Developer Salient Games and publisher Tesseract Studios have announced Songs of Rats, an "indie dark role-playing game inspired by choose-your-own-adventure books". It's coming to PC sometime early next year.
Songs of Rats takes place in a cluster of broken-down spaceships and space stations "crushed and combined into one massive structure" known as the Wreckage. Bizarrely, due to "advanced self-repair technology", the Wreckage has become a haven for its inhabitants.
You must venture into the darkest, deepest corners of this "dangerous yet livable labyrinth" in order to uncover "the dark secrets of fallen civilizations", together with a team of fellow explorers that will help you to navigate the Wreckage's many dangers.
As a roguelike, Songs of Rats will feature an ever-changing world, along with a range of "strange, human and inhuman enemies" with which to do battle. It wouldn't be much of an eldritch superstructure without them, after all.
Exploring will not just get you combat encounters with horrors; it'll also net you bonuses that you can use to upgrade your character, making you better-equipped to survive the dangers of the Wreckage.
Largely speaking, Songs of Rats tells its story through text and evocative lo-fi images rather than hoity-toity fully-3D graphics, so if you've got any degree of nostalgia for the old days of RPGs, then this one will likely serve you well.
You can check out the debut trailer for Songs of Rats right here. It gives a good sense of the strange, chilly sci-fi aesthetic the game is going for.
Aesthetically, Songs of Rats shares a fair amount in common with 2022's retro-style adventure game Norco, although it's perhaps a little closer to old-school dungeon-crawlers like Eye of the Beholder on the gameplay front.
In any case, Songs of Rats launches on PC via Steam sometime in the first quarter of 2025. You can wishlist it here if you like.
