• 08 Dec, 2025 *

While fans review-bomb the Steam page, I don’t consider the last episode a fail, nor do I think that it ruins the whole game. Actually, I’m mostly positive. What I’m going to talk about isn’t really positive, though.

Woah there, pardner! Major spoilers ahead

Pivotal moment in development

Let’s dissect the "20 endings" statement. Personally, I doubt you can count 3 achievements that lead to the same conclusion with slight text variations as 3 endings. So the true number of endings is exaggerated on purpose. What’s the purpose then?

It’s apparent to me that on a production stage some game-changing considerations took place. Episode 4 had set the bar so high that the development team realized: there’s no available resource to meet players’ expectations. That would mean angry comments, negative reviews and ultimately - the game would’ve been forgotten.

An array of players’ theories on the topic of a possible story outcome was a low-hanging fruit in that situation. Before the update, the abrupt "side" ending (involving butterflies in the stomach) was exclusive, and obviously was not the "main" ending. There are too many of them now, and it’s hard to differentiate the "true" one.

For example, Tosha can slaughter 1 of the 3 innocent meal options, but it just leads to the (almost) same "fake" ending. It shows how devs can’t define story conclusion themselves. On purpose.

See, the thing is that devs needed you to play for a while after the update - for a whole while - before you write your review. Little frame changes in previous episodes try to justify your lost save games, but the idea here is simple: people see lots of players in Steam charts and think that 5th episode is really long and cool, so that new people buy Tiny Bunny.

This is me theorising here, but I despise such marketing practices. You are saying you couldn’t fix game saves two years into development? Yeah, whatever.

Decision-map and prime path

So why exactly do I have to kill the dog like a maniac, and not in a dare moment? Feels weird that I am to kill someone else in order to see "Zhulka likes/doesn’t like people behind door". Don’t get me wrong, I totally get it why the dog loves animals and hates Polina with Romka. The thing is, the scene with her always leads to "side" ending (if longer ending verifies "true" story end).

It seems reasonable to expect a grand, long episode with guardrails and a bunch of little variations of it depending on your past choices. But here - make one small choice, and the story line changes drastically, and it’s hard to comprehend at first. Some choices seem to exist solely to lead to a different ending, and that’s all she wrote!

For example, Fallout New Vegas has only 4 endings, but includes many variations - "nods" -for players. I know that these 2 games are different - I’m talking about approaches to story making.

Private brand

If you take a closer look at 5th episode announcements, you may find a change list that includes marketing improvement. The fact that it’s here means how important this topic is to devs. But make no mistake - it ain’t improving the game experience, we are talking merchandise, ads, marketing on book fairs and so on. Every decision on marketing made by lead dev (it is a small team) is time taken off the game.

Yeah, about lead dev—first game startup after last episode release greets you with SAIKONO splash-screen. Upgrades, people, upgrades! But I think it’s deeper than one guy trying to raise some hype.

Imagine: you are about to make most of your fan base angry, and you know that in advance. Your team was working long hours trying to bring the last episode into life, and you can’t really blame them for following your vision. What can you do to make things right? What can you do to make things right for really cheap and really fast?

Just slap your name on it! Not that it didn’t work: I believe many people think it’s entirely Joker’s fault that episode 5 is the way it is. Frankly speaking, there’s no difference if lead dev has enlarged ego or he tried to cover development team from bad update reception - the effect is there already.

Atmosphere leak

Having so many "side" endings, you just can’t help but replay certain parts of the game in order to find "main" ending. It means you will see all of those frames again and again. And again. Thrill is gone. Character designs don’t imbue any feelings anymore.

And the music in ep5 doesn’t help at all: sometimes I felt like devs are mocking me with all of ’em bells and whistles just for the sake of a joke. The scene is serious, endangering, tone is set, and... and here you can add laugh track now, ’cause can’t make it worse than that.

Ep4 introduced a lot of body horror designs, I remember seeing it for the first time: trust me it worked. There’s no room to escalate that theme anymore - dev team needed to jump over their heads to make it interesting again. TLDR: such a shame they didn’t. Wasn’t there anything else to stir things up in the world of horror?

Insert still water meme

And stop reusing old moves - we have already seen that "it was all a dream, or was it"! I’ve seen it in the prologue already, come on!!

Conclusion

"Зайчик" leaves bitterness in the mouth. I used to be really positive, but can’t say it’s true now. Runs on Ubuntu LTS really nice, but core problems during production show game’s true colours. They call it non-linear horror visual novel, but horror is being sucked out of it.