Hare Raising Havoc

Hare Raising Havoc
Developer(s) BlueSky Software
Publisher(s) Disney Software
Platform(s) Amiga, DOS
Release date(s) 1991
Genre(s) Adventure game
Mode(s) Single player

Hare Raising Havoc is a side-scrolling puzzle adventure game developed by BlueSky Software in 1991 for the Amiga and DOS. Disney Software published the game. It is a spin-off of the 1988 Disney film, Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

Plot

The game follows the same basic pattern of the cartoon at the beginning of Who Framed Roger Rabbit and related shorts. After opening with a Maroon Cartoons title card, Mommy explains to Roger that (once again) he is in charge of babysitting Baby Herman, and if he proves incompetent at this task, "he's going back to the science lab!" As usual Roger swears to perform faithfully, but immediately after Mommy's departure, Baby Herman catches sight of the large baby-bottle-shaped sign on top of a local bottling plant. He escapes the house, heading for the plant, so that Roger has to find his way out of the house, and up onto the roof of the plant, before Mommy arrives home and discovers Baby Herman missing. At the end of the game (whether successful or not) Roger must face Mommy and ultimately his director on the cartoon set.

Jessica Rabbit makes brief cameos in a couple of the environments.

Gameplay

The player moves Roger around in each room, interacting with objects--for example, turning on a stove, pushing a bouncy cushion to a different position, etc. Once the right objects are in the right states they form a convoluted, Rube Goldberg-like method of exiting the room. The game is extremely challenging due to not only the puzzles themselves, but the time limit imposed by Mommy's impending return "one hour" from the start of the game. As a result, the player has much less time to learn the later environments, and a winning game requires almost flawless completion of each room's puzzle. A few hidden powerups allow the player to turn back the clock a few minutes, but they generally take a little extra time to obtain, so remembering which are actually worth the trouble is crucial.

The game's running speed varies with processor speed and a speed option set by the player. Since this affects both the clock speed and Roger's animations and movement, setting a slower or faster speed will not inherently make the game any easier, aside from player comfort. The faster and more smoothly Roger moves, the faster the game's minutes pass.

See also