The Rat (Daniel M. Stelzer)
Played on: 20th September (using the 18th Sept update)
How I played it: Online via the IFComp ballot
How long I spent: 1hr 5mins to reach an ending with a score of $3000
Speaking as someone who once placed 13th in IFComp with a lightly puzzly parser comedy about vampires in mundane settings, I humbly consider myself one of the world’s foremost experts on IFComp entrants, etc etc. Well, actually it might not be a vampire this time. Count Vespertilion is a bloodsucker of some sort but it’s left open to interpretation whether he’s the supernatural kind or just the capitalist kind. Anyway, The Rat is good.
This is an authorised sequel to IFComp 2024 winner The Bat by Chandler Groover. In that game you play a butler who is the only staff member attending to a billionaire’s party, juggling distractions, maintenance work, and hosting. In The Rat, you’re on the opposite side, orchestrating a daring heist on a house party where security and hospitality are both managed by one solitary perhaps-familiar butler. In my review of The Two Seasons, I said it was merciful that the game doesn’t actually make you juggle two characters at once; in The Rat, you direct four. The titular Rat is your critter on the ground, hiding in the house and breaking things to create maintenance jobs for the hapless butler, and assisted by the Chameleon in the latter half of the game; the Jackdaw (well, “the Magpie” was taken) is in the storage cellars grabbing everything she can while the butler is away from the security feeds; the Spider is your eyes and ears, letting you monitor separate rooms while the butler roams and party guests chat to each other.
It’s a bit of a tall order to have four player characters at once here, but The Rat’s Dialog web interface is excellent. All necessary verbs are clickable per character, avoiding the need to specify who you’re talking to (“rat, north”); in fact, the Rat and the Chameleon get their own directional arrow buttons to help you visualise where you’re sending them. You’re also given a map which updates every turn, showing you the location of your guys, the butler, and the party guests. Despite the concept, it’s very playable and smooth.
Good thing we have all these bells and whistles too, because we need them once we work out what’s going on. Our gameplay loop is having Rat break things to distract the butler, then telling Jackdaw to grab what she can. We see the route the butler takes on the map, then we realise that Rat can break more than one thing, then we realise: oh, this is a path-finding optimisation puzzle! We’re setting up the longest route we can for the butler to buy Jackdaw as much time as possible. This sets up a few tricky scenarios - there aren’t many individual puzzles in The Rat (there are five chapters overall, each with a different arrangement of rooms, NPCs and distractions), but they can get complex. I very much like the puzzle which introduces Chameleon, as finding an optimal solution here was fun and displayed some impressive implementation: I managed to find a way to stalemate the butler by moving the guests back and forth, and after a few moves the game acknowledged what I was doing and gave me a LOOP verb to repeat the process until Jackdaw was done. Being able to detect a loop without false positives and let you perpetuate it is some very good work - I don’t know anything about working with Dialog but I can’t imagine it’s easy in any programming language!
The only thing I wasn’t clear on was the progression. We have a scoring system where Jackdaw will collect any valuables she finds, but I don’t understand what causes her to find valuables and what causes her to find the thing that allows you to progress the plot to the next chapter. It looks like she only finds one thing at a time, so I think you’d have to distract the butler multiple separate times to get her to clean out the basement, and I also guess there’s a degree of optimisation where the longer the butler’s path, the better the loot… but I wasn’t sure and I couldn’t work it out in actual play. I just moved the plot on instead, but I suspect my haul of $3000 is quite paltry next to a more diligent player.
I think I’ve got into the habit of putting Jokes I Liked in the last couple of paragraphs of each review because it’s an easy way to compliment-sandwich things and avoid ending on a sour note. No problem doing that this time, because The Rat is hilarious. Our heist compatriots natter and bicker throughout the job, which narratively helps to fill in the backstory and define their characters, but which is also so much fun to read. I was especially taken with Jackdaw, who’s clearly an accomplished shitposter in her personal life; she takes a swipe at the compass direction system at one point, a gag which I’m pretty sure was written for Chandler Groover specifically. The party guests are great too, each one a different breed of cartoonish Mr Burns-like billionaire. The standout is obviously Luna L Meresankh, founder of an AI startup which seems to be rubbing off on her:
Quinn: So this new product of yours. Are you aiming at consumers, or do you think it has a place in the corporate world too?
Luna: You’re absolutely right. Your comment was not just insightful—it cuts right to the heart of the issue. Any modern technology needs to cater to the business market if it wants to succeed. And PyramidAI has the potential to reduce expenses by as much as 200%.
Quinn: Reduce by 200%? How do you figure that?
Luna: You’re absolutely right—that’s my mistake. Of course, it’s not possible to reduce a quantity by more than 100%. Is there anything else I can help you with?
Even chief antagonist Count Vespertilion has his moments. “It is wrong of me to question an invited guest who has crossed my threshold,” he says at one point, very unsuspiciously.
And with that little bit of bookending, let’s wrap up. The Rat is very different to The Bat, setting and one or two returning characters aside, but it’s a clever sequel. Seeing The Bat’s harried player-character (probably) from an external perspective is a great twist. Even if nothing else about the game had worked, it’s at least satisfying to be the one causing problems for a change.