We had to play Bad Rats on April 18th, 2024 at 2:00 PM EST. Was it worth it? Yes.
Look. Most recent games as we write this (2024), when they are bad, are bad for roughly the same reasons. Rife with microtransactions and battlepasses, grindy as hell, "Games as Service" titles that will almost inevitably be lost to the sands of time in 20-or-so-years, and they all just blend together in one big mush. Even the "worst games" we played in the 2020s primarily just have the same issues as other games--they just have ONE exemplary reason to be the "worst" out of the deluge of similarly bad games.
Bat Rats is different. Bad Rats is a 3D game that tries so hard to pretend to be a 2D game, and then forgets and acts like a 3D game anyways. It's a physics puzzler where the physics has pseudo-RNG for factors outside of your control. It's got a horrible stereotype suicide bomber rat that explodes if you simply stand it on a barrel, because it treats the forces of being pushed up against and held up on a platform the same as if you dropped the barrel 50 feet onto it. It's got the most dogwater 3D graphics that 2009 could provide. The hints are only vaguely in English and feature as many typos as grammatical errors. The "easy" mode is the hardest mode, and the hardest mode is the easiest mode--the tutorial is the middle difficulty.
And it's HILARIOUS. Not for any of the reasons the developers wanted, mind, but it's one of those games that has to be seen to be believed. In an era where gaming is so stagnant that even the bad games are becoming homogeneous messes, it's nice to look back on a truly baffling "bad" game like this. There is SOME fun to be had, and it's a great lesson that unintentional fun is just as valid as any.
In short: it's better than Minecraft Legends.
Look. Most recent games as we write this (2024), when they are bad, are bad for roughly the same reasons. Rife with microtransactions and battlepasses, grindy as hell, "Games as Service" titles that will almost inevitably be lost to the sands of time in 20-or-so-years, and they all just blend together in one big mush. Even the "worst games" we played in the 2020s primarily just have the same issues as other games--they just have ONE exemplary reason to be the "worst" out of the deluge of similarly bad games.
Bat Rats is different. Bad Rats is a 3D game that tries so hard to pretend to be a 2D game, and then forgets and acts like a 3D game anyways. It's a physics puzzler where the physics has pseudo-RNG for factors outside of your control. It's got a horrible stereotype suicide bomber rat that explodes if you simply stand it on a barrel, because it treats the forces of being pushed up against and held up on a platform the same as if you dropped the barrel 50 feet onto it. It's got the most dogwater 3D graphics that 2009 could provide. The hints are only vaguely in English and feature as many typos as grammatical errors. The "easy" mode is the hardest mode, and the hardest mode is the easiest mode--the tutorial is the middle difficulty.
And it's HILARIOUS. Not for any of the reasons the developers wanted, mind, but it's one of those games that has to be seen to be believed. In an era where gaming is so stagnant that even the bad games are becoming homogeneous messes, it's nice to look back on a truly baffling "bad" game like this. There is SOME fun to be had, and it's a great lesson that unintentional fun is just as valid as any.
In short: it's better than Minecraft Legends.