Radical Rabbit Stew Review

I often make mention of my fondness for retro style games. The under appreciated Sega Saturn will always hold a special place in my heart, and Radical Rabbit Stew looks and feels to me like a long lost title for that machine. It’s a pretty simple concept, but it’s also great fun, with a lovely high end 16-bit visual style accompanied by some decent music that reminded me of those glorious days.

The setup is fairly simple; a space restaurant is attacked and all of the chefs are abducted by nefarious rabbits. A lone bus boy manages to hide, and must set out to save the chefs, defeating an endless barrage of bunnies by knocking them into the various saucepans on each level.

What this leads to is a great little sliding puzzle game. Using our trusty wooden spoon, as we hit the rabbits they slide in a straight line until hitting an obstacle. They remain dazed for a few seconds allowing us to knock them about the mazes until they end up in the saucepan. Early on this is simple enough, though as you may expect it quickly ramps up the difficulty. Breakable blocks, springs, curved corners and more feature, and each level manages to find new and interesting ways to spin these into clever scenarios while rarely repeating ideas wholesale.

Every so often a boss fight occurs, and are again uniquely designed while offering up a different challenge than the standard puzzles. New spoons are also found intermittently, allowing a stronger hit or an extendable grabbing arm, for example. These allow the puzzles to gain that bit extra variety, and and smartly used.

It can be a bit too easy at times mind. I whizzed through the first of the two areas pretty quickly, only dying a couple of times while trying to collect the optional coins on some levels. There were moments too where I solved a puzzle by mistake due to their almost self completing nature – think of the auto runner levels of something like Mario Maker and you’ll get the idea.

The second area notches up the difficulty a bit by adding in easily reachable fail states in some levels. These levels also tend to be much longer, with several sections to clear in a row. Our bus boy only has a limited amount of hits he can take before dying too, and once the randomly dropping bombs start later on I did find that it was not only much harder, but also a little more frustrating; dying to an unseen incoming bomb just as the final rabbit was on the way to the pot at last is not ideal…

Conclusion

These minor niggles aside, Radical Rabbit Stew is a fun puzzle game. The central mechanic is easy to grasp, the puzzle design is mostly brilliant and the retro style visual and audio presentation is right up my street.

This game was reviewed based on Xbox One review code, using an Xbox One console. All of the opinions and insights here are subject to that version. Game provided by publisher.