Rabbit Hole — About the Game and Its Rules

What kind of game is this?

Mocha finds an unfinished treasure map and a stopped pocket watch in a grandfather's old bag, and dives into the burrow. There is no floor down there. Mocha runs along the inside wall of a cylindrical tunnel, and moving left or right carries you around that wall. Instead of up and down, you orbit — familiar enough if you have played a runner before, but with a view that keeps rotating.

A run usually lasts one to three minutes. Three hearts mean a single hit doesn't end anything, and the 1.5 seconds of invulnerability after a hit keep you from losing the rest of them in one bad moment. The whole thing is built for the rhythm of one quick run, then another.

Your score comes from how deep you get and how many carrots you collect. Surviving alone raises it, but the top of the leaderboard is decided by how long you kept a combo alive.

Controls

There are only two things to do — move sideways and jump. Both keyboard and touch are supported, and the right one works as soon as you open the page.

Keyboard

← → or A · D to move, Space · W · ↑ to jump, Esc to pause.

Mobile and tablet

Three buttons appear along the bottom. Hold either side button to keep moving that way; the orange one in the middle jumps.

If left and right stop making sense

The rotating view flips some people's sense of direction. Turn on 'invert controls' in settings to swap them.

The three burrows

The burrows aren't recolors — they play differently. You start in the Dirt Burrow and unlock the other two with coins. Speed, obstacle density, and gravity all change, so the same run scores differently depending on where you are.

Dirt Burrow

The default, and the baseline everything else is measured against. No modifiers at all, which makes it the best place to learn the controls. It is also the only burrow with firefly swarms: grab one and the fog lifts for a moment, and seeing further is the same thing as having longer to react.

Crystal Cave

Crystals rising from purple walls. Runs about 1.12× faster with obstacles packed 1.15× tighter. The hardest of the three, but you cover more depth in the same time, which makes it the place to chase a high score.

Moonlit Burrow

Stars embedded in the walls. Gravity is about 0.72×, so jumps float and come down slowly. Slightly slower with fewer obstacles, but it is the only burrow where meteors fall. The long hang time is ideal for sweeping the carrot lines up in the air.

How scoring works

Your total is depth plus carrot score. Depth accumulates just by staying alive, which means the carrots are what actually separate two players.

Depth

1 point per meter. It only goes up the longer you survive.

Combo

Grab the next carrot within 2 seconds and the combo holds. At 5, 10, and 20 in a row the multiplier climbs to ×2, ×3, and ×5 — and one miss resets it to zero. Nearly all of a high score lives here.

Golden carrot

Turns you into a magnet for 8 seconds, pulling nearby carrots in. It is the safest stretch to extend a combo, so it pays best while your multiplier is already high.

Near miss

+50 for grazing a rock, mole, or meteor, or for clearing a root low. Risk, paid back.

Pocket watch

Slows time for 3 seconds (+30). Use it to thread a crowded stretch or rescue a combo about to break.

Mushroom trampoline

Bounces you far higher than a normal jump — think of it as the on-ramp to the carrot lines floating overhead.

One more rule below 1,500m

The burrow keeps accelerating until it hits top speed at 1,500m. Past that the speed stops rising — and something that wasn't there before starts appearing instead: the thorn gate.

A gate blocks most of the burrow and turns slowly. The opening is under a third of the way around, and it drifts clockwise or counterclockwise without stopping. Crucially, you cannot jump it. Roots you jump and rocks you go around; a gate leaves you nothing but the gap.

So a gate asks for planning rather than reaction. Not where the opening is now, but where it will be when you arrive — and you need to already be there. Fog means you first see a gate 90m out, which at top speed is three seconds. The opening keeps moving for all three of them.

In exchange, nothing else is placed in front of a gate. A rock on the way to the opening would mean taking one hit or the other, guaranteed. When a gate is in view, the gate is the only thing to think about.

Coins, cosmetics, and the daily burrow

Carrot coins collected on the way down dress Mocha up. One carrot is one coin, plus five more every 100m. Coins buy fur colors and accessories and unlock burrows. But three of the twenty accessories — the ribbon, the scarf, and the adventurer's hat — can't be bought at any price and come only from achievements. Some rewards should stay out of reach of a wallet.

Every midnight the same daily burrow opens for everyone. It is generated from a shared seed, so you're racing yesterday's run and everyone else's on identical ground. First clear pays 30 coins. Scores are tracked on both a today board and an all-time board.

Frequently asked questions

More to read

• Play guideControls, game systems, and scoring tips on one page.
• Mocha's storyThe treasure map and the stopped watch this burrow started from.
• BlogStrategy, rabbit and burrow lore, and development write-ups.
• AchievementsThe 30 challenges that pay coins and unlock accessories.