Rat Game: seven rats against an armed chef, and sudoku in the losers' cage

There is a line in one Rat Game review that made me laugh out loud, and it describes a real mechanic.

"Thank you for putting sudoku in the loser's cage so I don't get bored for being really bad at parkour and getting caught. Maybe throw some crayons in there too please."

An asymmetrical game that thought about occupying eliminated players already shows care most of the genre does not.

The setup

Asymmetrical online co-op: one Chef against two to seven Rats.

The Chef has been trying to exterminate the rats, leaving them no choice but to ruin his restaurant. You crawl through hidden shortcuts, hide in dark corners of a human-scale map, and work in teams to gnaw through wires, clog the toilet, hack the PC, anything to get the place shut down for good.

On the other side, you are the Chef whose treasured family restaurant is being destroyed by rats. You stomp around listening for the tell-tale sound of scrabbling claws, waiting for the right moment to grab them and throw them in the cage. And if all else fails, you also have a gun.

The Chef can be human or robot-controlled, and there is a fully co-op mode against a Robo-Chef.

The studio honestly announces around three hours of playtime.

Who made it

Sokpop Collective, and the name is worth knowing.

It is a Dutch collective that became known for a rare discipline: putting out small games at a sustained pace, each built on one simple idea, never pretending to be a two-year production.

Rat Game sits squarely in that vein: one idea, one map, three hours, and no roadmap promises.

What comes out of the feedback

The game has only five reviews as I write, so I am not going to talk about reception. But they are detailed and they agree.

The atmosphere works. One player sums it up: the rat voices are super cute while the chef sounds creepy as hell. That contrast is exactly what an asymmetrical game needs, where the two sides have to live two different emotions.

Another describes a moment I find perfect: he had to cover his mouth to avoid screaming when his fellow rat was executed in cold blood by the gun-wielding chef not three feet away, while he cowered in a rat hole.

And the maps are replayable. Maps and objectives are randomised, with secrets to discover, which is the right decision for a three-hour game.

The two reservations

No public matchmaking. That is the most repeated complaint: multiplayer requires friends, there are no public lobbies and no matchmaking. Two independent players flag it, and one adds he would love to play with strangers.

In a game that needs three to eight people, that is a serious constraint. If you have no group, buying is a gamble.

Solo is hard. You can play alone against the Robo-Chef, but one player warns it is very tough even using custom difficulty.

At 5.21 euros, for three hours of content, the arithmetic does itself if you have a group.

And there is something cheering about the asymmetry chosen: normally the many are the ones who are afraid and the lone side is the monster. Here the lone side is a man defending his family restaurant, and the many are the ones who came to ruin him.

You no longer quite know who to pity, and that is well played.

Got a group of eight? That is the ideal number, recruitment happens on the InsertCoins Discord.