The Warren

A strange little story about a rabbit trapped inside their warren by a controlling mother, a rabbit Rapunzel. Concise but pointed, and I like the ending. The first time, I chose to (Spoiler - click to show)stay.

As a kid I would go through phases of reading books only about animals, and I ate those things up. Hurry Home, Candy; Silverwing; the Warrior Cats series; Guardians of Ga'Hoole; Jack London's books, and many others. The rabbit setting of this story reminds me of Watership Down, a book about rabbit societies that I read in one of those phases, and greatly enjoyed.

Each animal book has different sliding scales for how human its animals are, whether they're true animals who are incapable of speech or have full-on civilizations with oral traditions and religious castes. Watership Down threads the line by giving the rabbits rabbitlike behavior in every aspect, but grounding that in a rich and intriguing rabbit society with clear, but not 1:1, parallels to humanity. This story matches Watership Down in the setting, in the balance of human and animal, human and alien; depictions of humanity through the lens of rabbits that aren't really human, except in all the ways that matter.

The modern-day human analogue of what happens in The Warren is obvious, but the rabbits give it a kind of melancholy, the alien feeling of a world that must exist somewhere but is very far away. I live in a city; the last time I saw a rabbit in real life must have been at least months ago. Overall, the story has the mien of an old-school fairy tale. One of the songs it's inspired by is, itself, based on a fairy tale about animals.

My other comparison is to Yume Nikki, though I've only heard of it and haven't played it. But in both stories you are trapped, dreaming of the myriad worlds you'll only see in visions and fantasies, perhaps for the rest of your life.

"The tunnel leads you outside, and now that you're out here, you find yourself disinclined to go back to where your mother is waiting. Instead you seek out a new warren.

You are eager to start over in a new place, but your years of isolation have served you ill in learning how to interact with other rabbits. Whatever you do or say seems always to be a mistake. The other rabbits bar you from the best nesting places and grazing grounds. They often start fights with you for no reason that you can discern.

You eke out a meager existence on the margins of your new warren. You are often cold and hungry, sometimes battered and bruised, and always, always lonely. Even the joy of being able to go outside whenever you wish is short-lived.

You could go back to the warren of your birth, but you can't imagine that you'd be more warmly welcomed there—except, perhaps, by your mother, and the thought of proving that she was right after all is enough to put you off that idea."

This rabbit fairy-tale worked really well for me the first time, but on playing again I realized that (Spoiler - click to show)each tunnel goes to a random destination every time, meaning the only outcome you control is how many tunnels you visit, which fits the themes of the game, I think, but undermined my interest in choosing which tunnel to visit. On the other hand, the ending is fairly responsive to what you encountered, but it's subtle enough that (depending on which one you get) you may not notice unless you play several times.

But the way things fell out on my first playthrough, I had NO idea that (Spoiler - click to show)it was a dream: my first three vignettes fit pretty well with the interpretation that the rabbit had started sneaking out every time its mother wasn't looking. Then on the last (fourth) tunnel I died... and the game continued with "You look around. It feels like there are even more tunnels than before." So I was wondering if this was some sort of afterlife. I tried one more tunnel and then went back to my burrow... only to wake up and (Spoiler - click to show)find it was all a dream.

So that was a fun roller-coaster. But the illusion fell apart a little even on a second playthrough, and more on subsequent ones. So was that first experience an intentional part of the possibility space? Or did I just get lucky? I eventually walked away feeling like the game was an experiment with form and responsiveness where each individual piece was thoughtfully done, but where some of the design was less effective once you saw the trick, and some of the effort was easily overlooked; it didn't engage with the subtleties of the gestalt of the design as skillfully as I might have liked.

Recommended, but maybe let your first playthrough stand as canonical and don't look back.

I’m a big book person, so go figure, some of my earliest memories involve my mom reading to me at bedtime. It’s mostly the favorites that stand out – I was small even as a toddler, so I couldn’t get enough of The Little Engine That Could – but there was one that I didn’t really like, but my mom insisted on reading it to me anyway. It’s called The Runaway Bunny, by the same author and illustrator who did Goodnight Moon (another banger), and the story is incredibly simple: a baby bunny tells his mommy bunny that he wants to run away, naming the different things he’s going to magically transform into to escape – a sailboat on the waves, a flower in a garden – but every time she tells him that she’ll follow, turning herself into the wind or a gardener, until finally he gives up and goes to sleep. I liked the pictures, which whimsically depict the rabbits’ transformations, but the plot offended my child’s sense of logic: why would the baby want to run away from the snug burrow where he lives with his mommy?

Let me be clear: The Warren isn’t an adaptation of The Runaway Bunny – in fact it was an entry in this year’s Shufflecomp, based on two songs I’ve never heard of. You’re not a baby bunny here, but one who seems on the cusp of young adulthood, and you’ve got a rationale for wanting to leave your overprotective mother, who locks you in your tunnel every night behind a grating made from a lattice of hunters’ discarded arrows: you want to explore, to experience life outside the tunnels, to meet someone who might be unlike any other bunny you’ve ever known before – or just to be seen as an adult, an individual worthy of respect in the eyes of others.

The game presents itself in two short quartets of links, each of which reveals a possible consequence of slipping out one night in search of freedom – a warren of forking paths. And the rewards for your boldness are sweet:

"You’ve never been able to take time to appreciate the trees in full blossom, to savor ripe berries warmed by the sun, to simply exist and breathe the fresh air."

Or at least, they can be – for down another path:

"You know that a rabbit can never let their guard down, that you always have to have one ear fixed on any hint of possible danger. But you forget this just long enough for a cat’s jaws to clamp down on your leg."

For every positive future, there’s at least one other where your brashness brings you to ruin, all narrated in compact, evocative prose. You have no control about any of this, there are no clues in any of the links to prompt you about which lead to happiness and which to disaster, you just need to take your chances until you reach the final choice, wiser now about why your mother does what she does, but facing the same dilemma: play it safe, or take a risk? Stay home, or run away?

When my son was born, The Runaway Bunny was one of the first books we bought. It’s not one of his favorites, either, but I inflict it on him anyway. I think about my mom, who lives almost 3,000 miles away from me now, on the opposite side of the country; I wonder what she was hoping for when she read me that book, and I wonder what I’m hoping for, too.