Rabbits in Culture, and the Origin of "Rabbit Hole" — Where Three Burrows Came From
Rabbits have long been regulars in our stories.
The same animal shows up wearing a different costume from culture to culture.
In East Asia, people looked up at the moon and saw a rabbit.
In the patterns on the moon's surface, they pictured a rabbit pounding rice in a mortar.
Korea, China, and Japan each tell slightly different versions of the tale, but the idea that a rabbit lives on the moon is widely shared.
The rabbit even claims a spot among the twelve zodiac animals.
In the West, the rabbit became a symbol of spring.
The bunny that shows up every Easter stands for new life and abundance — an image born from how many babies rabbits tend to have.
And then there's the phrase that gave this game its name: the "rabbit hole." In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the whole adventure begins when Alice chases a waistcoated rabbit and dives into its burrow.
Ever since, "falling down the rabbit hole" has come to mean getting drawn into a deep, strange world that's hard to climb back out of once you're in.
Three images became three burrows
The game has three burrows.
They aren't recolors of one another — each started from a different rabbit image.
The Dirt Burrow is the real rabbit's burrow from earlier.
Warm milk-chocolate soil, tree roots, mushrooms, fireflies.
It's the closest thing to a European rabbit's warren, which is why it became the default.
No modifiers at all; it's the baseline the others are measured against.
The Moonlit Burrow came from the moon rabbit.
Stars are embedded in the walls, glinting, and now and then a crescent drifts past.
A night sky inside a burrow makes no sense, but then imagining a rabbit living on the moon was already that kind of leap.
What's fun is that this is the only burrow with weak gravity.
Jumps float and come down slowly.
The common knowledge that the moon's gravity is weak got carried straight into a game rule, which makes this burrow not just look different but handle differently.
It's a rare case of a rule falling out of the setting.
The Crystal Cave leans toward Alice.
Not a real rabbit's burrow, but the strange place you find after diving into one.
Crystals rise from purple walls and gems roll underfoot.
It also runs faster with obstacles packed tighter, matching the impression that this is somewhere a bit wrong.
A burrow with no bottom
The story came from Alice's side too.
Mocha finds two things in her grandfather's old bag: a treasure map with no end drawn on it, and a stopped pocket watch.
The map has no end because the game has no end, and the stopped watch is a nod back to Alice's waistcoated rabbit, forever consulting his.
The in-game pocket watch slowing time came out of that.
If a rabbit carries a stopped watch, it seemed reasonable she could hold time back a little.
Deciding an item's effect by asking what fits the story before asking what's convenient tends to produce rules that need no explanation.
This burrow you descend with Mocha is exactly like that.
Take one step in, and you'll want to see just how far down it goes.
The moon rabbit started in India
One old branch of the rabbit-on-the-moon story begins with an Indian tale.
A rabbit, a monkey, and a fox meet a starving old man.
The monkey brings fruit and the fox brings fish, but the rabbit has nothing to offer — so it asks for a fire to be built and throws itself in.
The old man was a god, and he set the rabbit's image on the moon so the act would not be forgotten.
Carried east with Buddhism, the story became each region's moon rabbit.
The interesting part is that what the rabbit is pounding changes from place to place.
In China, the jade rabbit pounds the elixir of immortality beside Chang'e on the moon.
In Japan, the same posture pounds rice cakes.
In Korea it's a rabbit at a mortar, with the contents varying by telling.
The same shadow read as medicine for immortals in one place and as food in another.
The zodiac splits in a similar way.
In the Vietnamese zodiac, the rabbit's slot is occupied by a cat.
Of the twelve animals it's the one that differs by country, usually explained by the closeness of the Chinese characters' sounds.
A rabbit that brings eggs
The Easter bunny is a stranger combination still — a rabbit that delivers eggs.
The custom is first recorded in German-speaking regions: the Osterhase, an Easter hare bringing colored eggs to well-behaved children.
Children would build a nest for it and find it visited overnight.
German immigrants carried the tradition to America in the 18th century, and it became the Easter bunny as it's known now.
How the rabbit and the egg ended up in the same story isn't settled, but both are spring symbols tied to fertility.
An animal that becomes conspicuously abundant in spring met the symbol of new life at the same seasonal festival.
The career of "down the rabbit hole"
Alice dove into the burrow in an 1865 novel.
But "going down the rabbit hole" becoming the phrase we use took far longer.
At first it meant what the book meant: entering a strange, disorienting world.
Then the internet bent it once more.
It came to name the experience of following link after link and surfacing three hours later — starting on a Wikipedia article and ending up somewhere unrecognizable.
It isn't purely negative, either; it's closer to an admission that getting pulled in that deep is enjoyable.
That double meaning is exactly what the title was reaching for.
A game that literally descends, and the kind you meant to play one round of.
Only the moon became a rule
The three burrows each came from a different rabbit image — but one difference matters. Of the three, only the Moonlit Burrow changed the rules. Its gravity is weaker.
That wasn't a choice to single one out; the other two had no rule to carry over.
The Dirt Burrow is a real rabbit's burrow with no special physics, and Alice's world is strange without specifying how it's strange.
So the Crystal Cave only got difficulty dials — speed and density.
The moon was different.
"The moon's gravity is weak" isn't a story, it's something everyone already knows, and it translates directly into how the controls feel.
The rule didn't fall out of the setting so much as only one setting could be translated into a rule.
And it produced the best result of the three.
The Moonlit Burrow is the memorable one not because of the stars in its walls but because the jump feels different.
Building a world and making a world reachable through your fingertips turn out to be separate jobs.