The excessive quantities of “walking sim” horror games can sometimes be exhausting. It seems like every gaming platform is overwrought with tons of generic horror games where you slowly shuffle around a house and find out you were guilty of something. Bonus points if the graphics evoke a nostalgic retro throwback style.
RATSHAKER aims to be a surrealist parody or satire of the walking sim horror subgenre. Sometimes in the pursuit of satire, the media inadvertently becomes the object it intends to satirize. Can RATSHAKER escape this trap? Or, despite all its rage, it remains a rat in a cage? Find out in our RATSHAKER review!
RATSHAKER
Developer: Sunscorched Studios
Publisher: Dark Product
Platforms: Windows PC, PlayStation 5 (reviewed)
Release Date: May 28, 2025
Price: $3.49
If there was one thing you couldn’t fault RATSHAKER for, it would be that it didn’t live up to its name. The first order of business when starting the game after the amusing retro-style commercial is to shake the goddamn cartoon rat… and shake it, you will… to the bitter end.
To do anything in RATSHAKER, players must shake the rat to build up the RATSHAKER meter, which depletes gradually. It’s best to think of the meter as fuel to interact with objects in the setting. Things like hitting switches or picking things up can only be done when you have some juice in the RATSHAKER meter.
If you’re low or empty, all you need to do is hold that shake button and wildly shake your PlayStation 5 DualSense controller as if you were Michael J. Fox. That meter will fill back up… very slowly. Annoyingly slow to the point where players will think they’re doing something wrong. This is not a mistake. This is just how RATSHAKER is intended to be: intensely obnoxious.
When shaking the rat, it hurls and shouts. The whiplashed cries in agony from that pestilent rodent will be seared into your brain like an electric sword driving into your cranium. Thankfully, RATSHAKER is a mercifully short game that barely reaches the hour mark. Yet despite its absurdly brief play time, it feels longer due to the unbelievably slow walking speed.
RATSHAKER’s story is deliberately cliched and made funnier with its intentionally on-the-nose symbolism and absurd cartoon rat constantly yammering cryptic clues about the protagonist’s past deeds. The imagery is enhanced with rugged retro chunkiness, abstracting the graphics and making them uncanny.
The story is intentionally predictable, but the satire ultimately falls flat. It may be mocking walking sims, but at the end of the day, RATSHAKER is still another walking sim with dull puzzles. The whole ratshaking gimmick overstays its welcome after the first five minutes, and while RATSHAKER has some gruesome visuals, it doesn’t go far or absurd enough to elicit a visceral gut reaction.
The hazy pixelated filter combined with the cartoony rat is an inspired choice and helps make RATSHAKER stand out. The rat himself has an unusually smooth voice when he isn’t being choked or swung around. He sounds like he could have been a news anchor, and his ambiguous line delivery is executed perfectly.
RATSHAKER would have been more enjoyable if it didn’t have the tedious ratshaking, but then again, it wouldn’t be RATSHAKER if it didn’t. That farcical rodent is the one thing that keeps the game from being like all the other P.T. clones out there. Getting the different endings is amusing, and finding different ways to die is more challenging than you’d think.
At worst, RATSHAKER is utterly barren and completely stupid. For less than the cost of a cup of coffee, the game is best played with friends as some kind of freakshow curiosity. It’s too self-aware to take its dark story seriously, and it isn’t a fun experience due to the utterly glacial speed of the protagonist. Shaking the rat to do basic things brings the pace to a halt all the time, and the most fun the game gets is choking the little booger mid-sentence during dialogue scenes.
RATSHAKER is a bizarre, minimalistic satirical experience that will make you chuckle a few times, but you’ll be hard-pressed to ever replay it. There isn’t much to it, but that shouldn’t be surprising considering how cheap it is. The visual style during the nightmarish sequences will leave an impression, but not as much as the moronic wails of that rat.
RATSHAKER was reviewed on PlayStation 5 using a code purchased by Dark Product. You can find additional information about Niche Gamer’s review/ethics policy here. RATSHAKER is now available for PC (via Steam) and PlayStation 5.
