’t at the white arrow in the middle of the boss, you get hurt, but shooting the white arrow does nothing. Fortunately, the segment is optional and I’m sure it’s because of all the reasons stated. But if you make a part that’s mandatory to trigger, yet optional to beat, why have it in the first place?

The models of Bunny’s Buddy are pretty low poly, yet semi-realistic. The usage of colors is good as on the ultra graphical settings, a ton of foliage will appear all over the area. It is a bit jarring that the animations for the plants are of a lower framerate than everything else surrounding it. Music mostly consists of simple notes from a piano and various other instruments, with some bugs, birds, and the wind acting as ambiance. Old Man, the caveman character called Monkey, and the vampire all have voice acting which may or may not all be the same person. I did notice a few grammatical errors, but they mostly consist of incorrect past-present usage or noun suffix.

Moral warnings are pretty strange as is the whole game in general. As stated previously, there is the supernatural with zombies, ghosts, and a vampire acting as enemies. Bunny can shoot fireballs and enemies explode when hit. I saw the word “crappy” used exactly once by Old Man.

So… Bunny’s Buddy sure was an experience. Despite taking only around 30 to 50 minutes to complete, there are issues with padding as there is barely any reason for the world to be as big as it is when the experience is so linear. On the bright side, I somehow ran into zero glitches and crashes. There is potential for a little bit of fun due to how all over the place the story is, and playing as a bunny is always cute. However, $10 is a tough price to recommend for something that is a one-and-done kind of thing even if it’s mostly safe in terms of morality. Maybe on a sale if you’re really into bunnies.