But you're still hungry.

Note: not a retro game.

You’re a rat named Mat who has a best friend named Toby and a mouse girlfriend named Nat. The game is a linear platformer from a rat perspective; it felt very much like an interactive movie. Maybe you should think about it like Ratatouille: The Platformer.

Online people complained about the controls, but I thought that Mat generally controlled quite smoothly, besides some funny clipping that could happen if you jumped onto the wrong ledges. The game is fully voiced, with many cutscenes of varying lengths interspersed, and pretty good music. It opens with Mat retelling his story to some...squirrel witch??? that we’ll presumably see in episode 2. She sometimes makes useless interjections like “hahaha, fate is a fickle thing”. Mat is a member of a rat commune living near/underneath a human house, which consumes enough cheese that they can scavenge food from the humans. They’ve repurposed lots of little human belongings like buttons, barrels, toothpicks, etc. into tools, homes, etc. this is one of the most charming parts of the game; even with the linearity, you can explore each space, just not backtrack, and I was always tickled by the everyday objects I got to see magnified. However, Mat will often tell you, the player, what to do. eg, “I knew I had to get to that hole in the wall. I saw that if I jumped onto the bookcase via the hanging wires, I’d be barely able to make the leap.” I did find that a little constraining sometimes — there would be all these objects in the area, but there was only one path to the goal, and Mat would just start talking to you about it if you didn’t do it fast enough — but on the other hand, fitting the narrative more tightly to the gameplay did make the game feel more like an interactive movie/story. And in most of the scenes there was plenty of time to wander around in the room. However, some of the sequences, especially in the beginning, felt like they were drawn out to teach you mechanics, e.g. the dream sequence when Mat keeps getting baited by dream Nat. The game did make me a little paranoid about possible holes in the wall in my apartment...sometimes I’m like, wow, I could imagine a rat doing skillful jumps on the knobs of my dresser, or squeezing through the area between my fridge and counter, or whatever. Eeek.

The rats are weirdly (or not so weirdly, since they have to move and control in ways familiar to the player) anthropomorphic. They stand on two legs, have human mannerisms, etc., and they only run like real rats as the “sprint”. And oh god the cat!!! It’s this weird CGI cat and the main interaction with it is this escape sequence where the cat is jabbing its paw through a grate and the animation is SO GROTESQUE like it looks like a human arm, you can see a 90 degree angle at a “joint”, ahhhhh.

The platforming part was fun. Very generous with checkpoints and all. I liked the 2D puzzle parts, but felt they were a bit contrived. The combat — definitely contrived. There are scenes with the bully where he throws rocks at you and whips his tail at you if you come too close, and you have to whip your tail only after you dodge all his rock throws?? Like come on, dude. And the combat during your escape has some distance issues, plus it only appears at the end, so idk. In the season 2 trailer, they had these previews of Mat doing battle with snakes and other large animals, so I sure hope they make it a lot smoother.

Story summary follows, including spoilers.

The prologue is Mat escaping the rat commune’s prisons while being pursued by guards. He’s recounting his story to a squirrel and she asks him to start from the beginning. Mat starts with his life in his rat commune shortly before Mat’s scavenger test — in the commune rats can take roles like “guard” or “scavenger”. Mat’s best friend Toby becomes a guard and Mat is able to become a scavenger with his agility and speed. Mat’s main motivation for becoming a scavenger is to give him access to the house (the guards otherwise don’t let rats leave) to meet his partner, the house mouse Nat, who’s the pet of the human girl. It’s implied that in the past the rats lived in tunnels and moved freely, but then the Governor rat created the commune, organized the rats into the current system, and prevented the rats from leaving without permission. Mat and Nat both want to escape to the “outside” by combining Nat’s ingenuity with Mat’s physical skills. Though a guard, Toby turns a blind eye to Mat’s escapades because of their friendship. At one point Mat is locked into a room by a bully rat and escapes via the old rat tunnels, where he overhears the guards talking callously about prisoners and mistreating rats. He also at one point enters a tunnel where it looks like the Governor is using rat poison on prisoner rats (all this is from him sneaking in and out of the house basically). When Mat warns Toby about it, Toby eventually believes him but asks Mat to allow him, as a guard, to get to the bottom of it. But the next day the scavengers get told they’re banned from doing runs for the foreseeable future, even though they’re the main source of food for the rat commune. Mat realizes he needs to leave now to escape with Nat. He sneaks out, including hearing the scavenger and guard leads arguing about the scavenger ban + increased guard power. He used to sneak into Nat’s room via a hole in her door, but the humans fixed it. Nat is alone because the girl had an asthma attack (or allergic reaction?). They force open the door and incur some injuries, and are about to escape when the house cat starts to hunt them. Mat and the cat (in pursuit) jump off a window ledge, leaving Nat unharmed. Mat realizes he has no choice but to return to the commune to avoid the cat and recuperate from his injuries. The rats at the commune, who are starving, at first thinks he has cheese, but then they realize there’s a cat claw on his back. They praise him for having killed “the claw”, but the governor throws him into prison for violating the curfew. Mat meets a rat named Old Rusty in the prison. Rusty claims to have helped build the commune and was imprisoned right after the founding. He knows how all the tunnels work. He teaches Mat how to fight and throw nails and they bide their time for escaping. Eventually, Toby helps them escape by knocking out the guard on duty. He tells Mat that he will stay behind and try to change things from the inside, and he understands why Mat tried to escape once the scavenger pause was announced. (It’s unclear how Toby will explain this?? The other guard must clearly remember Toby claiming to relieve him and then getting knocked out??) Anyway, Mat and Rusty run through the tunnels until they see a large pool. Rusty can’t make the jump, but tells Mat that he can go first and toss Rusty a rope on a ledge. Ha ha, there’s no rope and Rusty is hoping to buy time for Mat to run while holding off the guards. Mat defeats the guards, but Rusty still can’t make the jump (duh) and has Mat escape. After much running Mat sees the governor and some guards waiting for him; they push him off a cliff and into a river. Then we get the season 2 trailer — Mat survives the fall, but the current brings him to the forest near the house, and he has to make his way back. The trailer shows like, actual combat and stuff with animals way bigger than him. It’s unclear how they’ll actually implement this, see above...