Even launching just three days after Hades 2, Rabbit and Steel from solo dev Mino has become one of the highest-rated and most successful new roguelikes of May 2024. It's a bullet hell action roguelike spliced with MMO raid mechanics, and it has done incredibly well on Steam. At the time of writing, it's racked up over 2,400 user reviews with a 98% positive score – and as Mino tells me, it outsold his previous game, 2020's Maiden and Spell, in one day.
I recognized Rabbit and Steel from its showing in a previous Steam Next Fest, which Mino says "was a pretty huge boost." The pitch is: take on randomized raid-like battles – think tons of AoE markers, projectiles, and global cooldowns (GCDs) – with up to three friends in a pick-up-and-play format. It's a "raiding roguelike" starring cute bunny girls who can be customized through over 100 random, collectible items and five chosen classes like assassin and druid. And yes, it's a Final Fantasy 14 love letter right down to its bone marrow.
"I feel like the Final Fantasy 14 influence is so obvious that it doesn't even need to be mentioned, but I will for posterity's sake," Mino says when I ask about the MMOs and roguelikes that were in the back of his mind during development. With over 4,000 hours in Square Enix's beloved MMO, Mino is mighty familiar with FF14's raid formula. He also mentions the original Hades, which he enjoyed and which "had some really good design that I could learn from," but which he also wanted to tweak slightly, specifically in the way weapons are upgraded mid-run. But if anything, though there's not much overlap with Rabbit and Steel, his favorite roguelike is Slay the Spire. (These are both high-ranking entries on our list of the best roguelikes, if you're hungry for more.)
"The reasons for the 'MMO raid' feel are numerous; for one I play a lot of FF14, so I was fairly familiar with what's fun in a raid and what isn't," he explains. "But more importantly, it felt like a concept that I was uniquely positioned to create. I had Maiden and Spell's code; most importantly its netcode, which let me easily create 'patterns' and send them across the internet with rollback. I also had the basic framework for how Maiden and Spell works as a game; four buttons, floaty combat, cooldowns and GCDs (I didn't call them GCDs in Maiden and Spell, but that's what they were)."
"There are a lot of indie games out there, and a lot of roguelikes too. It's very easy to get lost amongst all the other action roguelikes coming out every other week (especially if Hades 2 decides to shadow drop three days before your release date). Also, I just think online co-op games are a good idea in general. Nowadays, a lot of people play games as a thing to do with friends over Discord, so I wanted to make a game that could fit into that. If you don't have something that other games don't, you won't stand out. For me, that means a multiplayer game with good netcode and a unique concept. Not too many others can do that; even larger indie teams."
Compared to Final Fantasy 14, Mino wanted to simplify things a bit for Rabbit and Steel. "It's cool that a huge, mass-marketed game like FF14 gets to put things in their game that are obtuse and difficult to understand and require time and dedication and patience to complete," he says. But that wouldn't fit the approachable vibe he was going for, "so I was restricted to things I could explain with a quick text blurb above your character's head," like "spread out" and "knockback."
This wasn't always going to be a roguelike, either. In another timeline, Rabbit and Steel is more similar to Maiden and Spell, with a simpler series of bosses. "I'm glad I did make a roguelike though; the replayability and different builds you can get really make the game something greater than the sum of its parts," Mino says. "In MMOs, you fight the bosses over and over because you want a set of endgame gear; but in Rabbit and Steel you do it just because you might get an even wackier build than last time."
The resulting balance has clearly found its audience. Mino was shocked by the sales, and equally so by the near-perfect reviews. "I thought it would do a bit better than Maiden and Spell, but I didn't expect it to be a smash success by any means ... Personally I thought the game still has a lot of flaws; one particular one being how cluttered the visuals can become during the more difficult boss fights," he says. "In fact, I was kind of expecting to be a bit hammered on that point!"
This unexpected success has reinforced his existing plans for extra content updates for Rabbit and Steel, which may end up being "a little bit grander" now. "I also want to take a crack at mod support; some people have already been making custom sprites for the game, so it'd be cool if there were tools to do even more," Mino says.
