The Rat

(I beta tested this game)

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Batman’s villains are way more fun than the man himself. I’m sure the good people of Gotham are glad there’s the one person maintaining the social order against a tide of gibbering chaos – it’s nice to be able to go out to a concert without being fear-gassed or laughing-gassed or choked by a vine or choked by a luchador or blown up by a penguin-bomb or immobilized by a freeze ray or … whatever Clayface does to people, in the animated series it kinda looked like he could fire mud-streams? Anyway it would be deeply unpleasant, sure, but safely ensconced in fiction, the libidinal excess of the villains is way more engaging than Bruce Wayne’s emotional constipation. And how much more would that be the case if the villains had a point?

The Rat is a distaff counterpart to 2024’s Comp winner the Bat, exploring exactly that reversal. The Bat saw you playing as a knock-off Alfred catering to the every need of a knock-off Batman, who in this version of reality was an addled collection of tics barely managing to resemble a human. The Rat sets you up as crew of hardened criminals bent on boosting some of the Bat’s valuables, with the main obstacle to your plans the aforementioned super-butler. And your best weapon to distract him? Pure, unbridled chaos.

What that means is that the Rat is a very systems-driven piece of IF – it has situations, not puzzles. After a brief tutorial sequence, you’re let loose on what are more or less a series of escalating levels where you need to figure out how to keep the butler busy for longer and longer periods of time, enabling the crew to ferret out more and more loot. You’ve got a number of tools in your repertoire, but primarily these are spatial challenges as you figure out how to make messes and mischief in far-flung rooms, forcing the butler to yo-yo from one wing of the mansion to another to try to restore them to some semblance of order. And as is typical for the author’s work, the interface is designed with numerous felicities and features, most notably a constantly-updating map, that makes it easy to set and execute plans.

There’s a pleasant sense of mechanical escalation as new tools get added into the toolkit and the degree of difficulty increases, but what’s even more engaging is the personality of the baddies: each member of the team has a codename and a specialty, and they all do some kibitzing – and reveal a bit of their supervillain origin stories, many of which are quite sympathetic – as the heists proceed. As in the original game, the satire is quite broad, but entertaining nonetheless, providing a pleasantly anarchic chorus as you take the world’s worst Batman to the cleaners.