Lapin (Xbox One)

Lapin is a touching tale of a band of five rabbits seeking a safe new home, and with its lovely art and gorgeous music, the emotions are beautifully realized when it is telling that tale. However, Lapin is also a precision platformer, and by choosing that direction for its interactive moments, it ends up on some unfortunately unsteady ground. While drawing clear inspiration from fellow precision platformer Celeste right down to specific mechanics, it doesn’t nail the responsiveness one would hope for in a game that demands pinpoint accuracy at times, leading to an unfortunate situation when trying to weigh the game’s quality. How much does the game’s story hold up when the weight of a rough action component can’t be ignored?

 

Lapin has the player assuming the role of Liebe, this young bunny an abandoned pet who was adopted into the small community of rabbits known as Alfa. Each of the five residents of the Alfa burrow have a history behind them and well-defined personalities that become more apparent over the course of the adventure, and while the chances to speak with them can sometimes interrupt the flow of the action, it’s probably preferable to get to know these other bunnies over playing more platforming levels. Liebe sits at a good spot in the group, earnest and open but a bit immature so the others are naturally inclined to speak with her and try to assist her, but she’s not some burden either as she tries to do whatever she can for her friends. The group leader is named Captain, the rabbit trying to live up to his name by always being supportive and watchful. Bianca almost serves as a secondary leader, her experiences in a former burrow called the Cage has made her a bit more secretive even though she still dotes on the others when she’s not trying to be a teacher. The remaining two bunnies beyond Liebe, Jose and Montblanc, get much more of the story’s attention, Montblanc being a quiet engineer who refuses to acknowledge his emotions while Jose is an incredibly outgoing artist who always looks to brighten up the days of others no matter what it takes.

Quite often the player will get a chance to see the different rabbits interact with each other as different points in the story bring out more from them, the game wisely spacing out certain stories like Montblanc’s issues so they can have strong emotional payoffs once they have reached their endpoints. Things can be sad, sweet, or even bittersweet, but thanks to Liebe and Jose’s more outgoing personalities there is also levity, this also helped out by an interesting approach where you can unlock playable flashbacks. The group is forced to abandon their Alfa burrow at the start of the game thanks to human construction, but as you talk more with your travel companions, you build up relationship points with them that eventually pay off with dedicated sections where you can see an important moment from the past where Liebe became closer to that rabbit or otherwise learned something important about them. As for where the band of bunnies intends to go after leaving the burrow you grow to know better through those retrospective moments, they follow the map of an expedition lead by a legendary bunny called Jorge that supposedly found a land of paradise. Jorge’s expedition hangs over this small group’s journey, the player even able to find small challenges off to the side of the main platforming areas where the reward is a seed that contains small memories from Jorge and his allies. Comparing this expedition of the past with the current one ends up a pretty important part of Liebe’s development and helps to start solidify the grander theme that makes this game so wholesome, the group’s connections and bond leading to the kind of touching events that make Lapin’s plot worth paying attention to most of all.

 

Admittedly one of the odder elements of the game is figuring out how humans and rabbits relate to each other in the game world. Rabbits wear clothes and have human hairstyles despite being proportioned like the real animal, and they can seemingly operate human devices like computers yet can’t communicate with people and Liebe was even someone’s pet before. At first it can seem like we’re viewing the world through the rabbit’s perspective so certain things are adjusted, but it also doesn’t gel with direct actions taken that clearly show the rabbits appear to be exactly as depicted. There are some less realistic elements that crop-up as you explore beyond just how athletic and capable these bunnies are so the mild confusion it causes is worth pushing past, but then we reach the truly shaky ground that Lapin is unfortunately built upon.

 

Lapin is by no means a terrible platformer, but it is one that expects more out of its systems then they were designed for. Most of Lapin focuses in on well-timed and well-spaced jumps, your wall jump your most used ability for more advanced navigation as you can both repeatedly leap up the same vertical surface or launch yourself fairly far by springing off a wall you’re clinging to. Different areas will introduce a few shake-ups like bubbles that give you an aerial jump or moving devices that you can leap off of with the right timing to get a huge burst of momentum, most of the game’s larger areas and their side-challenges focusing on a unique specific gimmick that must be used to safely get around things like thorns and lethal crystals that coat so many of the surfaces. Usually, dying will only reset the current room and they usually aren’t very large, although some chase scenes like outrunning a weasel will strain this a bit as you need to cover longer stretches between checkpoints while still being beholden to the same tight requirements usually found when navigating a deadly space.

The basics of Lapin work fine and this means, when the room isn’t too demanding, you can work your way through jumping puzzles or maneuver deftly through tight spaces. However, things do start getting rickety as level design and certain gimmicks start to mix a bit poorly with your movement. There are many times where you need to guide Liebe into a bouncy flower to get a burst of movement in a direction, but you also need to then hold the opposite direction of that flower to have a hope of landing where it’s safe. The issue that arises a bit too often is sometimes to hit that flower, you need to be holding the control stick towards it right up until you hit it and then need to be pressing the other direction rather quickly or else you’ll not have the right amount of distance needed to clear a deadly drop. Lapin’s bigger issues tend to come from when it strings together such tight requirements in that way, the player having to perfectly execute a chain of actions where being half a second too early or late to adjust leads to immediate failure. Even in lower stakes situations though sometimes the amount of safe ground or walls for Liebe to land on again expects pinpoint accuracy to an annoying degree, the player sometimes having to inch up to an instant death hazard so they can position themselves properly or alternatively they’ll hit a hazard when trying to land because they were a mite too slow or fast in adjusting their midair movement.

 

A precision platformer definitely demands greater reflexes and imposes stricter conditions on what counts as effective movement, but movement in Lapin isn’t so tight that you can be consistent in threading the needles it sometimes requires of you. It feels unfortunately easy to brush against an instant death hazard during the game’s more demanding moments even though, when you attempt that same challenge again immediately after, you didn’t really change up your movement much to clear it safely. Lapin does quarantine some of its strictest challenges to the seed collection rooms off to the side and only the chase sequences feel like they expect constant consistent performances despite how they can be undone by being slightly off in seemingly insignificant ways, but the little bits of awkwardness in how precise the game expects you to be at times do drag down platforming that is able to be good when there’s a bit more wiggle room so you’re not worrying about Liebe’s position down to the pixel. When you are messing with a mechanic like the boxes you can ride that are fired out of a launcher you trigger by touching it you feel like you’re engaging with something with more layers, but Lapin’s more restrictive moments inevitably last longer than the better designed moments where you can string together some satisfying platforming that didn’t need to be obsessively demanding to be entertaining.

THE VERDICT: Lapin’s heartwarming story of five wonderfully fleshed out rabbits and their wholesome found family relationship could have been the cornerstone of a great video game, and at times, Lapin does seem like it’s going to come through and at least provide an overall good adventure. The unique mechanics that arise in different areas could have kept things fresh, but the layouts of individual challenges start to ask for too much from your limited movement options so you can’t consistently be as precise as it demands you to be. Too much focus on the exact landing spot or perfect timing start to turn some of the platforming trials less into tests of your reflexes and problem solving and more into finding that one exact action or position to avoid falling a pixel short of success, but persistence is at least still possible and the lovely tale at Lapin’s heart means it can still be worth suffering through those moments of weak level design.

 

And so, I give Lapin for Xbox One…

An OKAY rating. The beautiful story about five adorable bunnies can get remarkably complex and emotional and while the opportunities to talk to Liebe’s friends are so numerous it can lead to the action losing some of its flow, it’s certainly the game’s heart and the reason Lapin keeps its head above water. It’s almost strong enough on its own merits that it could push this game up to a Good rating, ideas like flashing back to the time at Alfa doing wonders for characterization and establishing the group’s history with each other. You want these rabbits to find their paradise, to make it through the adventure safely. You fear for them when they’re hurt, you wonder if the bright-eyed optimism of someone like Jose can survive the journey. Lapin’s art and music does so much to further make this nearly a top notch experience I would love to see more people try, but then the choice to be a precision platformer gets in the way. Again, it likely tried a bit too much to be like Celeste, the difficulty part of the tale and overcoming it important for Liebe’s growth, but it’s not narratively satisfying if a character’s struggles are more about if you held the control stick a fraction of a second too long and missed the one spot you need to be to properly pull off the next jump. The easy retries definitely do smooth over the rough requirements at times and someone with some platforming skill should be able to persist and experience Liebe’s beautiful tale, but it sounds like nailing the “precision” in precision platformer has been a problem for this game even back when it was first released in a Game Preview/Early Access capacity.

 

So much of Lapin could be salvaged by small adjustments that account for your limited movement abilities, some hazards just needing to be a bit more clearly defined or being pushed just a few pixels over to lead to something that feels consistently smooth. A white substance that can kill you in particular sometimes lets Liebe seem to brush her nose up against it and at other times you can barely let a hair on the hare get near it or you die, so while it could compromise the art a smidge to adjust it, already the narrative and visuals feel like they’re being brought down a bit by some uneven action elements. Lapin is still a mostly manageable adventure where the characters and journey are what hopefully sticks with you most, but alongside them you’ll likely be haunted by the memories of the worst cases where the game demanded perfection, this sweet game sadly not strong enough to fully rise above its roughest patches.