Pâquerette Down the Bunburrows

Difficulty : 4/5 (Very Hard)
Global : 4.5/5 (Great)

Pâquerette Down the Bunburrows is a pretty straightforward sokobun game : there are buns, you like buns, you catch buns.

Each puzzle has a bunny that you need to lure into a dead end in order to catch it. The bunnies are predictable : they fear you and will always move in the opposite direction when you are too close; they will always go left in priority if they can’t go straight; they will always dodge dead ends if they see them.
You also have tools to help you trap the bunnies in the majority of the levels, it adds layers of difficulty that can really skyrocket sometimes.

The game is incredibly well-designed, most of the achievements are references to a lot of very good puzzle games and I think that’s why this game is so good. It shows the dev studied and fully understood what made those games this good, resulting in Pâquerette fully exploiting its potential.

For the next parts, I have to warn you : I think Pâquerette is a game that is better experienced without knowing too much, but I don’t really want to put all of my review in a spoiler. If you still want to know exactly why this game is great, then procede.

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To be honest, I had rather high hopes for this game because I thought the concept to be extremely interesting (minus the instant Mario 64 / Galaxy flashbacks and their annoying rabbits…). But I’d never have thought it to be that great and didn’t expect meta stuff at all.
When I got the pickaxe, I directly mined the wall all the way to the right and reached a glitch room before being teleported to the crossroads; I smiled as I instantly understood it was one of these games I like so much, the games that reward ingenuity and out-of-the-box thinking.
So yes, this game is FULL of meta stuff : glitch rabbits waiting in out-of-bounds areas, baby buns if you manage to stack several bunnies, home captures that require you to twist the rules sometimes, and the final puzzle.

I’ll start with the baby buns. The rabbits you capture can all be released, allowing you to lure the rabbits in other rooms to make a stack. Two rabbits make a baby bun, but you can make a pile of 3, 4, 5… I managed to get a pile of 11 bunnies and that’s not even the maximum. There are also useful upgrades to help you that you unlock after reaching certain numbers of baby buns.
However, I think the game lacks a hint system : I currently managed to get 309 of them and I pretty much covered everything I can think of… it becomes extremely hard to find new ones and it’s discouraging. I started feeling this way around 230-250 baby buns, I think that would be a good value for that new upgrade.

Home capture is the “intended” way to capture a rabbit. A stack of bunnies is really easy to catch, and it’s clearly cheating. You need to capture every rabbit in their original room, without making a stack. That reminded me of A Good Snowman is Hard to Build (yes I quote that game too often in my reviews) in which you also could cheese levels but ultimately had to do them the right way.
An upgrade will let you track them easily and you can release the rabbits so don’t worry about making baby buns first or capturing stacks.

Besides the meta stuff, Pâquerette also has strong Baba is You vibes with the way the game is structured : the “never-ending” feeling you get as you progress and the slightly harder versions of previous levels in particular.

But there are still a few things that bothered me (lategame spoilers):

Apart from these very lategame things, the game is nearly perfect and is up there with the big puzzle game names.
Bravo!

Developer: Bunstack
Publisher: Abiding Bridge
Platforms: Steam – Windows/macOS
Release Date: August 2, 2023