Experiencing Zen in the Ratz Instagib Meat Grinder

Ratz Instagib is a fast-paced first-person shooter. As the name suggests, each hit is an instant kill. Be not disillusioned by my writing of this article, for this is not a game I am good at. In honesty, one shouldn’t even venture as far as to suggest that it is a game I am so much as merely alright at.

It is, however, a game that I find myself infatuated and enticed by, despite my inadequate skill. It is a mad and unforgiving experience that is intoxicating to give yourself over to.

The core game is simple. You’re a rat. You can walk around, you can jump, and you can shoot. By directing your weapon at a surface, you can repel yourself away from it. Those are your controls. There aren’t extra abilities or power-ups, or reloading, or health or armour, or alternative weapons or anything of the sort. It is, in concept and control, simple.

From this, however, comes a myriad of tech. Running and jumping allows you to pick up speed (a phenomenon many players of older shooters will recognise as b-hopping), repelling behind you allows you to pick up this speed faster, and repelling from the ground allows you to launch yourself high into the air.

When the original Half-Life released, it came with the tagline ‘Run, Think, Shoot, Live’. Were you to apply this to Ratz, you’d be in for a bad time. Here I’d apply ‘Run, Intuit, Shoot, Live’, for there is barely a moment to process the gameplay, let alone think about it, before you’re a fried corpse. From the moment you find yourself in-game, there isn’t time for anything but instinct. Oftentimes it is only once a shot lands that one even consciously registers they took a shot at all.

For anyone with experience in arena shooters, especially Quake, the moment and mechanics will feel immediately familiar. For anyone who hasn’t, they’ll become familiar quickly. The shooting works just like Quake 2’s Railgun, and the repelling works similar to rocket jumping (though without risk of damage).

Like the old rat maps of old shooters, most arenas are scaled such that you feel small. They’re compact and vertical, which, paired with swift respawns and breakneck movement speeds, allows no chance for breath catching and forces constant engagements.

To Feel, To Play

From the second you hit the game’s menu, you’re introduced to the soundtrack. Fast jazz drum and bass. Quick and aggressive, it sets the tone for how you must play.

You’re presented with the option to choose which of a number of modes you wish to play:

• Deathmatch is a typical free-for-all with every rat independent. Whoever has the greatest number of kills triumphs.
• Team Deathmatch is similar, but as the name suggests, has you allied with other rats against an opposing team, and the competition is for the highest combined team score.
• Capture the Flag has teams duking it out to steal the enemy’s flag without their own being captured.
• Freezetag has teams fighting in a deathmatch, but being shot is not instant death but instead freezes the shot rat in place. Teams can unfreeze their own members, but once all of a team are frozen, their game is lost.
• Survival has the players fighting off against waves of robots.

Once in a match, you’re sure to notice the hard colours, cell shading, harsh vignette, and required laser focus. This is a game that you feel one with. The precision accuracy and lightning reaction times turn off everything but bare instinct. Blinking is a death sentence. You flick inputs with an accuracy and exactitude you aren’t even consciously capable of. It is a completely different experience to anything else and leaves you wondering if you’re playing the game or if the game is playing you.

I wish to impress upon you once again that I am a poor player of this game, but I feel like a god. Even when I’m getting beaten sixty-nil, I remain energised and engaged. Any other game and I’d be getting annoyed, but in Ratz I find myself falling further and further into a flow state.

The highs are so high. B-hopping around dodging map obstacles at Mach 90 before fragging some poor soul in the crotch (indicated by the appearance of ‘- Crotch Shot! -’ in spectacular yellow text) from across the map the instant their half-second of spawn invulnerability dissipates is a feeling of euphoria.

Is there tangible benefit to a head shot or crotch shot? No – but it certainly feels good.

Ratz Instagib is nothing if not crude. Player’s anthropomorphic rat avatars are stylised and grotesque, presented in a range of gaudy cosmetics which can be acquired through playing the game. Upon being brutally lasered to death, an animation the player chooses from a selection is played. Some have the rats exploding into a shower of blood and giblets, one has them bloat, and another has them fried till only their skeleton remains. Each landing shot is also accompanied by a satisfying chime and a mildly perturbing squelch. That isn’t to mention the range of different lasers which can be picked from and the ability to change their colour.

In fact, you can customise just about every part of the experience: The individual colours of each character in your player name; the colours of enemies and teammates; the field of view (including when zooming), weapon visibility, horizontal weapon position; crosshair style, placement, size, and opacity; visual effects such as beamtypes and fragtypes, hit indicators, full-bright players, player outlines, and wall and object saturation; controls including mouse sensitivity, acceleration, and inversion; and graphical and audio settings including resolution, shadows, maximum frame rate, bloom, vignette, heads-up display size, music and sound volume, whether to display the currently playing track, and more.

You’re consistently pushed to improve, both by your adversaries and the game, which exposes various statistics to you. Kill counts, kill streaks, ratings, wins, losses, accuracy, and of course a global leaderboard. You can’t help but feel the game is nudging you towards self-improvement.

Community

I won’t sugarcoat the player numbers. There will be frequent times when you are online in solitude, though that isn’t to say that nobody ever plays. People arrange matches in the community Discord server, and sometimes you’ll catch a person or two online. Deathmatch is certainly the most played mode, and there is usually an uptick in player count to be seen when the game goes on sale. There is always the option to play alone, either in the wave-based survival mode or with the game’s rabid bots.

There are several game servers across the globe, and there is a good chance that you’ll find yourself on one outside your region, but that’s okay. There’s a half-joke, half-cope said around that Ratz community: ‘Ping doesn’t matter’. Remarkably, this isn’t complete rubbish. I can’t speak to if it is just due to simplicity, or the game’s network code, or another factor entirely, but even at high ping the game remains responsive, and I can’t think of a time lag has snubbed me.

The community is small but solid. There is developer-provided tooling allowing players to create their own custom maps, which are regularly published on the Steam Workshop; there is something of a modding scene, and the developer continues to support the game with new cosmetics, patches, improvements, tweaks, and engine upgrades.

You will surely be thrashed starting out, but there is a common degree of sportsmanship. The steep learning curve is something all players experience, and some more seasoned players may even go as far as to provide tips or advice for your improvement.

---

The game is cheap (especially on sale), takes up a sneeze of storage space, is well optimised, allowing it to run on even weak computers, and can be bought in a multi-pack so you can share it with your friends.

Move sporadically, think quick, and keep me guessing when I see you online.