Bad news everybody, I think I have discovered the game that is going to stop you doing anything else today. Witness the verminous splendour of turn-based puzzler Rat King, in which you simultaneously control two rodents who are exploring two different dungeons in splitscreen. I know, I know – to lose one rat in a dungeon may be regarded as a misfortune, to lose two looks like carelessness. But there is method to the madness.
Each questing squealer shares the same health bar, but faces a different 5×5 square room layout and enemy spawning patterns. As such, they will inevitably end up out of synch – one rat lodged in the corner of a room, for example, while the other fends off beetles in the middle. You need to work out the sequence of moves that keeps both rats alive, while scooping up coins to spend on items at shops, and guiding the varmints to the staircase to the next floor.
It’s immediately engrossing, and it layers up very satisfyingly. Each rat can move between the rooms of its particular dungeon without waiting for the other, allowing you to effectively “reshuffle” one half of the screen when you can’t see a way to avoid damage. One obvious way to get your skavens in synch is to line them up against parallel walls, but if you bounce off surfaces repeatedly you’ll waken a vengeful ghost.
The ghosts are a lovely wordless characterisation of a soft design constraint. The basic idea is just to punish you for brute-forcing the simultaneous-move mechanic, but also, it makes sense that rapping on the walls of catacombs would rouse their resident spectres.
Items can be very helpful, though they only apply to the screen half in which they’re collected. There’s an ice cube that freezes a room’s enemies in place, for example, and a purple swirly that spins one rat’s control inputs around, allowing for more flexible movement as long as you don’t confuse yourself.
The latter item makes the game feel like a lockpicking minigame in an Elder Scrolls RPG, but the correct reference here is Michael Brough’s 868-Hack, which stole the luncheons and sleeping hours of many RPS scribes in times of yore. I haven’t played many “broughlikes”, or at least, not knowingly, but Rat King already feels like a classic of the form. I’ve only scraped the skin, I’m sure. Find it on Itch.io.
