New 90% Positive Steam Roguelike Is a Faithful PSP-Era Comeback
Ratatan revives Patapon as an endearing, but lacking roguelike
Once upon a time, Sony was one of gaming’s most eclectic publishers. That might be hard to imagine considering that it is hyper-focused on a specific brand of cinematic storytelling these days, but platforms like the PlayStation Portable were once home to a bevy of inventive first-party games that were hard to replicate. There’s no better example of that than Patapon, a unique rhythm action series about marching eyeball critters. It was a one-of-a-kind idea, the type of special game you’d be hard-pressed to find from a major publisher in 2026.
While you won’t find the creative spirit of Patapon alive at PlayStation Studios, you can still find it in Ratatan, a musical roguelike which exits early access on Oct. 15 for Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X. A spiritual successor to Patapon spearheaded by its former developers, Ratatan looks to pick up the dropped torch and march the rhythm game into a new era. That’s not exactly an easy task, as developer Ratata Arts discovers in a lacking roguelike that struggles to fully modernize a classic game. As flawed as it is on a structural level, though, Ratatan is still loaded with a nostalgic charm that will make you pine for a lost era.
At a glance, Ratatan is Patapon in everything but name — and even then, it’s still pretty close. You take on the role of a pint-sized critter, a titular Ratatan, who becomes a conductor for an army of Coburn, a breed of one-eyed fuzzballs. Your goal is to lead the Coburn through 2D worlds filled with monsters, barking out orders in order to take out foes en route to meeting a Goddess. All the fundamentals of Patapon are there, right down to a very similar soundtrack of bouncy music.
On an aesthetic level, Ratatan nails the assignment. It's a vibrant little cartoon with a feel-good nature that’s so infectious that it’s hard to resist tapping your foot along to the bright music. It’s positively endearing; you can really feel that it’s coming from developers who deeply loved creating Patapon and are just happy to make something like it again.
The rhythm gameplay still feels fresh nearly two decades after 2007’s Patapon, even if it’s a little shallow. You issue commands to your Coburns by nailing two or three button combos in time with the music. Hit the Y button three times and they’ll start marching. Hit A three times and they’ll stop to attack. Aside from those core commands, you can perform magic-consuming special attacks, create shields, and jump to avoid attacks. There aren’t enough button combos or timing mix-ups to make the system very involved, but it’s easy enough to get you into a trance-like flow state as you tap along to the music. The more I play, the more I appreciate how it adds positioning to the Patapon formula, as there's a strategy to moving your Coburn to the right spot to avoid incoming attacks.
While that’s a great foundation, Ratata Arts struggles to find a way to push the Patapon formula forward. Ratatan lays everything out in a roguelite structure, where you need to guide your Coburn through a handful of worlds while nabbing run-specific upgrades. The buildcrafting mostly centers around infusing your Coburns’ attacks with elements, like poison or shock, as well as altering the power of critical hits. None of the upgrades really change how you play much at all. The run itself barely changes either, as you march through the same worlds and fight the same bosses every time with minimal variation between them.
Ratatan tries to keep that interesting with RPG hooks. You’ll pick up tons of weapons throughout a run, which can be scrapped to power up specialized gear. Permanent progression also helps give you more power each run, and give you more starting Coburn to build your army. As necessary as those systems are to incentivize players to try one more run, it quickly starts to feel like the roguelike is only there to stretch out a very small amount of content. I’ve yet to fully finish a run, but I can already tell it’s just a matter of grinding until I’m powerful enough to coast through the final boss.
Get Polygon’s Wishlister newsletter
A weekly cheat sheet to what you’ll eventually love to play. No buying, no commitment — just saving for later.
Free. Unsubscribe anytime.
I understand why Ratata Arts went with that flawed structure. Roguelikes are trendy, so it’s a chance to break through with newer audiences who are impervious to the nostalgia sales pitch. It’s also just a clever way for an indie studio to keep a game’s scope under control while still giving players a substantial enough amount of content. Still, it feels like more could have been done here. The final version of Ratatan I played feels nearly indistinguishable from the version of it I demoed before it went into early access one year ago. It doesn’t feel like a year’s worth of community feedback amounted to much, which is a shame considering how successful the game’s crowdfunding campaign was. Patapon fans were ready to march with Ratatan, but the runway turned out to be fairly short.
While the final product is too lacking in depth, I’ve still found myself firing up Ratatan more often than I expected to in spite of its shortcomings. It has a lovable energy, with its lively animations and earworm tunes that I keep humming along to. My joy isn’t so much coming from a love of Patapon, but a nostalgia for the inventive era of games that it was born from. Ratatan is an imperfect throwback, but one that I wish major studios were still comfortable supporting. Gaming is better when creators have more resources to work on their weird little passion projects.