Talk about a guilt trip! The moment I arrive in The Rabbit Haul, the mayor is giving out orders as there’s nobody left in town to fix it. At least the music is upbeat. It’s those effing raccoons that ruined everything. Fortunately, a positive can-do approach, a brave bunny smile, and a razor-sharp knife are all one needs to help restore everything to its former glory. It’s only a demo, so we might not have that much time to make a change.
The Rabbit Haul is an RPG, though, so expect a hefty game when it comes out. Our adventure begins with obtaining some tokens to help the local vendor, Gerald, rebuild. Your job is to grow crops with your ‘haul’, and the reasoning(?) behind the title, grow produce for currency, or to eat and make sure you’re ready to hold off against the raids by the Trash Panda Posse. So… it isn’t just the raccoons. As mentioned earlier, you do wield a blade, but you also boast some towers, too.
Like any basic farming simulator, you find a strategic place to plant your produce and then manually water it for it to grow. The tower structures, naturally, are plant-based, so allergies or attacks on anyone’s lifestyle choices here. When placed appropriately, they will attack the impending raiders, while you can manually go about and poke at them, too. Towers can be upgraded with tokens for better abilities, but remember, you need those tokens to help Gerald out. Pace yourself.
When everything is placed how you like it, and you’ve sourced everything tangible, pressing space will advance the game to nighttime for the survival aspect. Initially, these battles are swift, so you get used to it, and symbiotic crystals will drop to help level up. Like the common Survivors game, you will have a choice of three buffs to choose from that can include passive perks and various rarities. In addition, the tokens prove fruitless as Gerald shows up with his wandering caravan to buy items from your haul, but also to sell seeds you can then grow, thus restarting and improving the cycle. He also sells weapons.
In completing multiple waves of panda attacks, you’ll eventually earn tokens to invest in Gerald’s wears, including upgrades. As expected, the waves in The Rabbit Haul are getting more difficult with harder-hitting enemies, but there are also actual difficulty levels offering higher risks with higher rewards. Modifiers are potentially available, but not in the scope of this demo. Still, that’s all you ned really for this pseudo tower defence game, which is quite a nice setup, when you brush aside those earlier demands from the mayor.
The Rabbit Haul follows the Paper Mario, or Demon Tides 2D meets 3D. However, in the realms of this demo, the play area is quite limited for an RPG, and the focus is more on those tower defence waves being a thing. As a slave to that particular genre, I was up for that rather than endless fetch quests, though don’t be fooled into thinking that this is exclusively tower defence – there’s a sprinkle of lots of things. Actually, it reminds me a bit of Born of Bread. That’s a callback for you. Anyways, I got access to this preview a little earlier, but you can play it yourself now on Steam. Heck, go try it now.
