Bad Rats: the Rats' Revenge

I want to be straight with you before you click anything: the majority of people who own Bad Rats have never launched it. According to achievement tracking data, only around 12% of owners have cleared 10 of the game's 44 levels, which is the most accessible milestone on the list. That statistic tells you almost everything you need to know about what kind of purchase this actually is. But since you're on a review page and not a meme page, let's talk about what happens if you do open it. The structure is a 2D physics puzzle set across 44 levels. Each stage positions a caged cat on one side and a lethal object (chainsaw, bomb, falling safe, and others) rigged nearby. Your job is to place a roster of ten rat types, plus a limited toolkit of objects like trampolines and rockets, to build a chain reaction that gets the killing implement to drop. There are three difficulty tiers: a tutorial mode that walks you through placements, an Easy mode that gives you a loose layout overlay to work from, and an Expert mode that strips the hints entirely and hands you the full rat roster to figure out yourself. The concept is solidly in the lineage of classic chain-reaction puzzle games, and in isolation that skeleton is not embarrassing. The soundtrack, oddly, is a bluesy and funky score that has no business being this listenable given everything else going on around it. The problem is the physics, and the physics is a real problem. The simulation is nondeterministic: the same setup, placed identically, can succeed on one run and fail on the next because force values applied to the ball carry a random variance. For a puzzle game built entirely on cause-and-effect chains, that is a foundational crack. Critic reactions from Kotaku, IGN, and community reviewers across the years consistently land on the same two words: shoddy puzzles, inconsistent physics. The controls for manual rotation are hair-trigger sensitive, attaching rats to objects is finicky, and the in-game hints occasionally point you toward items that have no role in the level you're playing. Completionists who want 100% achievements should know that restarting a level mid-run to retry for an achievement condition is not cleanly supported, which turns already unreliable puzzles into genuine endurance tests. Then there is the cultural layer, which is impossible to ignore honestly. Bad Rats became a Steam in-joke precisely because it launched in 2009 before Greenlight existed, passed through actual Valve quality assurance, and landed in a catalogue that was still small enough for a bad game to stand out as a curiosity. The ironic review ecosystem grew up around it organically, and the developer, Invent4's Augusto Bulow, has stated openly that the game was planned to be funny and that he is happy people are laughing. That context matters. Buying Bad Rats in 2025 as a genuine puzzle experience is a choice made with full information, not nostalgia. As a gag gift to inflict on a friend's library, its legacy is well established. As a game to sit with and solve, expect around five to six hours to reach completion, a bluesy soundtrack that does not deserve the game it accompanies, and a physics engine that will occasionally beat you without any input from your own mistakes.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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