David’s Backlog Busting: Ratshaker (PC) Preview

Warning: The subject of this preview contains references and depictions of animal abuse, substance abuse, and mental illness. Reader discretion is advised.

Sometimes I think starting this Backlog Busting series was a huge mistake. My subject today is a prime example of why that is. I’ve had a look at Ratshaker, developed and published by Sunscorched Studios. Ratshaker’s title succinctly gives away the gist of its core gameplay loop. You’re supposed to shake a surprisingly well-spoken and deep-voiced rat until the game tells you to stop. The kicker is that you don’t start out knowing why you’re supposed to shake that rat. You can hear a voice telling you to shake the rat “until it yields” so you can find out “what you did.”

So, you’ve apparently done some horrific thing and seem to have no memory of what that thing was, which (somehow) means you’re supposed to shake a talking rat until your memory returns to you. However, even if you manage to remember what it was you did, it’s not clear whether or not you can atone for whatever actions you may have taken. The rat itself will frequently tell you that you can’t undo what you’ve done, whenever it has a chance to speak, because you take a break from shaking it. Ratshaker is an example of Steam’s user-defined tags gone awry.

One of the user-defined tags on Ratshaker’s Steam Store page is “dark humor.” Ratshaker has a fair bit of that, so I’ll give it a pass there. However, the user-defined tag featured most prominently is “psychological horror.” I would argue that’s only true if your name happens to be Winston Smith. Heck, maybe in an alternate timeline, the Party manages to brainwash Winston at the end of Nineteen Eighty-Four by forcing him to play Ratshaker for hours on end. Aside from the obvious animal abuse in its gameplay, Ratshaker also contains a lot of gore that seems to have been added solely for shock value.

Ratshaker also contains various types of references to alcoholism and mental illness. I tend to take issue with topics like those if they aren’t handled carefully, but there’s a pretty significant difference between acknowledging the prevalence of mental health issues and bringing them up just to point and mock people who suffer from them. As you might have gathered by now, Ratshaker seems to fit rather well into the latter category. At its core, I would describe Ratshaker as a gimmicky take on the “walking simulator” genre that’s more likely to make you regret having eaten right before playing it than to actually scare you.

If you’re a huge fan of gimmicky horror games and you’ve got $3 burning a hole in your pocket, I’m not going to say you shouldn’t buy Ratshaker because it might be tailor-made for you. What I am going to say, though, is that if you hate rats with every fiber of your being, there are (comparatively) much healthier and less disgusting ways of going about working through that, such as therapy. If you’re currently asking yourself why I bothered to cover Ratshaker in a full article, tell me if you figure out the answer; I’d very much like to know that myself.