Mad is a very useful term. Angry, insane, pushed and pushing beyond the bounds of reason. It can mean many things, and Mad Rat Dead finds a way to embody them all. Mad Rat Dead is a platformer mixed with a rhythm game where you play as Mad Rat. As the title suggests, and the gaping hole in his chest provides further evidence. He is dead, or at least is about to die, and the beat of his heart, to the tune of the music, is the only thing keeping him going through the limited time he has left. Mad Rat hops, jumps, and airdashes through a variety of stages and songs. Your first thought might be something on rails like Muse Dash and the like, but far from it. Mad Rat Dead is a full fledged platformer, your jumps and dashs can only be done on the beat; the music does not throw notes at you, but simply asks that your platforming be done according to the rhythm. Your walking is... rather appropriate for a dying rat, but you can always adjust on the ground and in the air between the beats and constantly watching positioning yourself between beats is just as useful as the actual dashes you make on those beats. The result is quite unlike anything you have played before, but the developers knew what they were doing and balanced the game around this being a new idea. Mad Rat can rewind time each time he dies, allowing you to revert the platforming state beat by beat until you can fix your error. The game, mercifully, only takes advantage this with a couple cheap surprise kill tricks in the game's runtime, but otherwise this is just the mechanism to send you back a bit when you mess up. Note that rewinding time does not reduce the amount of beats you have been given for a stage, so if you spend half the map rewinding you will likely be seeing the game over screen. The overall result though is a series of interesting ideas that are demanding by making basic platforming a lot tougher to accomplish with the rhythm aspect, but also understanding that these are things that are likely not perfect, and never really demanding perfection of you, even the score system is almost falling over itself to find reasons to give you an S just for not completely botching the rhythm. Combine that with some great art, stages with great variety and pacing, and some clever boss fights, and you have a game that is eager to show you something different and wants you to play it.
The madness, and charm, extends to the story as well, and is the highlight of the game in my opinion, though I suspect I am simply a softy when it comes to stories about death. Mad Rat Dead is extremely Japanese in spirit; Mad Rat is told by the Rat God (a cute, smug anime girl, as it should be) that he is going to die soon and he cannot escape that fate. Mad Rat does not even consider the possibility of trying to do so. He accepts his death, no Faustian bargain or wailing for him. He faces this with a quiet dignity, and only wants to fulfill one last desire before it's all over, a desire I am sure we all share when we are considering our own deaths: He wants revenge. Mad Rat is after the scientist who kept him in a cage and experimented on him and if he can get it, he will happily march off that in that final curtain call. Accompanying him is Heart, his literal heart hanging out in that gaping hole in his chest, and these two are a perfect duo. Mad Rat is... well, mad, but in the Japanese delinquent sense where he says one mean thing and then is a most reliable friend, and Heart has his back 100%, well above and beyond the duties of an organ whose job is to literally keep Mad Rat alive. The story is paced expertly, with only a brief cutscene before each stage, but it covers a wide array of increasingly insane incidents detailing Mad Rat's final day. Zombie rats, malevolent cats, nightmares, a simple quest for revenge snowballs quite well into a story about a rat who is mad, first angry, and then insane, and then pushed beyond all reason, mad, mad, and mad, as he spends his final day choosing on what terms he wants to die, ending with a surprisingly intense finale for a story where the ending is essentially known from the first scene (Complete with an absolute rat bastard of a song).
Clearing the story allows you to replay each stage or boss fight with any other song in the game, with a few extra songs you have not seen before opened up as a reward, as well as a hard rhythm difficulty, making the beat requirements of the songs more aggressive and often requiring tapping multiple notes in a beat to do one action. As for the soundtrack, many of the composers are Japanese rhythm game veterans, and most songs in the soundtrack trend toward electro-swing, and given this is a story about a cartoon rat who ends up menaced by threatening cartoon cats a couple of times, I choose to pretend some of these stylistic choices are references to classic American cartoons. Either way, the soundtrack is excellent, as it ought to be. If I had to offer the game one specific complaint, apart from the truly mad genre-blending at play, it is that the beat bar is at the bottom of the screen, but the platforming action is at the top, making keeping an eye on both, especially on the higher difficulties of play, harder than it probably needs to be.
You have not played anything like Mad Rat Dead, and, given how it came and went without much fanfare, you are unlikely to again, and as a unique genre blend, as a touching story, and as a rhythm game with a killer soundtrack, Mad Rat Dead succeeds at every level. If you have let this one pass you buy, I recommend you have another look at it. If nothing else, in gratitude for me for only using abusing "mad" puns and not filling this review with both "mad" and "heart" jokes.
