The bunnies are coming, are you ready for them?
BUNNYJACKS by Penny Blake – Available Now!
There are times when you want some easy-going fun, something humorous or soft-natured, so you can explore a wholesome story of personal fulfillment. BUNNYJACKS, by Penny Blake, will NOT fulfill such an itch. Instead, you’ll get an exhilarating blast of dread and confusion, wrapped up in the cute and cuddly, long-eared forces at play. It’s fun, silly, creepy, and confusing in all the right ways. So cozy up, grab your energy drinks, and get ready for a long night!
BUNNYJACKS uses Blake’s own Swish! Damn! Wtf! System (more on that below) to excellent results, giving players and writers enough interesting avenues to explore multiple replays and unique experiences. The premise of the game sees you as managing a hotel for the night, with a list of required chores. As you complete these activities, hour by hour, room by room, you run the risk of strange things happening, including your own decent into madness as the bunnies find ways to warp your very reality.
The mechanics are exceedingly easy to pick up, with a few rolling tables and countdown to manage. The provided prompts offer a wonderful chance to journal the strangeness, seeping in to even the most mundane tasks, always present to keep you on your toes.
The simple style and presentation of the document itself adds to the theme, where open pages with mysterious messages and nefarious bunny logos serve to highlight the strength of the prompts and mechanism of play.
Along with the potential story conflict and chance to journal in circumstances of dream-like confusion, what really shines is the system itself. Full disclosure, I consider myself a friend of the author and am myself planning to release a game using the same system, so I could be biased when I say that this innovation is truly inspiring.
The basic course of play involves one rolling for an activity to complete and then rolling to determine how smoothly (or not so smoothly) the efforts to complete the task unfold. At each turn, there are three potential outcomes. “Swish!” – an uneventful success, “Damn!” – failure with a step toward madness, and “WTF?” – success with a twist on reality. This variation of “yes”, “no and…”, or “yes but…” offers a fabulous way to follow prompts and journal with the urgency and disquietude needed to make a horror game from a list of chores.
In short, if you want a simple journaling game with interesting wrinkles that combines the silly and scary in an amusing and dreadful way than this might be for you.
BUNNYJACKS is available now, and you can currently name your own price to add it to your collection.
