While most of us whiled away the many days of pandemic-induced lockdown in 2020 binge-watching Netflix and baking our own bread for some reason, acclaimed anime screenwriter Gen Urobochi (Puella Magi Madoka Magica, Psycho-Pass) went ahead and built his own video game. That game, a rough demo that featured a rabbit in a mechanical suit blasting his way through piles of junk in a post-apocalyptic world, would eventually serve as the jumping off point for Rusty Rabbit, the new 2.5D Metroidvania from developer Nitro Plus announced this week at Tokyo Game Show.
“[Initially] it was purely a hobby,” said Urobochi. “It was a labor of love, and just basically me wanting to mess around with Unity.”
As the lockdown days turned into weeks and months, Urobochi continued to tinker with his bunny-based platformer demo as his ideas for fleshing out its world grew more and more ambitious.
“The more I stared at it on my screen, the more my imagination expanded,” said Urobochi. “So I showed my demo to the folks at [publisher] NetEase, and they said, ‘How about we remake this idea in Unreal Engine and turn it into a sellable product?’”
“And I said, let’s do it. And so we did.”
Thus, Rusty Rabbit was born. This Metroidvania with roguelike elements takes place thousands of years after humanity has abandoned the Earth, and rabbits have taken over. Stamp, the long-eared main character, spends his days piloting his mech suit ‘Junkster’ through the giant ruins of a giant space elevator in search of valuable scrap. When one day he stumbles upon clues to the whereabouts of his missing daughter on an abandoned ‘D-Tam’ computer terminal, it sends Stamp on a search for more of these computer terminals buried throughout Rusty Rabbit’s Metroidvania-style maze. All the while battling enemies and hunting for treasures, then subsequently making return trips to his base camp at the surface in order to upgrade his suit.
According to Urobochi, Rusty Rabbit’s story and exploration will be structured in a similar way to many other Metroidvanias, with its 2.5D game world expanding in all directions as Stamp increases his abilities and tool set to navigate it with. However, Rusty Rabbit will also feature a roguelike structure in the form of optional, randomly generated dungeon areas.
“We ended up having two types of dungeon areas,” said Urobochi. “We made story dungeons, which are more linear and contain RPG elements, and then we had random dungeons which we separated out. So the random dungeons are extra dungeons.”
Whether these additional dungeons serve as simple companion pieces, or offer additional avenues to boost Stamp’s stats outside of the main story remains to be seen. In fact, outside of the concept trailer above and a handful of screens, there’s little else to go on in terms of Rusty Rabbit details at this time. However the idea of an adorable bunny clambering onboard a hulking mech suit and smashing his way through scrap metal in a post-apocalyptic world in search of his lost daughter has our curiosity piqued, and the pedigree of Urobochi has us confident that Rusty Rabbit’s story is unlikely to be as straightforward as it seems.
Rusty Rabbit is coming to PlayStation 5 and PC in 2024.
Tristan Ogilvie is a Senior Video Editor at IGN AU. He previously assumed that a Rusty Rabbit was a cocktail.
