Night of the Rabbit

The Longest Journey meets Dr Who with a touch of Professor Layton, stirred in with some rabbit.

Looks rather charming, honestly.

This is from the same guys who made The Whispered World? Because that game didn't really take my fancy like this one does.

It's coming out in 3 weeks. Already been released in Germany, I think.

Go G.com is offering Deponia free for The Night of the Rabbit preorders.

edited 14th May '13 9:13:32 AM by JAF1970

Released

I was half-expecting a Night of the Lepus video game.

Game is out. I already expected a tvtropes page with its unique characters and gameplay

Typical Daedalic stuff: Nice and charming, but an utter failure as an adventure game. I hope those guys get their act together one day, because it's quite disappointing to see all that imagination squandered in games that are mechanically mediocre at best. Again, I weep for my country. Germany was a game developer stronghold in the 90s. Nowadays? Social games and edutainment is where it's at. Which makes the half-arsedness of games like the Daedalic adventures even more disheartening.

edited 1st Jun '13 4:48:21 AM by TAPETRVE

Uh, if I may ask, what exactly are the problems with it? You point, you click, you have your standard inventory, and you've got your puzzles, all of which seem to work fine. What other problems are there?

The sense of progression, which is essential in adventure games, is pretty much nil. Puzzles are randomly strewn in and lead for the most part to nothing (which apparently has been criticised by other sites, too, so I'm probably not alone with that sentiment). Even a game like Maniac Mansion, which pretty much invented fridge logic, still has a purpose in its messy puzzle solving, whereas here, everything feels unmotivated and aimless. It's almost like they made the art direction and writing without even knowing what to do with it, then decided: OK, let's turn it into a point & click adventure game.

I like it, but I have to agree. I'm up to giving medicine to the dwarf, but most of it's been just stumbling around. While the puzzles thankfully aren't make a fake mustache out of cat hair levels of unintuitiveness, the game's refusal to really work any sort of hint into the dialogue makes the puzzles more frustrating than they need to be. Like the bit with the explorer and his leaf boat. You need it to get to the dwarf's house, but he rambles on about wanting to go on this huge adventure out in the open ocean. So as far as I knew, this was actually the key to reaching the next chapter, and put it off for a while thinking it was unsolvable at the moment. And the in-game hint system is just a recap of my current story objectives.

I also have to admit I'm annoyed by how often the dialogue repeats entire sections with little variation. I've seen cases where every part of a character's dialogue tree will start one way, then segue into the same bit of lengthy canned dialogue reminding you of the exact task you need to complete for them.

edited 1st Jun '13 5:40:27 PM by TheGunheart

Hrmm. What examples do you have of this German stronghold? See, it's not that I doubt the claim, but more that I'm American, and we were pretty much focused on the console market at the time, so things like the various Amigas, the Commodore64, the ZX Spectrex and such... didn't get much notice. I know it was a thriving market, but since I've only been in Europe from Summer '96 to Summer '99 (lived in England for that span), when that market was (AFAIK) dead as a doornail, the whole thing's remained something of a mystery to me.

I know of Turrican, at least.

Horrible tangent, I know, but I'm eager to expand my horizons a little.

Got stuck for a while, then decided to swallow my pride and read a walkthrough. Just finished the 3rd portal, and I have to say I'm trying to like it, but I'm really not feeling it. I think its biggest problem is that it comes front-loaded with a long set of rather obtuse puzzles that seem to lead nowhere and bog the intro down...and then when the main plot kicks into gear, everything feels very rushed. And the puzzles for obtaining each spell are insultingly easy.