Games can take many shapes and forms, but one rising in popularity is the cozy game. Developer Reky Studio dares to ask: what’s cozier than bunnies baking cakes? The upcoming addition to Reky Studio’s Bunnyverse,Cinnabunny, aims to hop into players’ hearts in 2025, but it also plans to reimagine cornerstones ofthe life sim genre.
It’s hard to define a cozy game, as it often ismore a feeling than a set of mechanics, but there are some common elements found in genres that tend toward coziness like life sims and farming games. WithCinnabunny, Reky Studios is interested in looking at those common elements with fresh eyes and finding new ways to achieve the same feeling. For example, there’s nothing cozier in concept than rabbits. Recently, Game Rant spoke with the solo developer behind the Reky Studios brand, Patrick Gauthier, aboutCinnabunnyahead of the game’s Kickstarter launch, and he explained the focus on rabbits inBunhouseas something that started with developing a game catering to his wife and grew from there.
Enter the Bunnyverse
The bunny games Reky makes look at a common experience in gaming–cute animal protagonists–and find areas where that theme has been lacking. In contrast to cats or dogs, which have a broad presence in games, rabbits are typically low-level critters shot with arrows ingames likeSkyrim. Thankfully for bunny lovers, Reky Studios is developing the second game in its Bunnyverse and plans to supportCinnabunnyover the long haul.
The kind of community I built up aroundBunhouse,everyone just loves rabbits so much. I just wanted to give them another rabbit game. It’s really that simple…I think there’s two things. The obvious one is just that bunnies are flippin’ cute and people like cute things. But I think on a deeper level, there’s really not a lot of games that represent bunnies.
Gauthier described games that focus on bunnies as a relatively narrow and indie niche compared to things like smash successStrayabout a cat exploring a cyberpunk dystopia,legendary cozy dog gameNintendogs, or the wide selection of games featuring foxes as protagonists likeLost EmberorSpirit of the North. Bunnies, on the other hand, have little outsideJazz Jackrabbitor theRabbidsgames; this was a void that Gauthier had great success filling with his initial game,Bunhouse.
Compelling Gameplay in the Oven
Cozy games typically have a core gameplay loop involving an activity that’s an iterative spiral. Forfarming sims likeStardew ValleyorSun Haven, that’s obviously farming. For games likeAnimal Crossingor the upcoming cozy titleCritterCove,it is building up a community. ForBunhouse, it was operating a greenhouse and filling customer orders.
The core gameplay inCinnabunnyis baking. Baking is designed to be simple but growing in ambition and complexity as the gameplay loop spirals ever-upward. Players can collect base recipes for things like cakes, muffins, cookies, pies, or bread, and bake them alone or with a friend in co-op. But that’s only the beginning, as supplemental ingredients like chocolate, fruit, nuts, or herbs can also be added to the recipe, making more complex flavors for the community.
There’s kind of a two-fold gameplay loop. There is one where you’re earning more carrots, so you can buy more ingredients, buy more things, and upgrade your bakery. And two, you’re improving your relationship, so you can learn what they like and then unlock new recipes and stuff…You start with a small little bakery, you sell your baked goods to get carrots, and then you can also gift your baked goods to increase your relationship with other bunnies in the community.
As players explore the community of Sugar Creek Burrows,reminiscent of the Shire fromLord of the Ringsbut populated entirely by sapient bunnies, they can learn the flavor profiles most enjoyed by the residents and get to know them by being their baker. Bunny bakers learn the things community members like to eat and create the perfect pie or cupcake for each villager, each of whom has their own personality, role, and of course, tastes. But that’s not the only activity waiting in Sugar Creek Burrows. Bakers will also have the kinds of collecting tasks common in cozy games, just with a uniqueCinnabunnytwist.
Away with Fishing, Bugs, and Fossils
Beyond just representing bunnies, though, Gauthier wanted to find new ways to approach some of the core elements of cozy games that he described as the “Animal Crossingtrio” of fishing, fossils, and catching bugs. He broke those collectathons down into broader categories of a quiet interaction with nature like fishing, a straightforward collectathon like fossils, and creature capture gameplay like bug hunting.
Pretty much in every farming sim genre game, you have farming as the core gameplay loop. For me, it’s baking, but then there’s also other things to do. There are villagers to talk to, while a lot of games have fishing and other things. I looked at the farming sim genre, and every single one of them kind of has the same exact things: there’s fishing, fossils, and bug finding, like theAnimal Crossingtrio. I wanted to do something a little bit different, but still kind of similar.
Bunhousefeatured fishing, but inCinnabunny,that is replaced with birdwatching.Fishing in video gamesis a compelling communication between the player and the environment in its best form, so taking that idea and applying it to another quiet and introspective way of communicating with the natural world made sense to Gauthier.Cinnabunny’s bird-watching also includes aPokemon Snap-esque photography minigame.
As Gauthier’s games give actual advice for caring for real-world rabbit pets, it should be noted that bunnies shouldn’t eat mushrooms. Notably, though, one ofCinnabunny’s “trio” isn’t fossils, but mushrooms. This fills the role of encouraging players to explore the world of Sugar Creek Burrows in search of the undiscovered, as the hoppy mycologist the player can become.
Lastly, instead of dropping nets on insects, players will be able to capture rogue recycling robots. As Gauthier explains it, an eccentric science bunny named Rowan had the idea of trash being turned intorobots to clean up other trash. As the creature collection implies, this didn’t go to plan and the town is terrorized by trashbots the player must capture and return to Rowan.
He wanted to solve the world’s littering problem. He’s like, “Well, if I give trash robot legs, I can help trash pickup other trash!” But sadly the experiment went horribly awry, and now they just run amok. You have to use your net gun to capture these recycler robots to bring back to him, so we can study them further.
Catching robots, collecting mushrooms, and photographing birds while building up a bunny bakery all come in 2025 whenCinnabunnycomes to Steam, but interested bun lovers cancheck out the game’s Kickstarter HERE.
