The gritty sci-fi atmosphere in Songs of Rats evokes a blend of Mothership RPG and Fighting Fantasy adventures.

The first enemy I encounter in the Steam demo for Songs Of Rats is a giant golem, encased in fridge-thick armour with fists the size of fridges and a thousand-fridge stare. If RPGs are good at anything, it’s making numbers scary. To wit: The battle golem has 40 health, and I have a nerf crossbow with pretensions that does one entire damage. I manage to do two entire damage, and he downs me in two hits.

This may well be what it feels like for a real life rat to fight a real life fridge, and in that, Songs Of Rats earns its name. The intro is all 80s cheese meets a desperate melancholy bolstered by bleak and bitty retro-futurist visuals. It’s also very pen n’ paper, down to losing health if you don’t have enough food and the limited action points you have to spend each day on exploration.

A trailer for you. It took some digging, I tell you. A certain other song about rats has monopoly on the search term.

You play as a scavenger exploring a space labyrinth known as ‘the wreckage’. Settlements of survivors scrape out livings on the outskirts, relying on the occasional idiot (it’s you) to venture out into The Biggest Tesco to scrounge up vital supplies.

Some bullet pointed notables:

Songs of Rats is a roguelike RPG in which you will delve into a mysterious Wreckland filled with secrets of long-gone civilizations.

• Develop your character and gather a team

• Face the changing world and its challenges

• Discover the dark secrets of fallen civilizations

• Face strange, human and inhuman enemies

There’s also one about petting a dog but I refuse to sully the website by mentioning it. Please stop doing this. You should listen to me: Citizen Sleeper‘s Gareth Damien Martin once dubbed me “The William Gibson Of Dog Petting” after I correctly predicted the dark future that awaited us all if we kept encouraging ill-fitting twee beasts to shove their snouts in absolutely everything. Now, the sky is the colour of a television tuned to a channel that solely broadcasts sloppy puddles of beef-flavoured biscuit sick.

Dog aside, I’m into this. I’d place it in the “small effort, large danger” category I just made up, in that it’s a fairly chill experience that offers a bountiful click-to-horrible-events ratio. One of the better ratios, imo. If you like the demo, the full game released yesterday.