Rusty Rabbit review: Buck Bumble

Nitroplus’ Rusty Rabbit is an easy hook. The key visuals show us a bipedal rabbit, wearing a patched-up bomber jacket, chomping on a carrot like a cigar, with a village made of scrap junk on the side of a frozen mountain in the background. Learning the rabbit pilots a mech suit in Metroidvania dungeons and is voiced by Kazuma Kiryu of Yakuza fame in both Japanese and English seals the deal. But what might seem like a zany, over the top action game turns out to be more nuanced than you might expect. Weird, wholesome, and deliberately rough around the edges, Rusty Rabbit is an earnest passion project that looks like a normal video game but happens to be more of a visual novel-coded character study.

Washed up

The star of the show is Stamp, who isn’t the cigar-chomping action hero he seems like at first glance. Stamp’s an old man who runs a junk shop as a “rust-grubber,” someone who explores ruins left behind by “giants” to dig for parts and put them together into functional machines. He hears the “voice of the junk,” and is able to build things like cars for his customers based on his ability to intuit how things work. Stamp’s a guy who’s lived a whole life, had a family, and has known and done the same old stuff for decades. He’s tired and weathered, but only has what he knows, rust-grubbing, and plans to do it until the wheels come off. What else could there be for a guy like him?

Stamp’s daughter, nowhere to be seen, left home in search of that “what else.” After studying the controversial “archaeology” that flies in the face of rabbitkind’s religious teachings and understanding of the world, she leaves Stamp behind after a big fight. While living alone, Stamp accidentally gets involved with a group of kits, eagerly diving into the ruins of Smokestack Mountain with the backing of a sketchy rabbit wearing priest clothes. Stamp, who cares deeply about respecting the dangers of his work, finds himself looking out for this bunch of reckless rookies. Using his mech suit-like digging tool and lifetime of expertise, Stamp ends up in the driver’s seat of an excavation that’s just as much about uncovering hidden truths as it is digging up junk and fighting monsters. And he might learn something about what his daughter’s been up to in the process.

No country for old bunnies

This game isn’t really about the conspiracies and lore, although that stuff is extremely funny. Left with the mysteries of what humanity has left behind, rabbits developed a whole religion from the text of Peter Rabbit, for example. It’s really about the goings-on in Stamp’s own mind, an exploration of what it might be like to simply be an aging old guy in the latter years of his life. Stamp is set in his ways, stubborn, and grumpy. But he’s also incredibly passionate about his interests and livelihood, surprisingly empathetic and totally open to sitting in a diner and talking to a young girl about fashion. You’ll spend just as much time, if not more, reading about Stamp’s internal reasoning behind putting a specific kind of engine together with other specific parts he’s found, compared to rooting around in dungeons blowing things up.

Such a strong dedication to details and monologing about things that don’t seem relevant to the plot will probably be a deterrent for folks, but I ate that stuff up. Despite being a silly-looking rabbit guy, Stamp is the most completely human character in a video game I’ve encountered in a long time. I was stoked to find a random car part and make a beeline for the nearest exit, just so I could go back home and read ten or more pages about how coils have to be carefully chosen to bear weight, why a car needs to be called “Princess,” or how Stamp sees his customers’ personalities and lives reflected in how they react to a finished product. Urobuchi’s writing is strong and utterly unfiltered, unafraid to dive into Stamp’s mind just to show us how someone dedicated to their craft might think, over and over.

Dungeon-drilling

Rusty Rabbit also isn’t afraid to sacrifice “fun” for affect. When in dungeons Stamp pilots Junkster, a mechanical (and rabbit-shaped) exosuit that only has weapons by circumstance. Junkster is more like a tractor than a Gundam, and the way it moves and handles reflects that. It’s heavy and inelegant, the result of decades of use, tinkering, and repairs. While it has features that propel Metroidvania-style gameplay (wall-jumping, grappling, shooting, etc), there’s an inherent clumsiness and rigidity that ensure any comparison to the likes of Metroid Dread won’t do this game any favors on paper. But it’s all in service to the vibe and setting, further emphasizing we’re an old man using his rickety old work tool in a situation he isn’t fully equipped to be in.

As such, combat isn’t really a focus, and you spend a lot of time in dungeons simply drilling blocks and crates. Enemies, themselves rusty, mechanical oddities and side effects of human ruin, are more like obstacles than challenges or pieces of an exciting loop. Hammering buttons and boosting through the air to swipe your “sword” at flying foes is a bad idea even if you can technically do it. A slower, methodical pace is a better way to approach problems, something Stamp is desperately trying to teach the younger rabbits he’s reluctantly feeling responsible for.

While this deliberately rough approach makes sense and feels effective in service of the story being told, there are moments when it’s hard not to feel annoyed with the sort of ironic, intended jank. Rusty Rabbit insists on having Mega Man-like boss battles, with huge mechanical beasts that have screen-filling, gimmicky attacks that can be hard to parse visually and get frustrating to deal with considering Junkster’s inherent limitations. Difficulty isn’t usually an issue though, and as long as you’re paying attention to the relatively passive mission and upgrade systems, you can get by with brute force and healing items.

Being a Metroidvania isn’t really a focus here either, being more of a framework for the dungeons than the key gameplay element. Many of the dungeons are small and linear, with things not getting terribly complicated or backtracky until closer to the end. This part can get frustrating too, as the map marks obstacles without finer details. It’s possible to get stuck simply trying to remember which obstacles are tied to which tool, and with multiple upgrade stages and barrier strengths, figuring out what you need to simply move the story forward can be annoying. Luckily, again, you don’t need to get everything to get through the story, with most of the upgrades and backtracking being optional stuff you can leave for the post-game if you want. There’s also a random dungeon feature that lets you mine for money and resources if you’re feeling stuck and frustrated with detail-cleaning the main dungeons.

Rusty Rabbit is the kind of game that sticks out because you can tell it’s made by people who care about their craft and have ideas they want to dig deep to explore. It’s not just a toy made for empty, vague metrics like fun and enjoyment. There are plenty of those, and those things have their place and value of course. But capital-p Passion Projects like Rusty Rabbit are few and far between, and offer alternatives to the norm that ask the audience to use their brains to engage with media in ways they might not be accustomed to. And there’s still plenty of fun to be had, from exploring dungeons to taking in all the silly rabbit-themed, sci-fi lore and background details that make such an off-kilter premise appealing. At the same time, this game might make you think about what you find important in your own life, or what it might be like to grow up seeing the world differently than people older or younger. This one is gonna stick for a while.

Rusty Rabbit is available on April 17, 2025 for the PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, and PC. A PlayStation 5 code was provided by the publisher for this review.

Lucas White

Contributing Editor

Lucas plays a lot of videogames. Sometimes he enjoys one. His favorites include Dragon Quest, SaGa, and Mystery Dungeon. He's far too rattled with ADHD to care about world-building lore but will get lost for days in essays about themes and characters. Holds a journalism degree, which makes conversations about Oxford Commas awkward to say the least. Not a trophy hunter but platinumed Sifu out of sheer spite and got 100 percent in Rondo of Blood because it rules. You can find him on Twitter @HokutoNoLucas being curmudgeonly about Square Enix discourse and occasionally saying positive things about Konami.