Everything about how Project Rabbit is actually played comes down to one rule: you only keep what you manage to take out.
The loop the developers describe runs like this: you enter the Abyss, you meet completely randomised high-difficulty encounters, you collect rare treasures and growth resources, you find an exit, you extract successfully. If you die, every item you were carrying drops and is permanently lost. There is no partial credit and no insurance tier mentioned.
That last clause is what makes this different from a soulslike. In a conventional soulslike, dying costs you a run. Here, dying costs you the run and everything you collected in it — which converts a boss attempt into an investment decision. It also means the value of any given trip is entirely a function of what you were carrying when it went wrong, and the sensible player response is to bank early and often.
Runs are also time-limited — the reporting consistently describes a session-based time limit, though the specific duration has not been published. Time pressure and total-loss-on-death are the two constraints that define the genre, and Project Rabbit stacks both onto a parry-timing combat core, which is why the difficulty criticism in the preview coverage is so concentrated.
Outside the Abyss is the sanctuary under the Barrier of Light, where survivors have made their last stand. This is the hub: the place you return to, and the place you prepare from. Coverage of the project has consistently described a structure where you accept a mission in the hub and then enter a run, the standard extraction-game loop as seen in Marathon and Escape from Tarkov — the two titles the developers themselves drew the comparison with.
The specifics of the hub are not published. Whether it has a mission board with rotating contracts, a leaderboard, a market, a crafting bench, or any metaprogression currency is unconfirmed. What is confirmed is that growth resources exist as a distinct category from treasure — which implies some form of persistent progression across runs, even though the details of how that progression survives a lost loadout are unknown.
The Abyss is not empty, and this is where the extraction structure meets the multiplayer structure. The game supports single player, online co-op and PvPvE, and encounters with other survivors in the field are a designed feature: the official copy says they "may offer help, or may pose a threat". The trailers stage exactly this — figures standing in ruins who might be allies or might not.
The practical read is that Project Rabbit is a game about trust priced in items. A co-op teammate who dies takes their share with them; a stranger who turns hostile takes everything. Neither the co-op composition limit nor the PvP rules have been published, though press coverage has recorded 3-player figures in Western outlets and 4-player figures in Chinese ones — with the trailer showing three companions alongside Alice. The official number has not been confirmed.
The Steam tags list PvP/PvE and cross-platform multiplayer alongside online co-op. Cross-platform matters here: the game is announced for PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X|S simultaneously, which means the survivor population is pooled across three platforms rather than segmented by them.
What remains unannounced is the entire ruleset that would make PvPvE fair or unfair — how aggro works between players, whether there is a system for damaged players to be robbed without a kill, whether friendly fire is possible, whether the extraction timer pauses in combat. Each of these would change how the loop plays. Treat them as open questions and check back when the studio publishes a systems blog.