Ürs

by Christopher Hayes and Daniel Talsky

Science Fiction
2018

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- egostat (1st Level, Abyss), May 4, 2023

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
A rabbit fable., March 14, 2022
by Rovarsson (Belgium)

The Rabbit Warren is in danger.

The THUD has been happening more frequently.

Against the reassurements of the old and wise Warrenherd, you set out to see if you can bring safety to the Rabbits for generations to come.

What follows is a beautifully illustrated dreamlike journey through a surreal but recognizable land. Although the true nature of the Warren and its location remains a mystery, there are enough worldbuilding hints for the player to piece together a background history.

Ürs is mostly about experiencing the story, wallowing in the dreamcoloured journey, letting the events carry you through burrows and landscapes.

The exploring and puzzle-solving that there is can be confusing, random trial and error. Fortunately, there is always the option to rewind until before your final mistake.

As in any self-respecting fable, there is a lesson to be learnt. It is a good lesson. It is also a lesson delivered with a powerdrill (as, again, in most every fable.)

Take a tour through the Rabbit Warren. I think you will not regret it.

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- TheBoxThinker, April 16, 2021

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
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.

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- DoodleRaccoon (Vancouver, B.C.), August 28, 2020

- erzulie, May 3, 2020

- Dawn Sueoka, September 27, 2019

- Doug Orleans (Somerville, MA, USA), August 11, 2019

- TheAncientOne, June 29, 2019

- jjsonick, May 29, 2019

0 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Great game, May 12, 2019
by suchamazingdoge (Austin, Texas)

The story and art style is good.

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- IanAllenBird, April 26, 2019

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
A gorgeously illustrated Rabbit game with puzzles, April 20, 2019
by MathBrush
Related reviews: about 1 hour

This game is really breaking new ground. Among Twine games, it's remarkable for both using extensive beautiful graphics, animations, etc., but for also being long and puzzle-y.

You play as a rabbit in a warren of other rabbits, but something truly odd is happening. As you explore more, you uncover an entirely new setting.

A few of the puzzles seemed fussy, and I wasn't completely emotionally invested in the story, but this is a Twine game I can strongly recommend to those new to Twine and those experienced in IF.

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- roboman, February 12, 2019

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
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.

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- tekket (Česká Lípa, Czech Republic), January 9, 2019

- mrfrobozzo, November 29, 2018

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
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.

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- E.K., November 20, 2018

- CMG (NYC), November 16, 2018

- Karl Ove Hufthammer (Bergen, Norway), November 16, 2018

- Sobol (Russia), October 30, 2018


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