Developed by Cozy Bee Games and published by SOEDESCO, Bunny Park is a cute little park simulator where you create your very own park just for the bunnies. From its formula, you can consider it a smaller version of Animal Crossing or any similar title because the vibes of the two games seriously match as Bunny Park is an endless park customizer and builder as well with no end in sight and it can continue for hours and hours as you build your park, expand it, change its layout, optimize it, change it again when you get bored and the cycle just continues. This is our review of the PS5 version of Bunny Park in which we manage our very own bunny park and feed them some carrots.
Bunny Park kicks off with an introduction where the game tells you that a storm has scared all of the bunnies and they are now scattered all over the place. You must renovate the park, remove all of the debris, and make it attractive once again to make all of the bunnies come back to the game. You start off with a small piece of land and just one bunny who arrives in your park right at the start of the game. The whole area is filled with weeds, rocks, and tons of other debris that you must remove before you start renovating the park. The debris keeps appearing back on the ground, so you have to be vigilant and continue the clean-up while you are renovating the park to its formal glory. You start off with pretty basic items in your park so you basically have an empty lot that you can customize however you want with the items available in the game.
There are three main attributes that define your park’s status. These include Popularity, Cozy and Cute. The items that you place in the park affect these stats along with how many bunnies you have and how well maintained the park is. You can purchase new items for your bed from the in-game store using credits you earn by collecting them from the bunnies. The bunnies dig up coins for you when they are happy so you must ensure that you keep them happy by feeding them, petting them, and maintaining a good park. As these stats go up and you expand your park, more and more bunnies will start coming to your park which in return not only increases your stats but also your income as all of them will dig up more and more coins for you.
The in-game shop offers you three different sections of items which range from Snacks & Gardens, Cute Decorations, and Robot Butterflies. Each of these categories has items that affect a particular stat of your park. For feeding your bunnies, you can purchase either separate vegetables and place them down or buy entire gardens that regularly produce food for your bunnies. Depending on your needs, you can buy as many of these gardens and vegetables. The Cute Decorations section has various décor items that you can place in your garden to increase its cuteness.
These items range from roads, fences, flowers, bushes, and different décor items such as carts, arches, flower beds, and much more. These are purely decorative items, and they increase the beauty of your garden. They are also much more expensive when compared to food items. The last section is the Robot Butterflies section which allows you to purchase different robots that help you with your daily chores in the garden. These include cleaners, petters, and coin collectors. Purchasing these robot butterflies will automate the respective process for you and you will be able to focus on other tasks at hand.
At the start of Bunny Park, you will be doing all of the work manually and your income will be less as well. Since your income is directly dependent on the number of bunnies in the park, you will need to be patient at the start of the game. As you get more and more bunnies, you can start earning some serious money and get different robots for helping you out in the game and start purchasing the bigger décor items for increasing your park’s stats as well. For expansion, you can purchase the surrounding areas which instantly grant you new area for building your park even further however the more you expand, future expansions start getting more and more expensive. There are a total of 25 bunnies to recall back to your garden, so you really have to increase your reputation to attract all of the bunnies back to your park. Each bunny also brings its own personality and habits to the park as well.
While Bunny Park is best played on a PC, the PS5 version feels okay with the controller as well. It takes a little time to adjust to the slow speed of the cursor and the camera and eventually you get used to it. The left joystick allows you to move the camera around and the cursor can be controlled by the right joystick. You can zoom in and out by R2 and L2 while you can also rotate the entire park to look at it from another perspective by pressing the L1 and R1 keys. Pressing Triangle allows you to enter the build mode or go back to the camera control. The UI is pretty basic and everything is right there in front of you at all times.
Bunny Park also looks visually pretty basic. The visuals are not that demanding, but the game comes with two modes to try out. You can either play the game in Performance mode if you want more frames or you can switch to the Quality mode if you prefer visual fidelity instead of frames. That being said I still find it weird that despite not being demanding on the hardware when it comes to visuals, Bunny Park still comes with these two modes. This might benefit the consoles when you expand the park completely because there is an immense amount of activity happening on the screen when your park is full of bunnies but other than that, I find no use for these two modes. The sound design of the game sits pretty well with the overall theme of the game and you have some great music to listen to as you develop your very own bunny park in the game.
Final Verdict:
If you love playing games like Animal Crossing, but do not have a Nintendo Switch then Bunny Park can be a decent alternative to it since you can create your very own Bunny Park and decorate it however you want. While customization options might be a limitation, in this case, it still offers a large enough space with plenty of things to manage and create the best bunny park that you can in a video game. It is a game for your free time and does not offer any sort of time constraints or challenges. It can easily help you kill a lot of time if you really want to invest that much time into the game. For me, Bunny Park was a fun game and I liked spending time in the game however after some time, it does get a little tedious doing the same thing over and over again but then again, no one said running a Bunny Park would be a piece of cake. Highly recommended if you love bunnies and want to run a park just for them.
Final Score: 8.0/10
