In a genre as stacked with options to play as roguelikes, it seems like the only ones I ever make time to play are those I have a certain predisposition to. Today’s game managed to be exactly that, considering the developer is the maker of the first game I ever reviewed for CGR. It’s called Rabbit and Steel, an mmo-like raiding roguelike developed and published by mino_dev and released in May of 2024 for PC. Its premise involves a band of adventuring rabbits exploring a mystical kingdom each night, and battling through the locals to uncover why they seem to go berserk after sundown. Players interact with the game primarily through 2D action combat against a variety of bosses, while also collecting loot rewards, buying items, and following a light story.

The story of Rabbit and Steel takes place in the Moonlight Kingdom, a place where the lonely find their haven, which in recent times has fallen under a mysterious enchantment. Each night a massive structure called the Moonlit Tower appears in the city, and anyone who looks to investigate it are fended off by the inexplicably belligerent residents of the kingdom. Your party of rabbits are hopeful they can eventually reach the tower though, given their speed and skill in combat. And thus the reason for your many, many attempts is born. As you can see, the story is very simple and it remains simple throughout. It is mostly moved along by speaking with the various bosses as they show up to chat with the party and each other in the shop areas, building up their personalities and worries as well as shedding light on the nature of the kingdom’s curse. It’s very prone to a lot of filler dialogue and superfluous worldbuilding, but underneath the fluff is a fairly compelling central theme that is worth playing runs until the credits for. Rabbit and Steel’s story certainly isn’t incredible by any means, but it has got its moments.

What most people are here for is the gameplay though, and there’s a lot to unpack! The game is built upon the foundation of mino_dev’s first release, Maiden and Spell, and thus shares its bullet-hell DNA and character design templates. That game was a bullet-hell fighting game however, and Rabbit and Steel opts to reinterpret those core ideas in a roguelike setting. Each run starts by selecting your class of adventurer, five starters and five unlockables, and as you progress you’ll customize your character with various loot items and purchasable skill upgrades. The characters all have very distinct playstyles, from Assassin Rabbit’s technical style of playing for advantageous positioning to Druid Rabbit’s turret-based combos, and while some classes work better than others with certain loot items, on the whole the build variety is wonderful. Whether you’re looking to land powerful blows to chunk down bosses, create a more consistent stream of damage, or cheat death with shielding mechanics, there’s a way to make any rabbit work for your playstyle. The shop upgrades in particular change your abilities’ properties altogether, making repeat playthroughs with the same class quite varied all things considered. I personally lean toward Garnet upgrades for their luck-based thrills, but Sapphire’s multi-hit mechanics are a real hoot if you land certain items. 

As for the battles themselves, this is where things get a little weird. If you’re playing alone, the game leans into its bullet-hell identity more heavily, and makes Rabbit and Steel into a true roguelike spiritual successor to Maiden and Spell. This is the way players experience the core story too, so it’s definitely not an aspect of the game to be missed. Facing down a screenful of bullets and finding the gaps to weave through is a classic and fun challenge, but this isn’t actually what the game advertises as the core play experience. When playing with even one other player (up to a max of four players at once) the boss design shifts significantly and starts to resemble the raids found in popular massively multiplayer online roleplaying games. World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV in particular spring to mind. A number of the bullets get pulled back in favor of attacks that target players based on their positioning to one another, from grouping up around a particular player before the area outside their radius explodes with bullets, to spreading out to avoid overlapping damage zones before a timer runs out, and more. It’s a very unique idea which brings the fun of coordinated boss raiding into a context which doesn’t require hours of grinding a main quest to get to, and as a player of MMOs in the past I can really appreciate this. That being said, a lot of people outside the MMO background tend to struggle with this game’s mechanics, and have often told me they find those particular attack patterns hard to deal with.

These are things that you can learn with time, but therein lies the game’s most sweeping complaint against people I’ve played it with: it’s a rather overwhelming game for newcomers to learn. With my background in MMOs and Maiden and Spell, Rabbit and Steel had its challenging parts as any good roguelike should but I was familiar enough with the game’s concepts to get the ball rolling. For a lot of less experienced players however, they report a staggering amount of sensory overload trying out the game and constantly feel like the attack telegraphs aren’t sufficiently clear enough for them to understand. I’m very torn about this, because on one hand as someone who can speak the game’s ‘language’ I always found the attack complexities to be well suited to the game’s four difficulty modes, and while there are some attacks you have to be hit by before you learn their rhythms I don’t think that’s an entirely fair critique considering similar titles like Souls-likes essentially ask the same thing. On the other hand, I do understand that learning a ‘language’ to engage with the game on a base level is a pretty daunting task, and perhaps there is something to be said for the game’s lack of robust learning tools. In the end it’s just a situation where I can see my own biases at work compared to my contemporaries, and while I don’t want their opinions to drown out mine in my own review, I do feel compelled to at least acknowledge how different our experiences with this game were.

Looking at the battles themselves, I would like to praise the game for its variety. Each of the games’ five core zones offer a particular mechanical focus, all building your knowledge and skills towards the final gauntlet in the Moonlit Tower. From Emerald Lakeside’s color-based mechanics, to Churchmouse Street’s many duo bosses with pincer attacks, to Scholars Nest’s sequence memorization, they all offer something different and give you reason to look forward to (or in Red Darkhouse’s case, dread) encountering each in a run. Overall, the gameplay in Rabbit and Steel is an effective execution on its genre-blending premise, but it does seem clear that one’s enjoyment is contingent on whether you’re willing to put in the work of learning its ins and outs. Not an issue in a vacuum to be sure, but it’s clear that this reality has limited my ability to invite others to play and experience the most unique parts of the game.

As for the presentation, it sticks closely to mino_dev’s original style for better and worse. It’s definitely more minimalist this time around, especially in the simple designs for the backgrounds representing the various locations. Character animations are still pretty lively despite the overall lack of frames, and attack bullets and zones pop with color. The characters’ designs, however, are where my biggest mixed feelings arise from. I was a huge fan of Maiden and Spell’s visual storytelling with its characters, and even in Rabbit and Steel I think a lot of the character designs effectively communicate personalities and ideas. From the armored mice to the regal dragons, the culture of the Moonlight Kingdom’s various districts are on full display and I enjoy that. In reference to the previous game however it retains the design choice of monster girls having no shoes, and seeing as there are no human characters in Rabbit and Steel to contrast it with, it honestly starts to cross into fetishistic territory. These games have of course never been totally devoid of suspect fanservice elements, but the discontinuity between the two games necessarily recasts those elements in completely new lights, and the lights of Rabbit and Steel lead to a more uncomfortable visual experience overall. I can learn to file away this design quirk over time, but the game should have been more cognizant of its issues to begin with.

On a brighter note, the music for the game is excellent! steel plus returns from Maiden and Spell to provide the music, and I think he’s improved since then. Most of the game’s soundtrack is split into Calm and Action mixes, and seamlessly switches between the two as you switch from musing over your build in a treasure room to dodging projectiles in a boss fight. The most extreme example of this is found in the Emerald Lakeside, where the Calm version features a guest singer humming a melody and the Action version has fully-featured lyrics. This actually ties in heavily to the local character arcs in the Emerald Lakeside, with the lyrics not only being from one character’s perspective but the fact she only sings it while you’re distracted by a boss fight in order to hide her feelings is a genius move. The whole game is just filled with fun music all around, and it was definitely a highlight of the experience for me.

Lastly, as for the spiritual wisdom we can draw from the Catholic perspective, I’ll need to get into spoilers but there’s a surprisingly meaningful takeaway to be found. In the game it’s slowly revealed that the curse plaguing the kingdom’s residents doesn’t cause them to hear voices of a superfluous dark entity, but rather the ambient thoughts of their friends and neighbors. Much of the game’s conflicts come from the various characters misunderstanding the thoughts and feelings of the people around them, and they only manage to begin freeing themselves from their interpretations of their situation by having genuine conversations with one another. From my perspective at least, the key theme of Rabbit and Steel’s story is an analysis of community perception in the modern age. Modern communications and internet technologies have linked together the thoughts and lives of untold millions of people, sometimes in greater detail than we appreciate, but it is impossible to gain a truly accurate understanding of those people using the incomplete views we are offered from afar. It is only through making the effort of seeking a real encounter with the other person face-to-face that we can cut through the noise of both our technologies’ flawed windows and our own biases, and in doing so come to perceive their true self. The message of Rabbit and Steel is an unexpectedly powerful one in its commission to seek real human connection, one that doesn’t even particularly require a Christian perspective to see the point of. There are still plenty of reflections on the Christian life to be drawn from that base theme though, and my mind in particular floats to our Protestant brothers and sisters and the great tragedy of Sola Scriptura. 

For those who don’t know, a large portion of Protestant sects believe that the authority of God’s Church and sacred tradition is irrelevant to salvation, believing that only personal reading and interpretation of the Bible is a valid means of following God’s Will in our lives. There has been much said on the theological errors of this assumption, from the Bible having been compiled by the Catholic Church through the process of tradition, and the fact that the Bible itself has no verses that suggest Sola Scriptura is true (2 Timothy 3:16 is the closest thing and any honest reader will tell you that the statement does not equate to Sola Scriptura), but I wanted focus on the more immediate reality of this faulty doctrine. God has revealed himself even in scripture itself to be Love itself, a concept which can only exist in a world of relations between Creator and created and amongst the created.  Yet on the topic of how one comes to know the fullness of Truth, many Protestants insist that it is only possible through an isolated reading of the Bible. 

Undoubtedly there is an ineffable amount to learn about God from the pages of scripture, but few (if any) are the great hermits who ever lived without guidance from a spiritual mentor, and fewer still are those called to such an expression of faith in the first place. How does one learn to humbly submit to God if one cannot even submit to instruction from the wise of both your own era and ages past, and how does one truly come to embody the fullness of Jesus’ call to love one another if you don’t strive to make connection and community central to the Christian life? In truth this isolation from the influences of others actually distorts the word of God in our minds, and subtly but disastrously alters the meaning of His Words through the poison of our biases. Only through recognizing that we are not individually equipped to find the answers to all of life’s questions, and trusting God to guide us into connection with those who will correct the assumptions of our perspectives, can we truly begin to see the fullness of truth (after all the Trinity, which is God and therefore Truth Itself, is expressly relational!). Just as Rabbit and Steel boldly claims that we must live amongst people to be fulfilled, so too should we never neglect the wisdom and revelation that comes encountering people the same way Lord Jesus spent His earthly life encountering so many. It is our relationship to Christ which ultimately saves us, but Christ crucially asks us to make ties to others as part of that salvific process. Let us pray for an end to false beliefs like Sola Scriptura that seek to isolate us from positive help and influence, and never take for granted that we do not walk this road alone.

In conclusion, Rabbit and Steel is a game of very particular appeal despite what lies on the surface. I certainly have the ability to find loads of fun in the choreographed chaos of its gameplay and love the music, but the steep learning curve brought on by its genre inspirations and suspect artistic missteps limits the potential audience by a rather significant amount. If you happen to be the sort of gamer who gels with the particular blend on offer then it is sure to provide plenty of fun play hours, but know you’re not the first to walk away dissatisfied if it ends up leaving a bad taste. For what it’s worth I had a good time with the game, and perhaps I’m in the minority on that sentiment but I won’t let that steal away the enjoyment I found.

About PeaceRibbon

A graduate in philosophy from a campus with Benedictine monks, "PeaceRibbon" is just an ordinary introvert looking to put his hours of playing games to good use. He's played games on every Nintendo console since the family Wii and later took up PC games once aware of Steam. He's explored a lot of genres, but his favorites have been story driven RPGs and fighting games. Often finds himself going deep into gaming culture and seeking out low-profile titles over keeping up with big releases.

When not gaming, he enjoys walking in beautiful places, and overthinking just about everything. Also serves as a cantor at Mass whenever he can. Has a twin brother who shares many of the same hobbies and passions.