Sometimes, you just want a game with no consequences. A chill experience where you can enjoy building something and watch as those you’re building it for interact with it. Well, I can safely say that Bunny Park hits that request perfectly. Having released on Steam in 2020, it has now recently seen a release on consoles, giving more people the opportunity to relax and attract bunnies to a park.
The premise really is that simple. You start on the middle section of a 9×9 grid of space, with one bunny arriving as soon as you start. Debris of grass, rocks, and wood litter the ground, so get rid of it all to earn a bit of money and start adding new things to the park space. This will improve the cosy and cute ratings of the park, thus attracting new bunnies to the park who can dig up more money from the ground.
The bunnies won’t be digging for treasure if they’re not happy, so you better be feeding them. Snacks can be bought and placed on the ground, as can gardens. While the buyable snacks are single use consumables, the gardens are permanent additions that will continually grow a snack. For instance, carrot gardens – the cheapest on offer – will produce four carrots that can either be left there for the bunnies to eat or picked up and placed elsewhere.
As mentioned, decorations improve the cosy and cute ratings of the park. These decorations include paths, fences, trees, flowers, and a number of other things. There are eight directions of rotation for items, allowing for diagonal paths and fences to be placed. You have the freedom of placement without being restricted to a grid, as well, allowing for a greater amount of creativity in designing the layout of this park.
When you have enough money, it’s time to think about expansion. Each of the other eight parts of the grid will require a payment to clear the woodland away to allow you use of that extra space. The price increases per expansion, starting from a small 2,500 all the way up to 20,000. If that feels like a lot, then don’t worry. Everything you do and all that you spend leads to quicker cash generation.
More decorations equals more bunnies, and more feeding areas equals happy bunnies. Both of those equals more money dug up from the ground, though you will have to collect it by aiming your cursor over the money pieces. To start with, anyway. Since the game has some automation in the way of bot-terflies.
These bot-terflies will help clear away debris, collect the money dug up by the bunnies, and pet the bunnies to make sure they’re always happy. The first two have two varieties to them, with mini and great. I haven’t noticed much difference between them, but I feel the mini ones would be less effective than the great ones, so best to save up for those great ones.
The translation to console has been handled very well, though the camera and cursor control can be awkward to use. The left stick controls the camera, and while the cursor will move once collected at the edge of the screen, the camera will bounce itself once you stop moving it to make that cursors centred on the screen. Cursor control on the right stick allows you to move around the entire park, but once again the camera will be jumping to centre that cursor when it get to the edge of the screen.
Aside from that, there’s a great artstyle to the game, with some nice calming music playing in the background. Zoom up close, and you can watch the bunnies hopping around enjoying themselves within the park with some smooth animations. It’s a very calming vibe overall, to the point you’re not stressing any about not having money.
For something relaxing to fit in between sessions of high-intensity gameplay, you can’t ask for a better game. Watch bunnies, build up the park, with no real goals beyond attracting all 25 bunnies to the park. I can easily recommend it for the Switch, as it feels the perfect handheld game. It’s certainly worth the time of anyone who prefers to walk rather than run.
Images Taken From:
Bunny Park (Original Screenshots)
