Year: 2016
Platform: PlayStation 4
Genre: Platform
Review Date: 2/1/22
Rating: ***

For reasons that are too bizarre and confusing to go into, a bunny girl ends up with cat ears and must defeat the Seven Devils in order to lift her curse. Throughout the course of this Metroidvania styled platformer, she can upgrade her shoes to enable dashing, bouncing, and hopping on flames. She also has a number of weapons at her disposal including throwing knives, boomerangs, a spiked hammer, and a kind of lightsaber. She can also stomp on enemies with her heels. Another interesting artifact allows your character to transform into a "bountiful bunny" with large bouncing breasts. This form allows you to deal and withstand more damage in exchange for mobility and agility. Her massive melons also cause the ground to shake when you land from a jump.

While the gameplay is pretty straight forward, there's also a time manipulation feature that makes things considerably more complicated. There are several occasions that require freezing or rewinding time in order to make progress, and those situations can be very frustrating - especially when you run out of time and have to revisit a save point in order to refill your time gauge. Enhancements can be purchased with gems that allow your time and health gauges to refill automatically, but those disable some of the game's trophies. Colored orbs can be used to access locked areas, and the game provides a fairly useful map of the areas you've explored.

I never turn down the opportunity to play a bunny girl game, and its retro-styled presentation and pixel art create a fun and colorful aesthetic. The music and voice acting are good, but some of the sound effects are weak and oppressively loud. The controls are tight, but pixel-perfect jumping and wall bouncing can be very challenging. There's little variety in the enemies, and pumpkins seem to be a recurring theme. The bosses are amusing and include a large fire-breathing eyeball, a gigantic cat with sensitive paws, and an Elvis-styled vampire that flashes his lethal loins at you. What's interesting about this undead pervert is that if your character looks at him while he's exposing his dong of doom, it's instant death, so you have to fight him with your back turned. It's a clever, but difficult and unintuitive mechanic.

Speaking of difficulty, that's where the game falls apart. Staying true to its old-school roots, it is ruthlessly demanding and relentlessly hard to play, but rarely unfair. The game requires patience and precision (and often speed), and enemies have predictable patterns. They also respawn every time you re-enter a room, which is annoying, but typical of the genre. I played for about six hours and got roughly halfway through before I was forced to give up and wasn't having any fun anymore. It's unfortunate that I wasn't able to see all the game had to offer and get rid of my cat ear curse, but for $15 I feel like I got my money's worth out of it.