With a title like Wiz ‘n’ Liz: The Frantic Wabbit Wescue you may think it was developed by Elmer Fudd, but this game isn’t concerned with hunting wabbits to skin and make a trophy out of them, but to rescue them after they have been taken away after a magical spell goes a bit wrong and they’re scattered across a cutesy fantasy world.
The game takes place on the magical world of Plum across 8 environments, each playing home to 3 levels. Every environment has a unique graphical style and music, but remain faithful to platform tradition. You’ll travel across pristine white snow in Snow Land and the sun baked sand of Desert Land (imaginative names aren’t the game’s strong suit). In each level, you’re tasked with several objectives. The first, and most important, is to collect rabbits; each one you collect reveals a letter that floats around in empty space, needing to be caught. With each letter you collect, you gradually fill out a word at the top of the screen. Complete this word, and a floating barred door appears - but it will only open when all the remaining rabbits are collected.
Once the door has spawned in the level, Rabbits stop handing out letters and instead drop other items - fruit, stars, and clocks. Clocks add an additional 3 seconds to your time limit, but are fairly rare. Fruit and Vegetables, meanwhile, fill up a meter at the bottom-left of your screen. Once the meter is filled, a healthy snack follows your stumpy hero. Between levels, you return to your cottage, which acts as a hub area. The fruit and veg that you’ve collected hang from trees, and can be combined in a giant cauldron to cast a spell. The effects are dependent on the combination of ingredients you use; you might dwarf your character, spawn different-colored rabbits, or trigger various visual effects. You might want to keep a pen and paper handy in order to remember the various combinations.
Aside from a few boss battles, the game is entirely devoid of enemies. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy in any way; a clock is permanently ticking down at the top right-hand corner of your screen and provides all the trouble you need. Starting at 3 minutes, your remaining time carries across levels - and the clock doesn’t restart unless you manage to die due to the game’s many environmental hazards. The slightest mistake can prove fatal, so each level becomes a frantic sprint to collect every rabbit in time so that you can move on to the next area.
Once only 30 seconds remains on the clock, a glowing orange orb spawns somewhere in the present level. Collecting it provides you with an additional 30 seconds, but finding them isn’t easy; if you finish a level with 9 seconds left, then that’s 9 seconds you’ll spend jumping around the next level in a desperate bid to find and collect the orb and give yourself a little more time to breathe. Forget about the letters and the fruit and vegetables - none of these matter in this situation; all that matters finding the one rabbit holding the life-extending orb.
The animation is fantastic for its time; from the way your hero holds their wizard or witches hat when they sprint, to the way the rabbits bounce along from left to right, Raising Hell Software (later known as the sadly missed Bizarre Creations) created a great sense of cartoon humor that warms the heart with its character. But don’t let its innocent charms fool you; the cutesy graphics are simply a shroud covering a fiendish difficulty level.
Another element worth mentioning is the music; some phenomenally catchy tunes drew me back to the game long after completion, pulling me in like gravity. There are plenty of games from the 16-bit era that featured amazing chiptune music - Streets of Rage, Golden Axe, Sonic the Hedgehog - and Wiz ‘n’ Liz is up there with the best of them.
The simple yet challenging gameplay on offer here, twinned with the humorous design, catchy music and lack of any violence means that it’s a shame not more people played it. It can be difficult to explain its appeal; gameplay can pretty much be summed up as, “save the rabbits, collect the fruit.” Explained in that way, you’d be forgiven for thinking this is just a simple child’s game; but even playing as an adult, on the hardest difficulty setting it provides a stern challenge. It’s a challenge I embrace with open arms.
These days, we’re so used to playing games which feature extreme violence and gore that going back to a simpler time, and playing something that’s effectively pacifist in comparison, is refreshing. I was happy to donate my time once more to a forgotten classic, and I’m sure I will be again in the future.
Gears of War; Call of Duty; Battlefield: these are all games that will all eventually fade from memory over time. But Wiz n’ Liz will always be there for me to come back to.
