For people like me who grew up playing games in the earlier PC era, there’s no doubt that point-and-click adventures were one of the more dominant genres on the scene. Mixing together storytelling, a variety of puzzles, and typically a fair amount of humor or even mystery, part of what also helped games in the space stand out was how great they’d often look. By minimizing the action and how many working elements had to be on-screen, effort could be put into making the backgrounds and environments more detailed and impressive. The Night of the Rabbit, I’d say moreso than its typical modern competitors, manages to truly take the elements that classically helped the genre stand out and make them work across the board.

Starting with the look and sound, the game gets off to a strong start. Each area you walk into and through is colorful, has a very distinctive overall art style, and is loaded with detail. Granted, that can make it hard to tell what you’ll need to interact with at times, but thankfully when you’re in the vicinity of anything you can interact with, the game does a great job of popping up your options. On occasion, this can be troubled by two interactive elements being close to each other, but for the most part it works well. The sound is similarly handled well, in particular the voice acting, whether it be the occasional word from a narrator or one of the game’s characters. It isn’t unusual for games to get at least a few uneven performances that pull them down, but in this case it all works out quite nicely.

Moving on to the game’s story and puzzles, the good news tends to continue. The narrative driving the story may actually be the best aspect to the entire experience, as rather than establishing its base tone and then sticking with it, this is more of a roller coaster ride. While it starts out more light and amusing, as you progress the tone turns darker and a bit more interesting, and really appears to be focused on telling a full-fledged story for once, rather than just stringing together set pieces for someone to interact with but failing to satisfyingly stick the narrative landing. A final area where it isn’t unusual to see some room for criticism is in the construction of the game’s puzzles. More often than not, I actually found the solutions required to be sensible, not necessarily requiring massive leaps of faith and simply being intuitive if you get into the right mindset. I did find the attempt to have in-game help to be less than useful though, usually simply telling me everything I already knew, and failing to give me useful guidance. I have seen some competitors that have found ways to be more helpful, so this is an area where the game comes up a little short.

Still, despite the few areas where there’s still room for improvement, more often than not The Night of the Rabbit knocks it out of the park. Though I love games in the classic LucasArts style that go for the laughs and stay there, I really appreciate the attempt here to be a little more than that, flexing a bit of quality writing muscle. It hasn’t been unusual to see Daedalic titles that have been impressive visually, that also work well in a couple of areas, but this really feels like an effort where all aspects of the experience came together. If you’re a classic adventure fan who’s looking for something that feels fresh, this fits the bill.