Ürs

- View the most common tags (What's a tag?) (Log in to add your own tags)

5 star: (4) 4 star: (8) 3 star: (7) 2 star: (1) 1 star: (0)

Average Rating: Number of Reviews: 5 Write a review

Most Helpful Member Reviews

Great art, unique protagonists, and some interesting special effects, January 29, 2019
In Ürs you play as a rabbit whose warren is threatened by ominous THUDs, and you have to figure out how to save it. After a while you realize that the setting isn't quite what it appears to be at first. It turns out that (Spoiler - click to show)the THUDs are meteorites hitting the shell protecting the large space rock (small moon?) that the warren is located in. You have to uncover some secrets of the ancient rabbits, increase the strength of the shell, and move the large space rock so that it is orbiting a different celestial body in order to save the warren. (I think that's right. Somehow the ancient rabbits must have built an engine of some sort into the rock itself.)

The art in this game is great - like the cover, with its strong hint of rabbity-ness.

The plot feels right within the mainstream of science fiction plots - uncover secret knowledge that no one else has dared to find and save your world, but the rabbit protagonist and the art give it some freshness.

One interesting feature of Ürs that I've seen in the Geronimo Stilton series of books that my kids read is that the fonts of certain words are changed - in the middle of a sentence - to augment their meaning or effect. For example, the THUDs actually go "THUD!". I think this effect works well most of the time. The one place I'm not sure about is the dialog that's rotating or moving while changing colors. That's unfortunately a bit hard to read.

Ürs has a rather impressive set of influences. The authors list Watership Down, City of Ember, Skyrim, Caves of Qud, Super Mario Brothers, and Apocalypse Now. I confess that I don't see how most of these fit the game (Watership Down is obvious - the rest less so). Maybe it's not an influence, but the game also reminded me at times of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Cute bedtime story with a sci fi touch, November 23, 2018
The title of my review summarizes how reading/playing this story felt to me.

On the one hand, parts felt like an illustrated bedtime story you might read to your children. The usual life of the shown rabbit society consists of sleeping, eating, digging and getting new cute rabbit babys, and the authors somehow manage to invoke the feeling that you (the reader) are indeed living this life.

On the other hand, the particular rabbit whose role you play has some higher goals: Very often, the peaceful and self-sufficient life of his rabbit friends is interrupted by hard "thuds" which endanger the rabbit's warren. As nobody else seems to care, it is your task to do something against these "thuds".

So you start an adventurous voyage, to discover what lies behind your usual warren, and to find a rescue against the "thuds". I won't write about any details of this adventure, but it's nicely done and shown with lots of great illustrations. Your rabbit-like movements and your partly-naive rabbit-like thinking are described well, and the urgency of the task is also comprehensible. So while everything remains cute (rabbits...), you still take your protagonist and his cause seriously.

Central to the game is one puzzle which requires a bit of thinking, but is not too hard. This is also the part of the story related to sci fi (you'll easily see why, once you have reached this part of the game. That's really a sense-of-wonder moment for our rabbit protagonist).

Overall, I don't regret playing this game; it took me about 30 minutes. I'd even like to read more stories in this setting.

Gorgeously illustrated game about rabbits in an extraterrestrial world, October 21, 2020
Ürs follows a rabbit who lives in a warren that appears idyllic on the surface, but which opens up into a larger extraterrestrial world with signs of an older civilization whose technology may be able to help prevent a looming disaster.

The gameplay of the story is focused on navigating through the world of the rabbits, including the warren, the tunnel system leading to the surface, and finally a set of ancient ruins. The detailed illustrations help visually orient the reader as to the current physical location in the story, and there is an interesting input mechanism at one point in the story that highlights links within a text-based map, allowing easy hops to adjacent rooms within a multi-room building.

While navigating through the space is delightful, the story struggles a bit to keep up. The focus from passage to passage rests strongly on exploration, but progress is ultimately very linear. A compelling narrative could pick up the slack, but the story doesn’t deliver on initial promises of tension, character development, or momentum.

However, the level of polish and deftness of execution in the light puzzles, coupled with the beautiful art, make this a fun experience despite the narrative quibbles.

See All 5 Member Reviews

Related Games

People who like Ürs also gave high ratings to these games:

Recommended Lists

Ürs appears in the following Recommended Lists:

Polls

The following polls include votes for Ürs: