A Puzzle Game That’s Clever and Fast-Paced, Like its Superhero Mouse
Rat Protocol is a little on the nose. Each room is like a test chamber that needs to be solved, so Rat Protocol makes them actual test chambers. You’re a rat in a maze, so Rat Protocol makes you a rat. In a maze.
But you know what? As much as I think Rat Protocol takes the easy, slightly lazy route to its theme, it’s the only time it ever approaches easiness or laziness. Everything else is carefully tailored, and the end result is a pocket puzzle game where the cleverness is in the puzzle design.
Rat-Chetting up the Challenge
Rat Protocol is one of those puzzle games where you start off with rudimentary abilities, but you gain more as the game wears on. The puzzles keep pace with those new abilities, layering on more obstacles and forcing you to combine different moves to reach the end of a puzzle. It’s a game that loves to ratchet the difficulty in line with your newfound powers, and – to Rat Protocol’s credit – they never outpace each other. Everything is balanced, as all things should be.
You start with the simple sokoban ability to push blocks. That might send up a groan from Xbox puzzle players as sokoban are two-a-penny, but Rat Protocol likes to push the blocks into holes, acid and in front of lazers to see what happens. From one simple push of a crate, there are already several permutations of what might occur. And there are multiple crate types, from wooden ones that last a few seconds in front of a laser to a blue, metal crate that’s basically immortal. You can probably guess what happens to a TNT crate in many of the above situations.
I think a lot of games would have stopped there. Rat Protocol could have filled a game with box-pushing antics and it would likely have been decent. But it doesn’t, to its credit, as Rat Protocol starts chucking in other, slightly more out there stuff.
A Sokoban That Doesn’t Make Want to Claw out my Eyes
Ice squares slide the rat – and those crates – from one end of the room to the other, so you have to be aligned with where you want to go (mostly to avoid an acid bath). Portals might be conventional but they work well here because Rat Protocol uses a battery system. You need to power both sides of a portal gateway, and the batteries can be pushed like crates. They will even sit on pressure pads to open doors, so the battery becomes a vital component of any puzzle solution.
Hologram rats can be created, and they mirror the actions of your main rat. That hologram can float over acid (but, oddly, not survive a lazer), and it might be in a location that your rat can’t reach. The only issue is that your main rat moves whenever the hologram rat does, which might lead you into the crackling arms of a lazer turret.
Individually, none of these mechanics are particularly special. I’ve played my fair share of indie puzzle games, and I’ve encountered all of these powers before. But Rat Protocol does a few things to make them fresh. It keeps adding new ideas, every five levels or so; it tinkers with both sides of the puzzle equation by giving you lots of ways of overcoming an obstacle; and it never makes a puzzle so elaborate that you have millions of solution permutations. Most of the time, you can solve a puzzle by trying things out and seeing where it gets you. What happens to a conveyor belt that leads onto an ice square? Ah, that’s what happens.
Now You’re not Really Thinking With Portals
Rat Protocol does dodge the really difficult questions, though. You might wonder what might happen if you push a block or battery onto a portal, and the answer is – unfortunately – not that interesting. Nothing happens. For the sake of making the puzzles discrete and completable, Rat Protocol does simplify the rules when you can’t help thinking that something more remarkable should happen.
Still, I think Rat Protocol does a sterling job of presenting levels that – on the face of it – seem impossibly complex. If you were to look at the final level now, you’d worry that you had wandered into a half-finished level of Factorio. But Rat Protocol steps you through the individual abilities, teaching as it goes, and you can take each test lab in sections. You can break them down into smaller, completable rooms, to the point that Rat Protocol becomes actually quite achievable. And that’s what makes it enjoyable: it makes you feel like a brainbox, when – really – there weren’t many other paths you could have taken.
It’s closer to ‘too easy’ than ‘too demanding’, but that might be a temptation for players who want something a little more laid-back. What we would have liked, though, was a better Undo and Reset system. To reset, you need to pause the game and select it from a menu, which avoids accidents, I suppose, but is mostly a pain. And the Undo only moves you one square back, which isn’t particularly useful when you’ve accidentally pushed a crate onto a conveyor belt and it’s now multiple moves away from where you want it to be.
General, we are Pro on Rat Protocol
Rat Protocol isn’t a revolutionary puzzle game. It’s magpie’d most of its ideas from other games, grabbing a portal from here and a pushable crate from there. But it’s not afraid to chuck dozens of them into one level, creating a lattice of different game mechanics. A lot of the time, you can feel like the scientists that oversee the levels, trying item A on item B to see what happens.
It creates a puzzle game that looks complex from screenshots, but is actually easy-cheesy. Rat Protocol is deceptive like that. You can sit down for an evening and complete all of the puzzles in a sitting or two.
I wouldn’t say that my life has changed having played Rat Protocol – it’s too overly familiar for that to be the case – but it still surprised me. This is too well made and confident to be lumped into the ‘generic puzzler’ bracket. It’s a two-hour mental workout, and it’s one of those workouts where I felt better after experiencing it, rather than tired and a bit ragged.
Important Links
Rat Protocol Scurries Onto Consoles With Clever Puzzles And A Very Unfortunate Lab Rat – https://www.thexboxhub.com/rat-protocol-scurries-onto-consoles-with-clever-puzzles-and-a-very-unfortunate-lab-rat/
Buy from the Xbox Store – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/rat-protocol/9p7t43jlbfb9
