RATSHAKER finds you exploring a strange house carrying a dark secret, but you’ll need to jiggle your rat to figure it out.
You find yourself in a field with no explanation of why you’re there. Also, you’re holding a rat. You’re instructed to give the little critter a shake, which naturally, gets the rodent to scream in a human voice the whole time. As you do, a house appears before you. The rat starts to tell you a story of some horror that cannot be undone by shaking them. Still, what choice do you have but to march forward?
And also, you’ll keep shaking your rat. You’ll shake the daylights out of the poor creature by the time the game’s done, as that is how you accomplish everything in this ridiculous horror game. Shaking the rat charges your meter, which you can then use on various objects around this eerie house to activate them. You use the meter by choking the rat, because of course you do. Any time you’re not shaking or choking the poor thing, they will unveil small bits of the winding story as you discover them. If you discover them, as this story has several ways it can play out if you don’t get too distracted messing with the rat.
RATSHAKER somehow manages to mingle a serious horror tale with solid, frightening atmosphere even though you basically have an “off” button for your fear by shaking the rat and listening to their silly howling the whole time. It’s clearly a game that has no interest in taking itself seriously, but it can still get a bit unsettling between periods of shaking your rat. It creates an interesting mixture of emotions that make the laughs come hard and fast every time you have to hear something serious followed by the sound of you that rat being taken for a ride.
RATSHAKER is available now on Steam.
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