Ratatan review – the unofficial return of Patapon

Sony might not be making a new Patapon game, but the original creator has decided to create one himself, with an entertainingly odd new spiritual sequel.

By this point every platform owner in video games has had a crack at handheld gaming. Valve has the Steam Deck, while Microsoft has the ungainly sounding ROG Xbox Ally, and Nintendo now only makes handheld consoles (or hybrids to be precise). However, it’s Sony’s entries into the market that many may have forgotten. Starting with 1998’s miniature LCD PocketStation, it was the PlayStation Portable (PSP) that really put Sony on most people’s radar for portable gaming.

Arriving in Europe in 2005, it used Sony’s short-lived Minidisc format to deliver games on a screen that – for the time – was strikingly high resolution. It also played host to a number of unusually strange and creative games. Standing out for their weirdness, even on PSP, LocoRoco and its sequel were brightly coloured 2D scrolling games that defied genre definition. The same team (the now defunct Japan Studio, aided by the equally absent Pyramid) was also responsible for Patapon and its two follow-ups.

Patapon was a rhythm action game that had you issuing beat-synced commands to control a group of warlike cartoon eyeballs, as they laid waste to enemies and their defences. Also 2D, its silhouetted warriors and their high-pitched chants were quite unlike anything else available at the time, or indeed since, although Crypt Of The Necrodancer is a more recent entry in what might be considered the rhythm combat genre.

The last Patapon game came out in 2011 and since then it’s been radio silence – with the peculiar exception of a remaster that was also released on Nintendo Switch. While Ratatan is developed by a new studio, its project lead, Hiroyuki Kotani, was also the creator of Patapon and LocoRoco, and those games’ personality, anarchic humour, and left field tactical fighting, are evident in every frame.

While not an official sequel, Ratatan is a full-blooded spiritual successor to Patapon, sharing much of that game’s design principles. It too is a side-scrolling rhythm combat game, relying on tapping buttons to the beat in order to issue commands to your warlike band of tiny, stylised bird-like creatures called Cobun. You don’t control them directly, instead using their leader, the Ratatan, to issue orders.

Those orders equate to follow, attack, use magic, jump, and shields up – the last two used to defend your miniature army from larger enemies. All these instructions are delivered by tapping buttons to the beat, your Ratatan chanting words in a language you can’t understand, and the Cobun shouting back in a call and response style. Mess it up, as you will quite a lot, and their slightly discordant response lets you know they didn’t understand, forcing you to wait four beats before you can try again.

When battles are close, that enforced pause dramatically increases the tension, since enemies continue to attack as your troops stand about waiting to hear what they’re meant to be doing next. You do find those fudges happen less frequently as you gain experience, your troops’ rhythm-based commands becoming second nature, although in the heat of battle there will always be mistakes as your brain frantically tries to balance the tactical needs of combat with timing the multiple taps of each order.

That’s not helped by the fact that the game gives you the highest ratings for tapping just slightly after the beat. You get the hang of incorporating a lag, with perfectly judged taps building your team’s ‘fever’ to make them perform better in battle. But it prevents you from getting into the groove of its music, the latency perpetually making your chanted commands fail to match the game’s underlying drumbeat. It’s clearly a design choice, perhaps to compensate for variations in TV displays, but it’s one we never felt at ease with.

It adds to the pressure though, giving you one more thing to wrestle with as you work around enemies’ and bosses’ tactics, learning when to attack, defend, and rally to prevent your ranged troops from getting left behind by slowly retreating foes. You also continually need to change approach depending on the troops, weapons, and perks you have equipped.

Perhaps Ratatan’s biggest departure from Patapon’s template is its roguelite structure. Rather than a linear progression through levels, you start from scratch each time, working your way through a clutch of separate, randomly populated rooms, and a boss fight that marks each world’s finale, before moving on to the next one.

Between runs, a hub area lets you change troops and equipment, add perks, and craft weapons and upgrades. There are eight different Ratatan leaders to choose from right from the start, and each one has their own skills and style of Cobun troops. These come equipped with two types of weapons, one melee, the other ranged. It gives you a huge amount to upgrade, sacrificing punier weapons you’ve picked up to strengthen rarer, more powerful ones.

It’s Ratatan’s meta game that lends greater purpose to your actions, with individual runs always in service to long-term progress. As is by now familiar in roguelites, the random factor inherent in the choice of power-ups you get in each run has a powerful effect on their outcome, with total failure regularly having more to do with random chance than your own skill, or lack thereof.

Thanks to the steady flow of upgrades, even the most ignominious defeat nets you fresh weapons, and goodies to trade for perks, giving your next attempt added impetus. It also helps supply motivation when the fighting mechanics begin to feel repetitive. What really sets the game apart though, is its stunning visual and audio design.

Even though you’re at war, your leader’s and troops’ chants sound adorably childlike, the high-pitched chorus of voices sometimes charmingly off key. That cuteness is in direct counterpoint to the fact that you spend your time attacking and killing enemies, some of them dozens of times the scale of your fun size troops. Cries of ‘Murder!’ and ‘Goodies!’ pop up above their heads as they cheerfully annihilate foes and collect any treats left behind.

If you were a fan of Patapon the first time around, it’s unlikely you’ll need further convincing. If not, Ratatan’s highly individual approach to tactical rhythm action warfare, although occasionally frustrating, is so different from anything else available that it really has to be experienced first-hand.

Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC
Price: £29.99
Publisher: Game Source Entertainment
Developer: Tokyo Virtual Theory and Ratata Arts
Release Date: 14th October 2026
Age Rating: 7

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