The Pack Rat

I collect things on my head and fall, so they take them away from me. That's how you could summarize The Pack Rat — a strange little platformer from 1992 that plays with a simple principle: you're not a hero saving the kingdom. You're a rat, and rats do what rats do best — steal things.

The game takes place in one room (or rather several of its variations), and your goal is refreshingly absurd — collect as many things as you can. Various objects appear on screen, you rush at them, they fall on your head and you have to remember them. The more things you collect and the longer you don't lose them, the better. The game doesn't promise to save the world or tell an epic story — it just wants to see how long you can mess with the stuff.

Controls are minimalist and exactly as they should be — movement and jump, nothing more. A caught object gets added to your list, physics are simple and alive. The problem comes when you realize you'll simply forget some things — memory is the target mechanic, and that can be frustrating if you're not the type who likes to remember that you currently have a book, a pie and one shoe. So the game becomes less about skill and more about whether you're willing to play by its rules.

The Pack Rat was an odd choice for a time when platformers were played for survival, coin collection and defeating enemies. Here you're just... a rat with OCD. It stays in memory more as a curiosity than a classic you return to again and again, but it's precisely that strangeness that makes it interesting.

Playing it today means entering a piece of nineties eccentricity, when developers weren't afraid to do something silly just because it occurred to them. If you like simple platformers without major demands and have a taste for weirdness, throw it in an emulator. As a historical curiosity it's worth noting.