My Brother Rabbit

Back to Artifex Mundi again for something slightly different this time in My Brother Rabbit. It doesn’t follow the traditional Mundi structure in that firstly, there is no dialogue and secondly, the story is told through pictures. The story itself centres around a little girl who is sick and the event of the game take place in her imagination where her ugly toy rabbit goes on an adventure to save her.

The gameplay itself is different too. There is more of a focus on indirect puzzle solving and having to collect lots of the same item to unlock the next steps of the game. Items are either hidden in the background or puzzles need to be solved in order to collect them. There are some that are slightly more advanced than the other games where you are required to pay attention to various elements in the background of the game.

There were three times this happens during the game and the first time you need to move sticks around to make patterns in order to release three items from a sealed chamber. The codes to these are hidden in other scenes but I didn’t realise this managed to unlock the chamber through luck rather than knowing what I was doing. The next one was comprised of a code of five different images, so no amount of guessing was going to open this one. Thankfully though, despite my luck of unlocking the first set of patterns, I started seeing them in the environments so was able to figure this one out as intended.

Graphically, it’s also very different from the standard Artifex Mundi games with a much more child friendly, cartoony look. This seems like a strange choice as the puzzles are certainly not child friendly for the most part. And the rabbit is also more scary than cute.

Musically, it does the same thing as other games where a child is sick and they are struggling to recover… so they make the music as depressing as humanly possible. Thankfully, the gameplay hides this as you will be too involved in the puzzle-findy goodness to pay much attention to the music.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 30 Achievements

Being an Artifex Mundi game, it continues the trend of having a large offering of storyline achievements and there are 20 of them here. There are also no true missable achievements either as there is now a chapter select function which allows you to replay chapters. They’ve also removed the expert playthrough requirement too.

From the ones that are not storyline related, these can be obtained simply by clicking on everything there is to click on… okay, not quite but it will work for most of them. Some of the achievements are counter intuitive in this regard. On my first playthrough, I missed three achievements. One related to me not clicking on everything as there are four ducks in the first chapter that require clicking for an achievement. To be fair, these are well hidden, so you almost need to know they are there to click them. It’s not a secret achievement, I’m just stupid and didn’t plan in advance.

However, the other two that I missed, I missed because I had worked out the puzzle solutions and solved the puzzles before using every other option. The first of these is at the end of chapter one where you spray some plant thing with red paint. The nozzle has another eight colours and you need to use them all for the achievement and you can go back after you’ve used the red one.

The other one is in chapter three where this is a weird moose robot (that’s right, moose robot) that you can attach various arms to. You have to attach all three arms to the robot and use them but using two of the arms doesn’t move the game forward and are effectively mistakes. So again, I was punished for using the correct arm first.

The last one I’ll mention, which I was clever enough to research in advance, is for seeing some weird creatures fly away on a paper aeroplane. I’m not entirely sure if this is time based but you need to move between scenes to see them fly away and get the achievement. When I changed screens, I only just saw them, and I don’t know if I would have missed it if I was slower.

Downloadable Content – N/A

My Brother Rabbit is a simple and quick completion however, it again suffers from overpricing. The game retails at £11.99 and is completable in under 3 hours. There is no replayability either as once you’ve seen all the solutions, that’s it.