Game Review: Rabbit Simulator

cw: animal cruelty, animal torture, gore, animal death

This review contains no screenshots, because this game does not exist.

You’d be forgiven for mistaking the rabbit in Rabbit Simulator for the real thing. On a technical level, it’s very difficult to believe that this game was made by a single person, and it starts making a lot of sense when you hear that the sole developer, Richard Churlis, was one of the key technical leads on Unreal Engine 5 before his departure from the company.

The light moves through the rabbit’s fur perfectly. There’s sub-surface scattering on the rabbit’s ears. The nose has a wet sheen to it, and you can see the rabbit’s musculature moving between its skin when it hops around.

One of the most common first reactions to seeing one of the photos of the rabbit in Rabbit Simulator is, “wait, that’s from a game?”, a question asked with even greater intensity when someone sees it in motion.

The second question people will ask is, “wait, what’s this game about?”

The rabbit’s perfection as a simulation goes below the surface. Every muscle and bone is simulated. Every organ actually functions, or at least has a stripped down function. There are joints and ligaments that move, and the rabbit has a brain — not a set of programmed actions or a decision tree, but an actual brain — which is hooked up to an actual nervous system. Churlis often cautions people against making sweeping statements about the perfection of the simulations — according to him, simulation is often another way of saying simplification. He would object, for example, to the characterization of the rabbit’s brain as being a “real” brain, because under the hood it’s relatively simple and no actual neurons are simulated. But watching the rabbit in motion, you can’t help but get the sense of what an achievement it is. The way the fur mats when it gets wet with water or other fluids is breathtaking.

And sometimes, if that’s the introduction someone is given to it, they understandably get more serious. “Wait, what’s this game about?”

This is somewhat of a complicated question, and it’s one that Churlis loves to field. “Richard Garfield has this quote I love, that a game is a series of interesting choices,” he said over a Discord call, “So the thing about Rabbit Simulator is that the choices aren’t interesting, it’s really barely even a game, it’s not called Rabbit Game. But the thing that makes it a game is that you don’t have this moral modality like in other good and evil games, there genuinely are ways to interact with the rabbit that are just as (if not more) deep than all the ways that are, ah, destructive.”

Rabbit Simulator has no goals, objectives, unlocks, or achievements. There is nothing to motivate the player to take any action. Instead, the player has tools, all of them available right when you start the game by hitting the “Simulate Rabbit” button. These tools are: food, water, furniture, brush, hammer, and scalpel. Of these, the hammer and scalpel have obviously attracted the most attention.

“In 1976 Marina Abramović sat down for six hours and let the audience do whatever they wanted to her using a collection of 72 objects,” said Churlis, referencing a performance art piece titled Rhythm 0, which actually took place in 1974. “And that’s Rabbit Simulator, except that 72 is just way, way too many given how much work each one of them would be to implement. I mean, I’ve thought about cheating it, having a few different kinds of knife, I’m already doing a few different fluids and having honey [as Abramović had in Rhythm 0] wouldn’t be that difficult. But I’m not pretending that I’m doing anything wholly unique here. It’s part of the ongoing discourse. And if you take the Roger Ebert school of thought, that games aren’t art and never can be, then either you have to say that Rabbit Simulator isn’t art or that it’s not a game, and of those two positions, I think both are false, personally.”

While it’s clear that Churlis is a technical savant who sees himself as the inheritor of an artistic tradition regarding agency and transgression, the fans of the game are not always so eloquent or erudite in their defenses of it.

“You bash the rabbit in the head with a hammer,” said one user. “Do you like bashing a rabbit in the head with a hammer? Great, this is the game for you. Do you not like that? Go fuck off and do something else.”

The largely unmoderated Discord server, not made or endorsed by Churlis, has a section of channels titled “gore”. There, users share pictures and memes with each other. The pictures are largely of simulated rabbits who have met their deaths by scalpels and hammers, with the pictures taken using the game’s photo mode. The simulation continues even after death, so many of the photos show post mortem injuries as well. Users will take it in turn to do what they call “rabbit CSI” as they look at these photos and determine the sequence of events, particularly with regard to patterns of blood splatter and what might have happened after death.

Similarly, there are channels devoted to coming up with new ways of killing the rabbit, particularly with tools or combinations of tools that are unobvious: the rabbit can die from blood loss or blunt force, but also suffocation or strangulation, which are much more difficult to achieve with the tools as given.

Churlis, when asked about those users, grows evasive. “Look, I think there are different ways to interact with any kind of game. That’s one of the ways.” I asked whether or not he wanted them to stop. “I guess to me, it’s interesting that they’re out there doing that, it’s just not really what it’s about. Like, an early version of the game would uninstall and permanently flag you after you killed the rabbit. It was more pure, in a way. But I knew that people would get around it, that there would be a guide up five seconds after I pushed it about how to get around that. They can crack AAA titles, they could sure as hell crack this little thing. So no, there’s not just one rabbit that’s somehow tied to you, even if that would have been nice.”

It seems that in Churlis’ mind, all this care and effort that went into every detail of lighting, fur simulation, and painstakingly realistic rabbit anatomy exist for a short, clean little art piece. In practice, there are people with more than a hundred hours in the game, and these people represent the game’s most vocal fans.

So far, Rabbit Simulator has mostly flown under the radar. While it was briefly on Steam, Churlis eventually removed it for unstated reasons. It’s currently only available on itch.io, where Churlis expects it to stay. It’s attracted its controversy, but remains extremely niche and is not often spoken of by mainstream gaming publications.

“You know, if I have one thing I’m thankful for, it’s that I didn’t have it be a woman instead,” said Churlis. “Very early on, it was going to be someone who was a close resemblance to Abramović, much more of a nod to her work. But I’m glad I steered into another direction.” When I asked why, his answer was simple. “It’s a lot easier to simulate a rabbit than a person.”

Edit: A few days after the publication of this review, Rabbit Simulator was removed from itch.io. It can currently be found on Churlis’ personal website.