As someone who works in a corporate office world, I have to suffer the daily mental fatigue of office jargon and office politics. I should be happy to discuss my blue sky thinking on strategic and tactical solutions to 10x my productivity. Sometimes I introduce a new word I’ve made up just to see if someone parrots it back as I’m sure half the people don’t know what they are actually talking about. Rats in a Cage takes the daily hell that is office work and turns it into a satirical puzzle game that fans of Baba Is You will adore. It is time to climb the corporate ladder as a foul mouthed rat looking for the big cheese.
Each level is named after a corporate jargon or saying but it gives you a clue about how you’ll need to solve it. The goal in each of the 42 main levels in the game is to reach the exit. This is usually blocked by your lazy co-workers who are fellow rats. They love nothing more than sniffing out coffee for a break though and so by opening and closing doors or standing in or out of their way, you can manipulate your co-workers to run after the coffee. As soon as they can’t move directly to it and something blocks their path, the co-worker rats stand still. You can use this to your advantage to get them to stand on pressure pads or block the path of other rats to get to the coffee too. These are just the building blocks for the mental gymnastics you’ll need to jump through to win the game.
Everything is themed around office workers hell and I love it. Doors are emails that when you open one, another closes as unread. You can drop office gossip in strategic places to send your co-workers scurrying towards it. Deadlines can be pushed around like blocks to get in the way. You can even stab your co-workers in the back to take them out of the level! Rats in a Cage is one of those games where the theming is superb and I felt personally spoken to, seen and heard. All this takes place as part of a long job interview with a swearing, angry HR robot who takes no shit and intends to fail everyone. The game is played through an old CRT monitor and whilst the graphics are stylised and may take some getting used to, they have their own Spectrum anti-establishment charm to them. Grotesque and snide with a large splash or cynicism. What’s not to love?
Rats in a Cage is brain melting and one of the subplots that hurts your brain more revolves around plants. There are pot plants dotted around levels that you shouldn’t touch as they’ll smash and your AI friend gets annoyed at this and starts adding modifiers to levels if you persist. I believe each level can be completed without smashing the pot plants but it requires extra brain power to work it out. Sometimes that’s better than having the screen flipped upside down though! To break up the main levels, there are also interlude mini games and bosses (literally your boss) to beat too. Some of these involve moral choices such as which away round the toilet paper hangs or should you leave your co-workers having an extra long toilet break and get them fired. The boss battles involve point-n-click styled dialogues where you can choose to suck up to the boss or just be aggressively awful to him. Each brings its own crass humour of a boss who just hates you and everything about you – much like how it feels to work in a corporate world really. Boss battles are wildly varied and include games like pushing your colleagues off the corporate ladder to defend your bosses arse, and shooting your boss to reveal the bullshit slogan to say to get promotion. They are genuinely well put together and fun to play.
Rats in a Cage is unique, a little unhinged and an absolute blast to play. You will need a lot of brainpower to make it through the stages and there is no undo move button to make things easier. Thankfully levels are a single screen and often doable in under a minute when you’ve worked out how to solve them. The gameplay time is largely spent unpicking the mess you are in so whilst 42 levels plus 5 or 6 bonus games may sound small, it took me several hours to just clear the first half of the game. This is a hidden gem released in a cloud of other bigger titles that deserves attention and a lot of love and support. It is a great addition to the puzzle genre and I’ll be happy to discuss Rats in a Cage via an open door policy… *cries*
Review copy provided by developer. Rats in a Cage is out now on Steam.
Higher Plain Games is part of the Higher Plain Network. If you like what I do, please consider supporting me via Patreon for as little as $1/£1 a month. There are additional perks for supporting me, such as behind-the-scenes content and downloads. You can also share the website or use the affiliate buy now links on reviews. Buying credit from CD Keys using my affiliate link means I get a couple of pence per sale. All your support will enable me to produce better content, more often. Thank you.
