The Rabbit Haul defends a farm built by three people

The Rabbit Haul left its demo behind and released in full on Steam on 21 September at GBP 8.71, a 15 per cent discount from GBP 10.25. Caldera Interactive developed and published it, with Fandom credited alongside. The premise is a loop players of this genre already know by heart and rarely see combined: grow a farm during the day, then defend it at night from the animals that want to eat it.

Sprout farms, the raccoons take

You play Sprout, a rabbit rebuilding a hometown that the Trash Panda Posse has already taken apart once. Daylight goes into crops and defensive plant towers, arranged so that their effects stack rather than simply add up, and the store page is explicit that the placement decisions you make in the morning are the ones that decide the night. When it gets dark, the raccoons arrive in waves, each with its own behaviour and its own way of getting around a garden, and they are not there to negotiate. Everything they reach is gone from the haul.

A roguelite that keeps what you learned

Each run pushes Sprout a little further, and the garden carries across attempts, so progress is measured in what survives rather than in a save file. Between nights there is exploring to do for stronger weapons and upgrades, and the full release adds the Tundra and Coastal biomes to the forest that the demo showed, each asking for a different tower layout. The release also ships with adjustable difficulty and controller support, which is a sensible pair for a game that wants to be played slowly.

Three people, three years, one slot in the Tokyo Direct

The launch post is worth reading for the staffing line alone: the game was built, in the studio's own words, by hand by three people in Canada, and has been in development since 2023. The team thanks the demo players and its Discord by name and credits that feedback for shaping the release. The other notable fact is positioning: the launch trailer ran inside the PC Gaming Show Tokyo Direct, which put a three-person Canadian studio in front of the same audience as the games that usually buy that kind of placement.

Our opinion

Farming games and tower defence games both ask the player to think ahead, but they punish different mistakes: one punishes impatience, the other punishes a badly placed decision eight waves ago. Merging them works best when the daytime half has real consequences, and that is what makes The Rabbit Haul interesting rather than merely familiar. The tower layout is the plan, the night is the audit, and the roguelite structure means a bad audit is a lesson instead of a lost evening. That combination is also the risk, because a run that ends because a tower was two tiles short can feel like arithmetic rather than a loss. Three people shipping this much system on a demo-to-release path deserves more attention than the genre usually gets, and GBP 8.71 is a fair price to find out whether the night shift is as satisfying as the daylight one.