In this rat-filled city builder, one wrong move can change everything - and in my case it was forgetting to add a toilet

Few games have taught me to prepare myself for imminent disaster better than Rimworld. It's a raw, unforgiving base-builder that requires no small amount of cunning to anticipate the dangers that lurk at the edge of the map. And it can be tiresome, rebuilding time and time again having been hit with yet another base-desolating rabid squirrel attack. So I went in search of a slightly more forgiving management game, one that might give some respite from a hectic life in the Rim.

In discovering Ratopia, a downright adorable rat-themed city builder, I put my rodent avoiding days behind me. With its fairytale assets and nomenclature it promised a gentle foray into the life of a benevolent rat queen and her god-fearing subjects. I imagined long days brimming with rodentesque revelry and midsommar nights of placid quietude, walking the halls of my ornate mousehole. What I found instead was a rat-infested carnival of pestilence and despair.

Best laid plans

As base builder fans often discover, there's an order to things. You start building with the more common resources dotted about the map, and as you tackle the research tree you'll delve deeper in order to gain rarer resources for more complex production lines. It's the basic survival game stepladder.

In starting a new game of Ratopia, you first need to build a City Gate to let in migrants. Then you go about meeting their ever more elaborate needs as they become less and less comfortable with the initial asceticism of a frontier lifestyle. Your Ratizens quickly grow tired of snoozing on the cold ground with zero entertainment so you have to scramble early, earning enough research points to work your way through several research trees in quick succession.

While the research pipeline is relatively freeform, in that you're encouraged to specialize depending on which resource you have greater access to, there's a core hierarchy of needs that have to be met early. Deviate from that and you'll have a hard time clawing back a single mistake, as I soon found out.

The rat race

For my third playthrough in two days – I restart city builders a lot – I decided to go without the tutorial. I didn't see the need to go through it all again. I had the general gist. At least, I thought I did.

I spent a lot of this playthrough exploring, which brings in a steady flow of research points each time you return with a new resource. I then built myself a Laboratory to churn out and stack up even more research points before things got too heated. I thought I'd gamed it. I had a steady flow of research points, I'd locked in an easy food source. I'd even quelled their cries for a circus and went about my day. Little did I know the wave that was about to break over my humble hamlet.

After a few days of careful consideration, working out each aspect of my base in great detail – from the efficiency of its layout, to the color of the wall hangings – it suddenly hit me. In the corner I spotted one of the many notifications I'd been ignoring for the past few hours of slogging away at my settlement, which noted that one of my Ratizens was sick. It was all downhill from there.

Like the Plague

Having been so enthralled with micromanaging my little rat village to within an inch of its life, I'd forgotten one simple necessity: toilets. Apparently the abundance of open pools dotted around wasn't enough for my bougie rodents – I suppose along with gaining sentience they'd relinquished their will to wash.

Despite a steady flow of research points, I wasn't pumping out nearly enough to see me through the process of rectifying a disease-ridden dominion. In order to heal my Ratizens I would need to build a toilet to head the plague off at the source. Easy enough. But to actually treat the Ratizens I'd need a hospital, which needed fabric and stone blocks – two things I had been willfully neglecting – as well as a pharmacy to make the medicine, and a kiln to fire the charcoal for it. In other words, a full-blown pharmaceutical production line. Not to mention the sheer rat power needed to get all this off the ground in time to save my people.

No. I was beaten. And in my attempts to emerge from the plague infested hellscape I had created, I thought fondly of the Rim and of squirrel invasions. As unforgiving as the Rimworld's storytellers can be, I found myself wishing for my happy place. Because in this delicate dance of survival, beady eyes begged at me for a cure I could not deliver. And in my hubris, I watched my rat empire fall.

Looking for recommendations to add to your wishlist? See what's on the horizon in our roundup of upcoming indie games.