The Stack

Spoilers follow the break.

After crash-landing on an alien planet, you find yourself emerging from a pod on a tree, now with the body of a telepathic alien “rabbit”. I put the word “rabbit” in quotes because it’s obviously not really a rabbit. Apparently it doesn’t even really look like a rabbit. The explorers of this world named the fauna after whatever similar Earth creatures they could think of, but in some cases the similarity is just a matter of ecological niche. So there’s “deer” and “beavers” and at least one “fox” and so forth running around, doing their things and in some cases wandering the map autonomously, bothering the more stationary creatures. It’s all quite lovely, and you have some influence on their behavior: the fox will chase you (and eat you if you let it), the deer will run away from the fox. An otter will follow you if you give it a fish, but if you don’t keep giving it more fish it’ll get bored and wander away. So it’s pleasingly diverse, but it all leaves the question of what you’re trying to accomplish by this. This isn’t a game that gives the player a lot of guidance.

I mean, okay: there’s one goal that seems obvious once you find it. When you manage to get back to your crashed shuttle — something I only managed after exploring basically the entire rest of the map — there’s a hatch mentioned on its own line in the room description, which is a pretty clear indication that it’s important. Why it’s important, I don’t know. It’s not like I’m going to be flying the shuttle out of there; the game is pretty clear that it’s beyond repair. Maybe there’s something inside the shuttle that’ll make it obvious what I’m supposed to do, but I can’t tell, because I’m a rabbit. Not exactly equipped for opening hatches, is what I’m saying.

Which leads to the somewhat less obvious goal: how to stop being a rabbit. On the sole basis of the plural in the title, I’m guessing that making any real progress in this game involves turning into some of the other creatures I’ve been seeing. The question is, how? The tree I emerged from has to be involved somehow. I saw a rabbit drag a dead rabbit over to the tree at one point, which suggests that I have to kill something to turn into it (or possess it?), but again, I’m a rabbit. Not exactly lethal.

I played this game right up to the two-hour limit for judging it in the Comp, but I feel like I haven’t made any progress at all, like I’m stuck in the prologue. If I’m right, turning into different animals is the game’s core activity, the thing that the puzzles are built around. But it’s something I haven’t been able to do. It’s as if I had played Space Invaders for two hours without finding the “Fire” button.