The comedy of Curse of the Sea Rats is a tonal mismatch for what’s intended to be a challenging 2D Metroidvania in the vein of Hollow Knight. The jokes distract at every turn, sapping the menace from the game’s hand-drawn horrors. Worse, they’re not even good jokes—often random and anachronistic to the 1777 setting or relying on lame stereotypes, like how Mamma Ratelli keeps referencing Italian words. When the game shuts up and just lets you explore—well, it still has issues, but it’s at least a lot more mysterious and compelling.
Despite playfully calling itself a “ratroidvania,” Curse of the Sea Rats doesn’t bring anything new to the Metroidvania subgenre of action-adventure games. The plot revolves around the pursuit of the pirate thief Flora Burns, who unleashed a curse that turned the game’s four main protagonists into rats. But where a game like Guacamelee! built its combat and exploration around the wrestling moves of its undead luchador, Curse of the Sea Rats just makes a bunch of sailors look like walking, talking, human-sized, weapon-wielding rats and calls it a day.
Outside of the visuals, the game largely ignores its rat angle—the stray humans and wild animals you encounter are unfazed by your countenance—and instead of coming up with thematically unique abilities for the protagonists, like squeezing through tight spaces, falls back on genre tropes like the wall-, double-, and dash-jump. It’s an odd choice, considering that the game is filled with foes, like Murat Reis (a vampire rat) or Freddy Eightfingers (a spider-rat), that are a blast to face off against, but whose abilities are creative in ways that yours aren’t.
It may not make a lick of sense for a British prison ship to have been carrying an American soldier, a Cheyenne warrior, a Barbadian freedom fighter, and a Japanese operator, but if the four main characters were anywhere near as colorful as the villains, a greater sense of variance between them would have been nice. And while you can swap between them at checkpoints, there are no character-specific obstacles that would require it. This also means that there’s no meaningful interaction between the four characters (at least in the solo campaign).
The only place where the protagonists, and by extension Curse of the Sea Rats, stand out is in combat. Wu Yun, the spirit guiding them to a showdown with Flora Burns and her half of the stolen Eye of the Serpent, imbues each of them with a different elemental magic that complements their innate physical attributes (such as Bussa’s in-your-face fists). Character animations can’t be interrupted, so mastering the rhythm of each battle is crucial, and it’s satisfying to get a grip on how each protagonist is meant to be played.
Unfortunately, combat is also where Curse of the Sea Rats’s many balancing issues are most noticeable. The non-linear exploration, and lack of any objectives on your map, means that you’re likely to find alternative paths around certain areas, only to confusedly circle back around to them later when you’re too over-leveled for them to be interesting.
This power gap is most frustrating when it comes to the bosses. Artistically and mechanically, they’ve had a lot of work put into them. For one, the whip-wielding Rama Cinnamon and her giant pet toucan Banana utilize very different tactics than Short Fuse Jones’s cannon-based contraptions. In practice, though, you can more or less just stand in front of these bosses and keep attacking, outpacing their damage and skipping entire phases of the fight. By unintentionally humorous contrast, multiple standard enemies pose more of a threat because they can stun-lock you, knocking you down over and over as you uncontrollably try to stand.
Curse of the Sea Rats is ultimately a perfectly average game marred by some poor design choices, like instant-death chasms and repetitive forest and cave areas. The trap-filled final dungeon finds the game at its best and most inventive, and is a joy to fight through and navigate, but it also emphasizes what’s missing everywhere else. Rats!
This game was reviewed with code provided by PR Wizard.
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