The Curse of the Sea Rats It is the product of a successful Kickstarter campaign, where around 6,000 backers put their faith in the project, contributing a total of €242,395, allowing the game to launch on Nintendo Switch. PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Microsoft Windows, Xbox Series X and Series S.
I have to say that I love rats, pirates and metroid, even though I’m not a big fan of the genre. The Curse of the Sea Ratsdeveloped by the Catalan studio Petoons Studio, mixes all these elements to give birth to a kind of “ratoidvania”.
Four rats fight for the amulet
Four rats fight for the amulet
The game begins with a cartoon sequence that describes the situation of our main characters, prisoners who are on a ship on the high seas and are under the spell of the witch Flora Byrne (probably inspired by the American privateer of the same name), which has turned them all into rats. After reaching an agreement with the ship’s captain, your task will be to find a way to restore your original form, achieving your freedom in return.
During this adventure we can choose from a cast of 4 characters: David Douglas, Buffalo Calf, Busa and Akane Yamekawa. Each one has a completely unique set of moves and abilities, so it’s best to try each one for a while and take a look at their upgrade tree to choose the one that best suits our playstyle.
Personally, I end up using Akane Yamekawa and Buffalo Calf more often, as Akane’s spear fighting style and Buffalo’s projectile and quick dagger attacks are much more in line with my normal playstyle.
One of the most beautiful games of this year
One of the most beautiful games of this year
Without a doubt, the greatest strength The Curse of the Sea Rats This is its visual section. Its characters and 2D cinematography, completely hand-drawn and animated, are a marvel. As an analogue, the scenarios are modeled in stylized 3D, which goes well with the character aesthetic, so overall it looks great. In addition, we will see a wide range of different environments during our adventure.
illustrations of kinematics
illustrations of kinematics
Unfortunately, all that glitters is not gold, and while I can say that this is one of the most beautiful games I’ve seen this year, The Curse of the Sea Rats Two things weigh in on the other side of the scale: the Nintendo Switch port and the playability.
The version I was able to play is the Nintendo Switch, and I have to say it was a little uncomfortable at times. First, the performance was stable most of the time, except for some action moments and a lot of enemies on the screen, where the game did not feel smooth (due to drops of 10 to 15 frames per second).
On the other hand, I encountered some bugs that I don’t know if they are exclusive to this version or occur on the other platforms: the first one was a boss fight where my character was immortal, and the second one was about a dialogue box during cutscenes that it was impossible to read because it was running off the screen.
On a positive note, I have to say that the game is localized in 12 different languages, including Catalan (the language I played in, since the game is from a Barcelona studio, and it’s my native language). Plus, it also has an English dub, which I always appreciate.
I’d like to explain why I said earlier that the gameplay was one of the things that bothered me the most. The Curse of the Sea Rats. From the first moment it’s amazing how good the game looks, although after playing for a while I felt that some elements in the movement of the characters, as well as the fluidity of the battles, felt strange and unbalanced.
In the time I spent with it, I didn’t feel like the combat was well designed at all. To give an example, I think in metroivania movement should feel nimble even without movement abilities like double jumps, meaning I’d like to be able to run, jump and attack with almost no stopping. In this case, every time we press the attack button, all our actions stop, making us feel like we have to run, stop, hit and move again, and until the attack animation is completely over, we can’t do anything.
When I realized this, I thought that maybe it’s because the game wants me to play in a different way, which is to use a parry, a move that if we do right after being hit, we’ll leave the enemies stunned for a few seconds so that we can beat them freely..
I have to say that I personally love this mechanic in games and this may be the explanation why The Curse of the Sea Rats It has a slower tempo in which we have to play reactively, but the problem is that it is not at all satisfying to use this technique properly. Something is missing feedbackboth the sight and the sound, the flash and the sound that let me know that I had hit the target and knocked out the enemy, leaving him on the ground.
What I noticed from the beginning is that maybe it has a problem with the difficulty of the title or the way it explains the gameplay. At first I died (no exaggeration) more than 10 times on the first screen because it took me a long time to get used to the movement and attacks, plus for some reason all the enemies take ridiculous damage, causing us to die in two or three the vast majority of the time blows
It seemed a little annoying at first, but I think I eventually got used to the positions and attack patterns, although I still feel like an early game hermit crab won’t be able to kill me in two hits.
As I mentioned, we have 4 characters, each with a unique style and their own skill tree. Characters only share the level reached, but they don’t share the points used to invest in the upgrade tree, so if we want to upgrade more than one, we have to kill enemies non-stop and get those upgrade points.
The skill tree just disappointed me. Except for a few specific ones that give us new active abilities or enhancements to our unique magic, the rest feel completely inconsequential as most are “3% extra critical chance”, “3 extra damage”, “5 extra defense” enhancements etc. .
I didn’t find the bosses difficult, rather boring, since as I mentioned before, the combat is completely reactive, which means that knowing all the moves of the bosses, the battles just wait in the space where you can avoid their attacks .attacks, take our opportunity attack and so on.
I don’t mind that the game falters in most gameplay aspects because when I first saw it I had plenty of time to play it and see how the story and characters developed. From what I’ve been able to see, there’s a general consensus on the opinion The Curse of the Sea Rats This is not too far from what I said in this analysis.
Given that the game is a product of the Kickstarter campaign, I would like to know what the developers think and if they have any plans in the near future to try to solve these problems, as they are partly related to those who put their trust in the project during the campaign .
If you really like “metroidvania” and think you can get past the things that need to be tweaked, I definitely recommend checking out the game as it has an affordable price of €19.99 on the Nintendo Switch eShop. If you’re like me, you like the genre but not too much, leave it on your wishlist to wait for a sale or some things to be fixed in a future update if that happens.
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