Rat King needs you to lead a pair of rodents through different dangerous dungeons using the same movement commands.
It didn’t seem too complicated at first. Just a cute little rat chilling in the middle of a gray dungeon floor. Well, two of them, as you will be controlling a rat on both sides of the screen, each standing in their own room in the dungeon. Not only this, but there were a few worms crawling around that seemed to mean me harm. If I bumped into them first, though, all was well. Inputting the correct commands to make sure that neither rat blundered into an enemy on the other screen while I tried to dodge a foe was where this game quickly got difficult.
Further problems come in the form of simple old walls. Each room has a slightly different wall layout. These make it difficult to freely evade enemies on both sides of the room at the same time, so you really need to think about your path to keep both rats safe. You CAN just bump into a wall in order to keep one rat in place while you carefully navigate with the other, but every time you blunder into a barrier you begin to summon new enemies into the room with you. A few careless nudges and you’ll find that you created two dangerous creatures while trying to kill one of them. Also, watching two screens to plan your path is challenging on its own and often resulted in me making some lethal blunders just from how hard it was to split my attention.
Rat King is cute and so simple to pick up and play that you’ll be kicking yourself over how quickly you manage to die when you’re careless. If you can stay sharp and juggle both screens (which does get easier once you start unlocking some helpful upgrades) then this game is a great mental workout.
Rat King is available now (for whatever you wish to pay for it) on itch.io.
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