The Year We Shook the Rat

One year ago, a small horror game arrived on Steam with no marketing budget, no franchise history, and no reason to be noticed in a marketplace that buries thousands of indie releases every month. It was called Ratshaker, and it featured exactly what the title suggested: a panicked, trembling digital rat, violently shaken by the player in order to survive. It looked disposable. It should have vanished.

Instead, it became something closer to a cult event.

Players streamed it, laughed at it, screamed at it, speedran it and then — crucially — shared it. A year later, the game still circulates in algorithmic aftershocks: reaction clips, rage-quits, and confused Steam reviews that mostly boil down to some variation of “I don’t know why I bought this but I can’t stop thinking about it.”

In 2025, Ratshaker did the unlikely: it migrated to consoles. First PlayStation in May, then Xbox in June, and finally, after a long and unlikely detour, Nintendo Switch in July. What began as a $3.50 curiosity on Steam became a fully cross-platform title, and in the process, something larger than itself — a proof that the console world still has oxygen for the small, the strange, and the aggressively unpolished.

The PlayStation version turned the game into a physical experience. With DualSense haptics, adaptive triggers, and gyro controls, players weren’t just watching the rat — they were shaking it in real space, feeling every vibration in their hands. It may go down as the first horror title that was designed as much to disgust the player physically as to unsettle them psychologically. No cinematic cutscenes, no orchestral scoring, just an animal and a controller that refuses to let you forget it’s alive.

In a year defined by $70 blockbuster releases, studio closures, and the ongoing consolidation of “prestige” gaming, Ratshaker became a strangely persuasive argument that there is still room on consoles for games priced like snacks rather than subscriptions. A tiny title, built on a single mechanic, shipping without the usual layers of polish or narrative framing, somehow forced its way onto the same storefronts as global brands and billion-dollar franchises. It became an unintentional case study in the economics of the weird.

That story — how a game this small crossed into the console ecosystem at all — is told in Scott Millard’s upcoming book Save Point, which includes the chapter “Every Good Story Needs a Rat.” In it, he describes the improbable process of trying to port a PC indie horror prototype into a certified console product when the math on paper could not possibly justify the cost. As he writes:

“Porting a $3.50 game isn’t publishing — it’s contortionism. Every dollar has to stretch until it screams.”

Sony allowed the game but refused to promote it. Nintendo rejected it outright, forcing the developers to rebuild the entire game with the rat replaced by a sausage just to satisfy content guidelines. Xbox, by contrast, embraced the title, offering dev kits, support, and a showcase slot in its Indie Selects program. And in the background, IGN unexpectedly released five trailers, including a semi-absurd live-action promo filmed in a pub — something no platform would have commissioned but which players treated as canon anyway. It is a story not of strategy, but of persistence: a rat denied access to the front door that kept scratching until someone opened a side window.

Whether Ratshaker is remembered as a minor indie hit or a genre defining classic is for history to decide. What is certain is that it survived its first year in a way few games of its scale ever do — by refusing to behave like a disposable product. It became an ecosystem: speedruns, console ports, TikTok reactions, new players discovering it months late and wondering what exactly they’ve stumbled into. It also quietly expanded the definition of what a “successful” horror game looks like in an era where the genre is usually synonymous with cinematic budgets and prestige graphics.

It didn’t need any of that. It needed only what the best strange games have: a simple premise, a point of view, and an audience willing to feel just a little uncomfortable.

To the people who played it, streamed it, hated it, refunded it, speedran it, or quit halfway through with shaking hands: you’re the reason this ridiculous idea survived long enough to have an anniversary at all.

And to the new wave of console players discovering it this year, the only fair warning is the same one the community now says to every newcomer:

You aren’t ready. You won’t be okay. But you will have fun.

Buy Ratshaker (links to all platforms)

Save Point: Perspectives on the Games Industry 2025 releases November 13 (order here)