Lab Rat

Lab Rat is a block-pushing adventure game about an AI going rogue over her metrics obsession. You control an anonymous test subject dropped in sokoban test chambers built around color-enhanced crates. The sarcastic writing and the expertly-designed puzzles fuse together to poke fun at videogame design conventions.

The testing rooms you have to complete are presented in typical 2D top-down sokoban view. However the mechanics are less conventional, since you can not only push the crates on the grid, but also pull them, drag them sideways, and climb on them. Additionally, each side of the crates can be altered by color-coded charges from laser guns, and you can only grab the sides that match your own charge. (The colors are limited to yellow, blue and green, and the game provides a colorblind mode.)

Despite the apparent complexity of this system, the puzzles are extremely neat. Each room is so tight that the risk of wandering off in a wildly wrong direction is quite limited. Instead, you have to find the precise moves that will unlock the solution—which can still present a fair challenge in spatial reasoning. Many puzzles are optional though, so you can skip some of them to continue the story, and come back later if you feel like it.

Much like in Kine, Chump Squad’s previous game, the writing and the puzzles are often intertwined. Lab Rat takes a jab at several genres and franchises, and sets parallel mechanical variations across a number of levels. For instance, a noir-themed series of rooms strips the colors out of the visuals, forcing you to come up with ways to deduce the colors of the crates and the lasers around you. These inventive brain-twisters were mainly crafted by prolific puzzle designer Lucas Le Slo.

Lab Rat’s story revolves around SARA, a snarky, robotic AI bound to elicit comparisons with GLaDOS, the well-known narcissistic computer system from the Portal games. Still, the writing develops its own humorous threads, with many biting comments aimed at data-obsessed practices in videogame playtesting. Gwen Frey, Chump Squad’s founder and lead director of Lab Rat, enrolled two fellow BioShock alumni to work on the game, which shows both in the sharp writing and in the richly detailed environments.

This description was written by Oriane Tury.