Rats in a Cage

Rats in a Cage puts you in the shoes of the ultimate corporate rat. An AI is tasked to test your ingenuity and morality through a series of puzzles. Though it tries to demoralize you, it will soon realize you’re among the worst of the worst and nothing can stand between you and your greedy objective.
Rats in a Cage is a corporate satire. The whole game is really funny and the puzzles are about manipulating your uninteresting rat colleagues to climb to the top. Literally, as the game is composed of 3 floors and a bonus one.

So how exactly do you manipulate those rats? Well, the fuel of a hard worker is coffee. When a rat smells coffee, it immediately wants to drink it. The same thing happens when it hears gossip, it can’t resist the call of the drama. The difference being that coffee is already placed when starting a puzzle while gossip is an item you can pick up and place wherever you want, mainly on buttons. Because the goal of the puzzles is ultimately to reach the exit located behind at least one door, which are opened using buttons.
Rats in a Cage is a bit of an unusual puzzle game, as it heavily relies on action and timings. The game is grid-based but not turn-based, if coffee is behind a door, the rats will immediately rush towards it the second that door gets opened.

There’s another way to control the rats though, namely the pathfinding. If something is on the way, the rats won’t be drawn towards their precious futilities. Rats in a Cage is all about careful analysis and precise setups, you generally cannot navigate as you’d like to. Other mechanics get introduced later on, such as the knife that allows you to straight up kill your colleagues so they are not annoying anymore and STAY ON THAT BUTTON. Or cubes, because who doesn’t like a dose of sokoban in their puzzles?

Once you clear a floor, you’ll get to meet your boss. Such an honour! Or not, it depends. During dialogues, you can choose to be arrogant, an ass-licker or bored. Each type of answer leads to a different dialogue, and they are pretty much always funny. Your boss will also challenge you to a minigame, whether it is a cheap sort of Space Invaders or a cool riddle. I liked that, especially as it sometimes plays gently with the game files, it’s a nice break from the puzzles that can get quite difficult.

Rats in a Cage is… hard to rate difficulty-wise. There are not that many puzzles in the game and they are mostly fine, but a few of them are just soul-crushingly hard. There is no undo button, which means the smallest timing mistake implies a restart. I wouldn’t say the game is frustrating, the levels are usually small and it doesn’t take that much time to start over… but yeah, it’s still annoying as you can’t really try things as you’d like to. I know some people can really be put off by that, so be careful if you’re interested in this game.

Apart from a bug in the pathfinding (sometimes a rat should slightly move but doesn’t), I don’t think I’ve experienced anything negative. It all comes down to whether timings are annoying or not to you, I personally liked that as it’s a nice change from most puzzle games, and done pretty well.

Rats in a Cage is a very good game. Maybe the puzzles are a bit weird sometimes, but the originality of the game makes up for it.
Funny puzzle games are not that common, especially ones with a darker sense of humour, the devs have my respect for that.

Recommended.

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Developer: Superdeep Borehole
Publisher: Superdeep Borehole
Platform: Steam – Windows/macOS
Release Date: September 20, 2024