About

Bad Rats is a physics-based puzzle game created by Invent4 Entertainment for the PC. The game, notorious for being known as the worst game on Steam due to it's poor graphics and gameplay, has gained notoriety for its reviews, and its use as troll gift on the platform.

History

On July 20th, 2009, the game was released on Steam. It did not receive any reviews from major reviewing publications, and was stated to be by Kotaku as "nearly universally reviled"^[1].

On December 18th, 2015, Invent4 announced that a sequel for Bad Rats, titled Bad Rats 2 was to be released in 2016.

We had a delay, but Bad Rats 2 is coming in 2016 with the Bad Rats Lord blessing. #BadRats #madewithunity #indiedev pic.twitter.com/odl3iZRGkv

— Invent4 Games (@Invent4) December 18, 2015

Gameplay

The game is focused on building contraptions to kill a cat using limited resources, requiring the player to build a Rube Goldberg-esque device in order to complete the task. The game lets you set up the device beforehand and play test it indefinitely, allowing infinite attempts at finishing the objective. Despite being a 2D puzzle game, the game has a Z-axis, atypical to the normal X- and Y- axis of 2D puzzle games.

Spread

Bad Rats has became an in-joke in the Steam community due to its poor gameplay and graphics, which has lead to its notability for the parody reviews on the game's Steam store page^[2], many of which are trollingly favoring the game with excessive amounts of acclaim. On December 11th, 2012, the Youtuber TotalBiscuit did a review of the game as part of his "WTF Is…" series, stating that the game "is an interesting concept, just horribly executed." On February 24th, 2015, the Youtuber VideoGameDunkey did a play-through of the game.