Combat: Parry, Deflect and the Art of Not Dying

The single clearest thing anyone has said about Project Rabbit comes from the developer, and it is worth putting first: "Extraction is Secondary, the Core is Soulslike." Everything else in the game hangs off the combat.

The four verbs

The combat vocabulary is Sekiro's, and it is explicitly not a new one. From the PlayX4 build and the trailers, four actions carry the fight:

• Dodge — the panic button, and the answer to anything unblockable.
• Guard / Block — the default, and the one that loses to chip damage or to posture-breaking attacks if you hold it too long.
• Parry — the timed answer to a telegraphed strike.
• Just-frame deflect — the tightest parry window, and the one that produces the most damage. This is where the difficulty lives.

On top of the four sits a layer of active combat skills, which the developers describe as "diverse" without enumerating them. The store copy's warning is the important part operationally: "even the smallest mistake can lead to a fatal conclusion". In a game where a fatal conclusion means losing everything, that sentence is the whole difficulty design in one line.

The on-site PlayX4 impression of "90% familiar, 10% unfamiliar" is the useful framing for what to expect. The familiar part is the parry rhythm. The unfamiliar part is that you are not fighting through a designed level sequence — you are fighting through a randomised one, and every attempt can end with you walking out poor rather than dead.

Enemies

Three categories have been shown, and none of them have official names yet.

• Standard enemies — humanoid opponents. The trailers show a headless figure carrying a polearm, which suggests the ruin-and-wildness register of the Abyss rather than an organised army.
• Mutated creatures — beings that have been altered by the Abyss' broken loop. The November trailer pushes toward this category hardest.
• Biome guardians — one per biome, five in total, functioning as the game's major set-piece encounters.

What is not shown is a roster of named bosses. The November 10 trailer contains a first look at a new boss that is never named on screen, and it has a distinctly East Asian mythological silhouette — a large figure with horns or a headdress — but the studio has not attached a name to it. The same applies to the "Mad Hatter", "Cheshire Cat", "Red Queen" and "March Hare" figures: they are confirmed characters with dark secrets behind them, per the official copy, but the game has not yet told us what those secrets are.

Bosses are multi-phase

Bosses in Project Rabbit are confirmed to have multiple phases that require you to change your tactics mid-fight. That is a specific design commitment: not a health bar with escalating damage, but a fight that stops working the way you had it working. If you learn a rhythm, the game is expected to invalidate it partway through.

The practical consequence for group play is that multi-phase bosses are where co-op coordination and solo fragility diverge most sharply. Several outlets raised this as a risk: a co-op team can adjust, split aggro and cover each other's recovery windows, while a solo player facing a phase change has nobody to buy time. If you are planning to play this solo when it launches, the boss roster is the page to watch when the names arrive.