Curse of the Sea Rats

I want to love Curse of the Sea Rats more than I actually do, and I think that tension is the most honest thing I can tell you about it. The hand-drawn animation is genuinely stunning, evoking the golden era of Don Bluth and early Disney animal features, and the moment you boot it up you feel that warm flicker of childhood cartoon nostalgia. Four prisoners aboard an 18th-century British ship, cursed into anthropomorphic rats by the pirate witch Flora Burn, set out across the Irish coast to earn their freedom. That setup has bones. The world even features references to Irish mythology, with figures like the Morrígan turning up alongside the rat-pirate chaos. As a premise, it absolutely works. The four playable characters, David Douglas, Akane Yamakawa, Bussa, and Buffalo Calf, are not just reskins. Douglas is the sword-and-pistol all-rounder, Akane wields a naginata with water-based magic, Bussa is the tanky brawler who can block to recover health, and Buffalo Calf throws knives and electric attacks that, once fully upgraded, make her dramatically more powerful than anyone else in the roster. That character imbalance is a genuine issue, not a quirk. The skill tree system is built around a split between physical and magical upgrades using the Eye of the Serpent amulet, and there is some genuine satisfaction in unlocking new moves, but the combat vocabulary stays limited throughout: a three-hit melee combo, a magic attack, a block, and eventually a dash and double jump. It never deepens the way a good metroidvania should by hour eight or ten. The difficulty curve is another problem that reviewers flagged consistently at launch. The opening hours are punishingly stiff, with regular enemies capable of chewing through your health before you have any real tools to respond. Survive that opening stretch, grind a little, and the midgame flips almost entirely in your favor. Bosses that should feel climactic end up being speed bumps. The developers also shipped a Dark Souls-style death penalty where you lose experience on death, which sits awkwardly against an otherwise breezy, cartoon-tone game. A post-launch Jolly Roger Mode was added, stripping out contact damage, constant enemy respawning, and adding fast travel, which is almost an admission that the original design had problems. If you are going to play this, Jolly Roger Mode is worth considering unless you specifically want the friction. The map is also poorly labeled, with no color-coding or area names to help you parse where you are, and save points and fast travel portals are inexplicably placed separately from each other, making backtracking more of a chore than the genre demands. Where the game genuinely shines, outside of the visuals, is in local co-op. Supporting up to four players simultaneously is rare in metroidvanias, and even critics who were cold on the solo experience acknowledged that having friends along for the ride changes the energy entirely. Combat chaos that feels repetitive alone becomes chaotic fun with three other people. The boss designs are inventive, including at least one that is a rat-ified Dracula, and the enemy variety spanning beetle-filled caverns to autumnal woodlands gives the world some real visual texture. The writing is lightweight, closer to a Saturday morning cartoon than anything with narrative weight, but the interplay between Flora Burn and her bumbling crew provides some genuine charm in cutscenes, even if the voice acting quality varies widely. As a solo RPG experience, Curse of the Sea Rats sits firmly in the middle of a very crowded genre. The story barely qualifies as a story, choices do not matter in any meaningful sense, and the build variety does not hold up to scrutiny past the midgame. The art direction is a legitimate achievement for a small studio, and the local co-op hook is real. If you have people to play with and your expectations are calibrated for a breezy, visually charming afternoon rather than a deep metroidvania, there is something worth experiencing here. Solo, you will need patience for the rough edges.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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