https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3779408260
I have played bad games (objectively, in terms of quality of experience and gameplay) in the case of which I would honestly regret giving a negative review. There are bad games with a lot of heart put into by developers who lacked either the experience or funds to create a genuinely enjoyable experience for the player. There also are bad games with an idea that introduces a new mechanic or a curious narrative device which still is not enough to make playing fun enough. Then there’s the Rat Cage. It has one gimmick – the protagonist is
a rat. That’s it. Outside of that, it is a low-quality copy of Little Nightmares.
[h3]No Flowers for Algernon[/h3]
Both the protagonist’s physics and interactions feel basic and raw. For example, the rat can climb some of the vertical objects like pipes, but there is no animation for the transition, the model just snaps to the new surface and there is no climbing animation either, the rat just moves upwards using the normal running animation. The player is also required to push or pull some objects, but the interactable surfaces are never precise, and it often takes several attempts for the rat to finally lock on said item. The interactions with enemies are equally basic and always result in an instant death and restart from the checkpoint.
Speaking of, the entire game is a string of small rooms with checkpoints at the start of each. This is a good decision since there is no long backtracking involved and with the poor lighting, imprecise physics and weak visibility of some of the dangers, the rat dies often. The telegraphing of the correct path is often extremely bad, especially during one of the game’s chase sequences, with the short time window available, at least two or three objects in the room brightly lit (additionally, one of them being an open doorway blocked by an invisible wall), which suggests their importance, while the correct escape route is awkwardly placed in the darkness almost outside of the camera’s view. And since we’re at it, the human in this game doesn’t seem to have much life outside of chasing that one rat which happened to sneak in during the snowstorm.
The thing that could have saved this game was the atmosphere and narration. Regrettably, neither of those is particularly great here. The inspiration with Little Nightmares is visible in the choice of dark-blue palette, the vulnerability of the protagonist and the similarity of some locations and scenery. In contrast, while Little Nightmares provided a coherent narrative and an interesting world, Rat Cage is almost a sequence of empty and very similar rooms connected with nearly no narrative. There are some choices made to enhance the gameplay, which remain absurd within the game’s world . For example, a chunk of cheese awkwardly placed on the ground as a collectible, just a few steps behind the mousetrap. Or how out of all creatures, the spiders in this game can’t climb even the smallest obstacle since that’s how the rat can avoid them. Or how there are those hamster wheels installed inside the factory vents that only a rat can operate, which are necessary to open some of the paths (the presence of rat-only operated devices together with the automated turrets shooting at rats with lethal syringes, often in the same room made me think how this entire building must have been created over an extremely long span of time by two separate, but also technically advanced cultures who had a starkly different approach towards rats.) OR how the player meets another rat who performs a happy backflip and then is never seen again outside of a single location. ORR how out of all the objects the human decides to infuse with rat poison and leaves all over the building he chooses apples, but the ones left on tables are also poisoned since the rat dies if it tries them. The default ending is also extremely unsatisfactory, to the point of contradicting every action that the protagonist performs. The achievements suggest there might be another conclusion to the story if all the collectible pieces of cheese are discovered but, at least for me, Rat Cage was not nearly enjoyable enough to bother.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3779412097
[h3]Bullet with a Butt[/h3]
There was one more thing that could have been a redeeming factor for this game – the price tag. All things considered, Rat Cage is an extremely basic, but more or less competent platformer. At 3 euros this game could perhaps have been considered a fair indie effort. At its current price, with running time of more or less an hour, Rat Cage somehow manages to feel both too short and too long at the same time, and definitely not fun enough. To sum up, here’s a sentence I’ve never thought I was going to write – you’d be much better of getting Little Orpheus at a deep discount instead.
