The Rat

It didn’t take long for the penny to drop for me that I loved the idea of this. The Rat is an alternative heist story happening more-or-less in and around the story of the IF Comp winner The Bat. I still had some of the happy glow from a recent replay of The Bat. I love heists and I love the trope of seeing familiar scenes from a totally different angle. The protagonist valet from The Bat is the main antagonist in The Rat, which is cool.

The writing is really good, with lots of banter between the characters who all have distinctive voices. The game escalates in a few stages, so you’re not just thrown in the deep end. And there are very many affordances for you to solve the puzzles (parser input, as well as mouse-driven).

I like the idea of the main puzzle - try to distract the valet for long enough so your comrades can break in. The valet takes a certain route between disturbances, so you need to find ways to stretch it out.

The actual experience of the main puzzles wasn’t as good for me. I had a lot of mindless flailing about. At times the solution seemed extraordinarily tight or extremely lax. When you later have one of your crew provide blocking assistance, I managed to completely break the game. You know that little dance you might do if you run into someone on a path, and you both take a step to move out of the way, but laugh because you both did it at the same time in the same direction, and not solving the problem? I weaponised that with an Ultra Canadian-meets-Brit level of polite sidewalk shuffling. I stepped left and right with the butler for about five minutes before I figured it was enough for the game. It luckily agreed, but the lightly-mangled response was a close one.

I really appreciate all the affordances with colour and various optional controls. However I hit the wrong command on the lower controls because they’d change position between turns, and I had to learn over the game to just use the top controls. This was exacerbated by the lovely dialogue, which felt distracted my puzzle solving rather than add to it. The end sequence appropriately has a twist to it, but I missed a line of dialogue hitting a button accidentally and it looked like the game was broken. I managed to figure it out, but it made the ending awkward.

I believe Stelzer got Groover’s blessing to make a tribute to The Bat, but I was disappointed when various details were not quite the same. Characters had different names. The house had a different layout. The ending was quite different. It was an alternate universe version of The Bat and I felt like it needed to be the same, or not at all the same.