Chris Rats' fighting game has fans before it has a name
One character-select reel from the HOUSE 2 artist, and the comments are already picking mains and inventing patch history.
“Choose your bingle bopper,” reads the caption on the character-select Chris Rats posted last week. The screen is a lineup of lumpy, thumb-dented creatures with names like Brainiac, Hogmar and Braplin, each one rotating into a spotlight that looks cut from cardboard and warmed-over modeling clay. It’s a fighting game in development. It has no title yet. That has slowed down nobody.
The full character-select reel, via Chris Rats on Instagram
Rats is half of Bark Bark Games, the two-person team—Isaac Nite is the other half—whose pixel-art horror game HOUSE built a cult following after its 2020 release, and whose sequel HOUSE 2 shipped through Glowstick Entertainment barely three weeks ago. Most developers spend patching just after release; Rats spends showing sculpted brawlers. Rats sites ClayFighter as a recent inspiration, one of the strangest 90s titles ever.ir own.
Claymation games have been promising this kind of charisma for decades and mostly failing to cash it in—back in 2015 we wrote about Armikrog and the unfulfilled promise of claymation videogames. Rats seems to be running the experiment in the right order this time: sculpt the boppers first, let the fandom arrive, and build the game underneath it.
Killscreen has covered the handmade edge of games—clay, paper, felt, anything with fingerprints on it—since 2010. The free newsletter brings the next roster like this one straight to your inbox.
