Program Your Rabbits To Meet Each Other In This Cunning Bunny Game
There are plenty of coding-style games on the Xbox, where you path a character to an exit by playing a sequence of cards from your hand. Three steps forward, two to the right, that sort of thing. But I’m not sure I’ve encountered one where you control two characters at once. Dual Bunnies doesn’t just want you to ‘code’ one character to the exit; it wants you to have a go at two.
Dual Bunnies, as the title implies, puts two rabbits on a grid and asks you to make them meet. It doesn’t matter where they cuddle – as long as they walk or hop onto the same square as each other, the level is complete. You just need to find the cards in your hand that will make that happen.
Less Robo Rally And More Rabbit Rally
It is absolutely not as easy as it sounds. You never seem to have a sensible sequence of cards in your hand. You might have too few cards to seemingly get where you want to go; or there might not be enough right-oriented cards when all you want to do is go right. The bunnies refuse to meet, and the puzzle really kicks in. How can the bizarre mix of cards get you to a canoodling situation?
The solution often comes from Dual Bunnies’ unique control system. When you play a card from your hand, you can choose which bunny it applies to. If Bunny A is on the left-hand-side of the grid, and Bunny is on the right, but you only have cards that take a bunny to the right, then you want to be focusing more on Bunny A. You can cycle through the two of them with the shoulder buttons.
But the rabbit-sized genius of Dual Bunnies comes from a third option. You can apply a movement card to both rabbits. If you’ve got a miniscule number of cards but need to cover a lot of ground, moving both rabbits at once is often your only strategy. A large proportion of Dual Bunnies’ puzzles are spent thinking about whether a move should apply to one rabbit or two.
Delaying Death For A Few More Moves
Spicing this all up are some obstacles. Dual Bunnies only really has a few, but they contribute heavily to the puzzles. Fires sit on certain squares and kill off your little cottontails. You have to quickly realise that the fires burn themselves out: if you can manage to wait four turns, the fire will be gone and your rabbit will be free to traverse that square. Dual Bunnies becomes a game of patience, as you waste cards so that the fires have time to exhaust.
Spike traps rise and fall with your movement cards, and they initially seem unfair. Try to cross them when they’re up, and they will kill you. Try to cross them when they’re down, and they will kill you too, as they will rise mid-hop. It soon becomes clear that spikes are attuned to a specific rabbit, so you have to keep one bunny still while the other attempts a spike-less passage.
Rounding out the obstacles are crates, which block your rabbit from doing anything at all, really (but are useful if you’re planning a double-bunny move, but don’t want one of them swandiving into some water), and portals. Portals do exactly what they say on the tin: you don’t need me explaining what they do.
Hopping Trumps Walking, Every Time
The only other factor to keep in mind is on the cards. Some of these are coloured in such a way to show that they’re a ‘hop’, not a walk. Hops are almost always better for you: they allow you to leapfrog spikes, crates and gaps in the puzzle. You need to save them for when you really need them.
Most of these are poorly introduced. Dual Bunnies isn’t brilliant at tutorialising itself, and we learned most of the nuances ourselves. The interfaces aren’t particularly clear, either. I’m not sure why there couldn’t have been a clear ‘hop’ icon on the hop cards, or why it’s so hard to tell which rabbits are in focus at any given time. I lost count of how often I accidentally moved one rabbit when I meant two.
The Undo and Retry features are decent and absolutely welcome (mistakes happen so frigging often), but Undo has the common problem of not working if you die. You can’t reverse a death, forcing you to play from the start again. A quick pause, after a death moment, allowing you to reverse the decision, would have been most welcome.
A Unique Puzzle Game That Gets You Thinking In Pairs
But while there are rough edges here or there, I thoroughly enjoyed the puzzles that Dual Bunnies had to offer. Part of that’s down to the sheer cleverness of each level. There’s always a pinch point, a problem that you need to resolve. So, you’re using portals, hop cards or dual-movement to solve them. One puzzle might have a surplus of movement cards, for example, so you need to use crates cleverly to lessen the number of steps you take. Another level might hand you no left-moving cards, so you have to resort to portals to bring the rabbits together. You can summarise each of the levels in this way, and even when you know how to solve them, actually pulling it off is still a challenge.
Plus the whole ‘one bunny or two?’ question is a fun one to answer. It might be clear which cards are used when, but there’s finesse in whether or not you move one or two bunnies. It’s common (oh so common) to find that you are one step shy of getting the rabbits to meet. It often means that you should have dual-moved at some point, rather than single-moved.
Dual Bunnies isn’t the most accessible game to play, thanks to some poor introductions and confused usability, but once you are clued into what it is doing, the sophistication becomes clear. You can feel inordinately clever as you step through a level, using every last movement-card on the way to a solution where your dual bunnies meet. I’ve looked around to check I was alone, then fist-pumped the air on more than one occasion.
Important Links
Buy from the Xbox Store, optimised for Series X|S – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/dual-bunnies-xbox-series/9p8f72h1kh2k
Buy for Xbox One – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/dual-bunnies-xbox-one/9p91fh5vp1cd
Buy a Windows PC edition – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/dual-bunnies-windows/9mxt04g4k4hp
