Nobody wants to be turned into a rat. Or at least the vast majority of people do not want to be turned into a rat. Rats lack the overt dexterity that humans possess, and they also don’t have opposable thumbs. However, Curse of the Sea Rats is a game where you do get turned into a rat. It’s not all bad though. Instead of becoming a regular rat who runs around and terrifies people in their homes, you become a swashbuckling anthropomorphic rat. It’s generally significantly better than the alternative.

This latest game from Petoons Studio puts you in the shoes of four distinct characters who have all been turned into anthropomorphic rats by a pirate witch. In terms of setups for gaming worlds, it certainly is a rather inventive one. As one of these little rat characters, you need to figure out how to do one thing: defeat the witch who turned you into a rat in the first place.
 

This simple opening leads the player into a world filled with rat pirates and the other non-rat, non-human animals who inexplicably decide to team up with the bad guy rats. It’s best not to ask why certain creatures decided to team up with the bad guys. It’s much easier to just go with it and not ask too many questions. Curse of the Sea Rats is not a game that has any answers to those questions. It’s far too busy being a fun pirate adventure.

In Curse of the Sea Rats, you can choose between the four characters mentioned before. They each have their own distinct style of play and their own separate upgrade trees. They all play very differently from each other, so it would be best to cycle through them a few times before deciding on which one you want to stick with. And even though you can switch between them at any checkpoint, you’re probably going to end up specializing because it’s a lot easier to get used to one playstyle and to develop one character.

Curse of the Sea Rats is a metroidvania game. It has some hack n slash and action RPG elements and it has a sense of humor about it. A game where a bunch of humans get turned into furries is probably going to have a sense of humor, after all. However, despite that sense of humor and the great hand-drawn visual aesthetic of it all, this game does have some issues. So, let’s have a look at what it does and why some of its mechanics are just a little bit off.

The basic layout of Curse of the Sea Rats is very standard in terms of metroidvania games. You have a big open world that you can explore, and you need to make your way through as you fight enemies, beat bosses, and clear obstacles to find new abilities that allow you to reach new areas. Then you rinse and repeat. It’s pretty typical overall, and doesn’t necessarily add anything particularly new to this formula.

On its own, this would be fine, but there are some problems with it. You see, Curse of the Sea Rats is clearly designed with a cooperative angle in mind. You can play with up to four players as you each take on one of the different characters. This makes it similar to other four-player-oriented games like Left 4 Dead or Borderlands. This appears especially prominent in the early game because enemies will absolutely demolish you.

You lack any real way to evade enemies, the parry is not all that great, and enemies are also very spongey. Many games of this variety give you a good degree of freedom over the movement as dodging your enemies becomes an important part of the game, but that is not the case here. You can get hammered by the enemies very quickly, and the bosses can sometimes trap you or leave very little room to strike. So, let’s first say that this review is very much a single-player review of Curse of the Sea Rats.

Here's the thing though. In the early game, the enemies are very tough and you could end up dying repeatedly because of the lack of dodge mechanics and the general low health and damage output of the playable characters. This doesn’t stay the case though. Upgrades come along very quickly, and within a few hours, you’ll have made your character into someone who can tank damage way more than ever before. In the beginning, you’re struggling against random enemies as they take off half your health with one hit, but then you get an upgrade that allows you to leech health with every hit and suddenly the game becomes far too easy.

The environment itself is very pretty and has a great overall presentation with great level design, and it does things in a fairly standard way. In Curse of the Sea Rats, regular enemies respawn whenever you reenter a room. This is not the case with bosses, mini-bosses, and ambushes, but is otherwise quite the usual thing. This means that it can become very easy to farm enemies as you explore the world, and enemies provide rather significant numbers of upgrade points.

While death is a constant, there’s no real penalty for it. You keep most of your upgrade points and gold, so it’s easy to upgrade after each death and then easily wipe the floor with the enemies who had previously bothered you. This all pushes your character towards a fully upgraded status quite early on, and it somewhat breaks the flow. The first two hours are spent getting killed easily, and the rest of the game is spent never dying unless you fall into a bottomless pit or happen to face off against a new boss with a moveset that you don’t yet know.

Curse of the Sea Rats is a game that fluctuates between hard and easy incredibly quickly. You may start the beginning of the game in quite a frustrating manner because you keep getting killed by the enemies that blend into the environment. Then only a few hours later, you’re decimating everything that approaches you.

The combat itself also isn’t particularly involved. You have a standard hit and a spell attack. You don’t have much in the way of traversal mechanics so you’ll mostly just be running up to enemies and stunlocking them as you repeatedly hit them till they’re dead. Rinse and repeat. However, because a low-level character gets killed really quickly, there’s no real incentive to try out any of the other three characters once you’ve committed to one of them.

Curse of the Sea Rats gives you four options but doesn’t allow there to be any real progress across character types and instead localizes it to each individual character. Essentially, there’s no point in experimenting if you want to keep surviving against the enemies that are now too easy with your current character but would be way too hard if you switched the characters.

The only real spikes in difficulty, once you get over the initial learning curve, are boss encounters. Each of them has their own special movesets that you need to learn, and once you have learned them, it becomes a test of patience and endurance more than skill. However, one of the annoying things is that Curse of the Sea Rats doesn’t seem to have invincibility frames. This means that if a boss catches you in a combo-type attack, there’s no real way to escape. You’ll be handling the fight just fine and then bam, they’ve stunlocked you and you might as well just give up.

The only other thing that will really give you any difficulty after the early game is the platforming. There are some parts of the platforming where you could just fall into a pit and die instantly. This then forces you to go back to the checkpoint and try again. There are also those tedious sections that can be found in practically every platformer where there are spikes above and below, so you need to dash through them quite precisely.

None of this is a deal-breaker though, and the standard metroidvania-style gameplay where you unlock new abilities to get yourself around previous obstacles is always great. Plus, there’s the other common metroidvania thing where you find new shortcuts that allow you to zip around the map with greater ease. All of this means that the game is very navigable, and it provides a lot of satisfaction when you finally get an upgrade that lets you do something you’ve been struggling with for a while.

However, this is also where a certain issue comes in. You see, the early game is so difficult because of the purposeful withholding of abilities that many would expect to be standard by this point. For instance, the first real traversal upgrade you get is the ability to double jump. This is something that is so common in most platformers that it being withheld from you is actually a bit annoying. The same goes for the dash. The dash is immensely helpful in combat but is only unlocked several hours in.

This is not unique to Curse of the Sea Rats, and it was also an issue that could be found in games like Ori and the Blind Forest. You don’t get to have abilities that should be starting abilities, because the developers didn’t have enough ideas for new traversal mechanics. Double jumps, at this point, are so standard that it’s generally expected right out the gate, but not here. This isn’t something that only plagues this game, but it is an unfortunate aspect of some metroidvania designs.

The problem with doing things this way and withholding what should be a starting feature is that you make the beginning of your game the weakest part of the game. Curse of the Sea Rats is a great game once you get through the early hurdles. It does get a bit too easy, but it never stops being fun. There’s enough of a challenge to the platforming and the occasional boss fight that you’ll see those sections in between as being breaks between far harder segments. All of this is a great thing. It makes for a rather cozy experience.

It does become an issue when it could potentially dissuade players from continuing with your game though. If the beginning of the game is the weakest, then you’re being forced to get through several hours before you get to something more enjoyable to play. It’s a disappointment because those early hours should be the thing that hooks you into the experience. You should start a game and love it immediately so that you’re incentivized to stick around and see what else it’s going to throw at you.

A game like Curse of the Sea Rats deserves some love as it is a genuinely entertaining game to play with an awesome aesthetic and some quirky characters to explore, but if players never get to that point, then that kind of sucks. It also doesn’t help that there can be parts of the game where you don’t know where to go because everything on the map is seemingly explored aside from locked segments that have keys you can’t find. However, that’s a standard metroidvania issue, and a small in-game bit of optional assistance could be useful there to stop players from running around and hoping that they find the right way to go in a big world that has no directions.

So, now that the many complaints are out of the way, what about the story that Curse of the Sea Rats has to tell? Well, it’s a fun thing. There are a bunch of characters with an array of accents and personalities, and the bad guy is a ton of fun too. The story isn’t particularly involved, and it has more of a vignette structure as you make your way through the world and deal with whichever bosses happen to be in the way next. It’s an adventure that doesn’t stop you all the time and instead leaves it up to the player almost always.

There are also the occasional side quests to find, and they usually amount to a fetch quest in which you need to find some item somewhere in the world, but they’re still entertaining. The story of Curse of the Sea Rats is not going to be revolutionary in any way, but it doesn’t need to be. It needs to be a fun time and, once you’ve gotten through the first few hours, it does become a fun time.
 

Curse of the Sea Rats is, ultimately, a great game held back from even higher greatness by some of the design decisions that were implemented. It could have had a better start, and some of the mechanics could have been tweaked ever so slightly, but once you get into it, it’s a whole lot of fun. It’s probably better in co-op though. So, if you get a chance to do that, go for it. It’s likely to be a great few hours spent with a couple of friends.
 

Justin van Huyssteen (@LC_Lupus)
Senior Editor, NoobFeed