Review: 'LAPIN'

LAPIN (available on Steam) is a 2D precision platformer from South Korean Studio Doodal released in the second half of 2023. In it, you play as the abandoned pet rabbit Liebe who, accompanied by four rabbits who took her in, must go on a journey to find a new home.

Plot

The basic plot: forced to leave your home in the local park due to construction work, you must journey to find a new home, following a legendary rabbit explorer's map. This immediately echoes those childhood staples The Animals of Farthing Wood (reviewed here) and Watership Down; both have bands of animals – also rabbits in the latter case – forced to leave their home and journey to find a new one. Given that the rabbits are constantly searching for "Paradise", there may also be some influence from Wolf's Rain.

While the story is very simple, I was surprised by how well-written the individual characters are. Liebe is accompanied by Captain, Bianca, José and Montblanc. Liebe is generally seen by the others as the baby of the group but inside she has a lot of determination which shines through during the journey. Captain is the cook and leader of the warren and does his best to take care of everyone. Bianca is also very mature and responsible but a darker backstory to uncover. José is the joker of the group, keeping everyone's spirits up with his games and songs. Montblanc is possibly the smartest, serving as the grumbling engineer who just wants to be left alone.

There's opportunities to interact with the other rabbits, giving you insight into their personalities and past. Upon reaching certain friendship levels, you unlock memories. By watching the memories you will see different events that shaped Liebe's relationship with each rabbit in much more depth. "Watch" is quite accurate; as nice as they can be, the memories tend to have little gameplay and transform your platformer into a visual novel. The memories are optional, but skipping them means missing out on important background for some surprisingly emotional scenes.

Gameplay

Gameplay is standard 2D platforming where you have to navigate through a challenging environment, avoid hazards and employ different mechanisms. It feels very heavily influenced by Celeste, even going so far as to replace the collectable strawberries with collectable seeds. However, the seeds are much easier to find than Celeste's strawberries with the extra rooms usually quite obvious. The standard rooms are occasionally broken up by chase sequences which are reminiscent of Ori and the Blind Forest and can ramp the difficulty up substantially.

In general, the game is much easier than Celeste, although the late-game rooms can require extreme precision and timing to pull off correctly. That difficulty brings up one annoyance of the game, it is completely unforgiving in unnecessary ways. What I mean is that there is no room for error. If you miss your timing or fail a jump, you will often have to restart the whole screen. For example, there are bubbles on certain levels which are required to perform certain moves but those bubbles don't respawn, unlike in Celeste. This creates a completely unnecessary level of frustration.

LAPIN contains Steam achievements in abundance! There are 94 achievements for a game which you can 100% in about eight hours. Easy and normal mode get their own individual achievements, so, if you play on normal mode, most achievements will double up. You can also get achievements for very basic actions which are unavoidable in the game. On the flip side, some achievements are mutually exclusive or require the story to be in progress; that means that it's not possible to travel back to earlier rooms and get the achievements.

Graphics and sound

Everything in Lapin is adorably cute and looks great. However, there are sections of the game where a lack of contrast between the foreground and the background makes it difficult to know which surfaces are in which. These difficulties can be exacerbated by how far the camera is zoomed out during gameplay, resulting in the characters appearing small. This may not be as much of an issue on a large desktop monitor, but I was playing the game on the Steam Deck which has a rather small screen. The only flagged issue for Steam Deck compatibility is a warning that some text may be small and hard to read. Personally, I had no issues reading all the text and the game ran smoothly on the Deck.

As with many indie games, such as Celeste, the characters are not voiced and instead make little squeaks when their dialogue is on screen. It's quite adequate for this sort of game though. The music tends to fit what's happening on screen, but I don't recall being blown away by either sound effects or music, aside from maybe one or two tracks in particular challenges.

Final thoughts

LAPIN is a decent platformer: challenging but not too difficult. It can struggle with the balance between storytelling and gameplay but the characters are charming enough you will want to see more of them. Finally, as all the characters are rabbits, it makes an ideal platformer for any furry gamer. Overall, Lapin is very cute and well-worth playing.