I wish there was a neutral review type, but here we are.
Ratuz is very hard to make a review about. It has so many good things going for it, but so many bad things against it.
Obviously, spoilers.
=POSITIVES=
-Amazing humor.
The game is full of jokes, from subtle to obvious, but most of them are good. The best one by far was Ratman in the wheel-chair, but sadly that one was leaked in the trailer, and no joke came close to it. Still good
-Ground and Air movement is slick.
You feel like you have total control while on the ground or jumping/falling, be able to turn on a dime, or quickly duck to avoid something.
-Generous saves.
There's a save-point after nearly every hard encounter.
-Menacing antagonist
You clearly see what Ratman is able to do before the game even starts, letting you know exactly what and how things will happen to you if he reaches you. That, and a giant, laughing-rat is just scary but also hilarious in its own right.
=NEGATIVES=
-Repeat Puzzles/Hazards
Expect to go through most puzzles at least twice. The amount of times the game makes you get something at the end of a obstacle course, and then turn around and have to do the entire obstacle course again, is just insane. Literally like over half the game is this shit.
-Lack of control knowledge
First off, the game doesn't even tell you how to control your character, you need to open the menu to find out. Already off to a bad start. And once you do find out how to do anything via E, that just brings up the other issue of:
-Game feels too simple, Items are one and done.
A quarter of these puzzles can be summed up to "walk up to something and press E". The fact that you lose items instantly, and they never are used anywhere else in the game, doesn't help either.
Forget feeling like you're slowly building an arsenal of tools, and forget feeling like puzzles teach you essential mechanics of the future. You get item X, you solve puzzle X. Item X is gone. You get item Y, you solve puzzle Y, Item Y is gone. I was 100% expecting to have to backtrack to unlock new areas after getting the fuse-breaker, or the cards, which MAY have been cool, but no, they just vanish.
-What can and cant kill you is not always told well.
Oh god. There is a giant purple octopus monster thing here. Maybe if I crawl arou- oh it does not kill me anyway, i'm fine. Well, better walk through this water- And i'm dead.
Things that look like they're for decoration become deadly traps, and things that look like they're deadly obstacles are just funny nick-knacks on the background. Also leads into the:
-Bullshit deaths.
A MAJORITY of deaths in this game will be caused by some completely random bullshit. And no, this isn't just the whole "unreactable" shit, i MEAN ITS LITERALLY impossible to not die to some of these things. Since the screen doesn't always follow you, you end up running to a new room and running straight into something that kills you (one of the deaths is literally a decapitating blade that's right on the edge of the new room'
Very rarely did I feel like I could use my knowledge of the game or quick thinking or rationalization to be able to beat things without dying once.
Ah yes, I clearly should'eve known this skeleton would randomly reanimate and then the door behind me would lock, and kill me. How naive.
The ONE time I was able to do so was when I saw a pressure plate on the ground, jumped over it, and then let a skeleton walk over it (I knew the skeleton would re-animate from the earlier mentioned puzzle). This was instantly ruined by the next trap which just blew me up instantly.
-Game feels empty at many, many parts.
Most of the acts are honestly just walking around empty hallways, or going through dis-armed obstacles/hazards. Some parts which FEEL like they would have more things (for example, the Ratman car scene), have nothing. Like, the entirety of the lab is for real just spamming the blue lazer's and parasites.
-The game doesn't attempt to let you learn things.
I expected the game to have sort of a 'mario' type learning thing, as weird as it sounds.
Basically, you get shown a mechanic, and then slowly the mechanic is used with other mechanics and you're expected to beat further areas with more mechanics slowly being added, that kind of thing.
The game introduces a new mechanic, and then throws it away instantly.
I KNOW I put "repeat hazards" as a negative earlier, but theres a difference between endlessly recycling the same thing for 0 reason, and letting your players begin to predict what to do.
For example, like the skeleton thing earlier, that was actually EXTREMELY satisfying when I recalled the first skeleton, and was able to beat the second one due to it. I felt like I was starting to learn how to deal with these hazards. But the game never let me have that feeling ever again.
-Forced Saves
There is TONS of times where a character will die and the game saves, basically cucking you if you wanted to... you know, not have them die?
One of them is for real a 50/50 pick between a red and blue lever, but at least it's the earliest of the three.
-Ok this is already getting long so ill just put it all at once, characters are lame, endings are lame
yes i know people don't play a game about a big rat monster chasing them around, but ANYTHING would've been better than what we had. At first the characters felt like real people, having funny discussions, and then everything nose-dived when they split off. The very first female you come across already wants to fuck you. Every researcher either kills themselves upon seeing you, or does nothing and dies like a moment later.
You meet a character, they either say nothing or say a few sentences, and then die or disappear for most of the game. That's how every character is.
As for the endings, it's lame as fuck how everyone takes turns to fight Ratman. Like, what the fuck is this, an RPG? I expected the ending where you escape with everyone except the woman would be that all three of us just jump his ass and beat him to death. But no, we go one by one and die.
=IN CONCLUSION=
Ratuz settings down AMAZING framework for a game. However, it slowly loses focus of what it seems to want to be, and the game slowly deteriorates in quality as you play longer.
Yeah, it's kinda fun if you just wanna die a million times while watching silly Ratman be a silly guy, but everything around that premise falls apart.
I hope things can be fixed, but it may already be too late.
=Developers, if you read this, please do this THING ATLEAST.=
Please make Ratman do something during the car scene, lmao. I 100% was expecting him to start striking at you and you'd have to do shit like dodge with the arrow keys, just holding left was super anti-climatic.
And yes, I know he kills you if you slow-down, but you can just hold left.
