One of the greatest strengths of the metroidvania subgenre is how efficient it can be at telling a story without interrupting the player. To this day, Super Metroid is the gold standard of telling a story with almost no cutscenes or interruptions.
As metroidvanias evolved over decades, developers have become less shy about the narrative bearing heavy on the gamaplay. Even the latest Metroid Dread succumbed to intrusive cutscenes, and it still managed to be one of the best examples in the genre. Perhaps a good metroidvania can still be story heavy?
Rusty Rabbit is a metroidvania with curious roots. The developers are primarily known for anime production, visual novels, and film/TV. What do they know about making a good metroidvania? Find out in out Rusty Rabbit review!
Rusty Rabbit
Developer: Nitro Plus, NetEase Games
Publisher: NetEase Games
Platforms: Windows PC, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch (reviewed)
Release Date: April 17, 2025
Price: $19.99
Rusty Stamp is a classic blue-collar, working class kinda guy who spends his days digging in the ruins of Smokestack Mountain. While he may look like a cuddly little bunny, he’s a weathered and tired middle-aged guy who would love nothing more than to keep to himself, smoke, and relax with a few beers after a long day.
He’s after junk and he loves nothing more than to acquire more of it, but his life gets complicated when a group of young prospectors come into town. Rusty finds himself getting caught in the web of their lives as their inexperience leads him to constantly save them.
Rusty Rabbit has a lot of dialogue and cutscenes between chunks of exploration. The storytelling and atmosphere are impressively dense and most of the dialogue is well-written, and voice acted. This is where the designer’s experience in visual novels and TV is apparent. A lot of care and effort was spent on the narrative as evident in the dense character interactions and dialogue.
The only area where the narrative fails is in the voice casting. Most of the cast is fine and deliver fairly generic, yet competent anime-like line delivery, but the main character’s English voice is all wrong. In Japanese, Stamp is voiced by none other than Takaya Kuroda. He brings a palpable weariness and believably to his performance with his deep and old-sounding voice.
Stamp’s English voice is woefully miscast with Yong Yea. Regretfully, Yong is hopelessly unconvincing as a rugged working-class guy. He sounds extremely nasally and comes off as a child trying to sound like an adult. Yong is grossly meek in real life, and it comes through in his performance, hurting Stamp’s characterization.
The story evokes some shades of the Pikmin games. The world is seemingly an abandoned version of Earth with traces of humanity serving as relics and ancient ruins. Exploring Smokestack is not just running and jumping to get around; most of the labyrinth is clogged with junk to drill through, Dig Dug style.
The 2.5D presentation looks cheap since almost every fixture in the playing area is a prefabricated asset, making the entire world feel like it was made in a level editor. The environment is built with mostly flat surfaces and boxes, which is pretty boring. It’s uncanny that such a naturalistic story is set in a very artificial-feeling world.
The controls don’t feel great. Most of the time Stamp’s mech, Junkster, feels sticky and stiff when moving around and jumping. The physics when getting around with the jet booster are also unwieldy and tends to send Stamp careening off into random directions.
The best part about the Junkster is customizing it and mixing and matching weapons. There is a decent amount of variety for gearheads to play with and modify to suit most playstyles. The skill tree is large and plenty of abilities to make Stamp a force to reckon with.
The aforementioned sticky and sloppy controls are always present no matter how decked out Junkster gets. Battling bosses put up a decent fight, but nothing is more challenging than adjusting to Rusty Rabbit‘s playability.
While exploring, the main gimmick is drilling and digging through box-shaped cells. While the game’s design may not be impressive on the surface, the developers take the concept further than you’d think. There are a lot of traps in Smokestack and clever means of gear-gating.
For a Switch game, Rusty Rabbit looks pretty good once you’ve gotten over the grid-like level design and repetitive asset use. Everything is readable and backgrounds extend far off into a vast distance, packing tons of detail and dense geometry. The rabbit cast of characters look like plush dolls and look as cuddly as a baby’s toy.
The industrial design of the machinery is like a construction equipment by way of garage model kit. Everything looks weathered and used, but slightly exaggerated and whimsical enough to be make a kid want a toy of it.
The visuals are easily one of the highpoints in Rusty Rabbit and are on par with Forged in Shadow Torch; the other metroidvania featuring a mechanized rabbit who smokes and drinks.
Rusty Rabbit‘s developer has never made an 2D platformer metroidvania before and you feel it when playing. Yet, I couldn’t help but find myself intrigued by the writing and atmosphere. Despite starring a cute bunny mascot in a robot, Rusty Rabbit is about humanity’s extinction, entropy, and the protag drinks and smokes. Yet, kids will still love it.
As far as metroidvanias on Nintendo Switch go, you can do a lot worse than Rusty Rabbit. It’s no Metroid Dread, or Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth, or La Mulana 2, but it’s absolutely worth a play. Yong Yea sucks and the controls aren’t perfect, but this is still a solid adventure with a lot to discover. Be sure to switch the audio language to Japanese and one of the worst qualities are fixed.
Rusty Rabbit was reviewed on a Nintendo Switch using a code provided by NetEase Games. You can find additional information about Niche Gamer’s review/ethics policy here. Rusty Rabbit is now available for PC (via Steam), Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation 5.
