YMMV / Mad Rat Dead

• Crosses the Line Twice: The whole game is this way. The intro has the protagonist being vivisected with his organs in plain view. He then turns into a zombie with his heart being not only removable but also having sentience.
• Fan Nickname: While the black cat has no officially stated name, many fans like to call it "Jack" after the stage theme before its boss fight ("Call Me Jack").
• Friendly Fandoms: Plenty of the fandom is fond of a mod that combines Mad Rat Dead with Friday Night Funkin'. The two fit due to being Darker and Edgier yet cartoony takes on the Rhythm Game.
• Genius Bonus: The game's Big Bad is based on the parasite Toxoplasma Gondii, and its actions in the game are fairly accurate to its real effects on rats and its life cycle.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Someone, despite being under a 24-hour Cosmic Deadline, uses his time-rewinding powers in averting deaths... is that not the plot of Ghost Trick? Even better, not only was the Cosmic Deadline a lie, but the protagonist, freed from illusions, is an animal that teams up with a natural predator (only this time, the animal is a rat teaming up with a cat instead of a cat teaming up with a dog)!
  • A disabled Jerk with a Heart of Gold clad primarily in yellow who can attack to the beat of a song thanks to something implanted in their chest? Are we talking about Mad Rat, or Chai?
• Memetic Mutation: Panasonic blue ray, Christmas in July^Explanation Some fans noticed that this phrase goes very well to the tune of the tutorial stage theme. Expect it a lot whenever "MAD RAT, ALIVE?" is brought up.
• Moral Event Horizon: Simply wanting to keep living isn't a bad thing. It's what the Rat God does to facilitate that that crosses the line: rewind time all the way back to before Mad Rat left the lab so that he'll be eaten by a cat as planned, undoing every life he spared/saved in the process. This pisses off Mad Rat so much that he spends the rest of the game pulling a Taking You with Me.
• That One Level:
  • Stage 3-3 'Dazzling Yellow' is an astonishingly sharp difficulty spike compared to the level before it, for a multitude of reasons. It introduces platforms that phase in and out of existence in time with the beat, and expects you to completely master their phasing patterns by the end of the level, as it requires almost perfect timing to get through the final parts. This would be bad enough on its own, but the music makes this immensely hard. It starts off relatively normal, but the latter half of the music track starts to become extremely discordant and difficult to follow the beat on, and the shifting music eventually makes you have to hit the 'off-beats'. The time limit is also surprisingly unforgiving on this level as well if you're not quick to pick up on the weirdness with the platforms. There is a very real possibility that all of the above is done intentionally to really hammer home how severely Mad Rat is slipping.
    • Stage 6-5 'Inside' brings back those platforms that phase in and out of existence, except all of them are now over bottomless pits. The music also races at a blistering 180 BPM, making the music difficult to keep up and the platforms difficult to keep track.
  • Stage 3-4 'A Cheezy Reward' ends with a complicated jump: Mad Rat has to stand at the edge of a treadmill that is moving him away from the goal, jump below a low pipe, then somehow walljump off the pipe onto a high stationary platform. Because there is only an empty void after the treadmill, you have to rely on walljumping, plus the low pipe means that going back and trying the jump again is itself difficult. Thankfully, the goal is close to immediately after the platform.
  • Stage 4-1 'Black Hole' introduces wind, which pushes Mad Rat. The stage starts off relatively easy (The Cat-dodging sequences not withstanding), but there are several wide gaps where Mad Rat has to jump on certain Nightmares in order to proceed. However, the winds keep pushing Mad Rat down to the void. You need to air charge and drop kick, techniques that were absent in the tutorial.
  • Any stage where Mad Rat has to cross a long gap by jumping at several Nightmares demand precise distancing, possibly costing you a lot of beats from the rewind mechanic:
    • The distance between Nightmares varies wildly. You might have to jump on the Nightmare, you might need to do a small mid-air jump, first, or you might need to dash at the Nightmare first (ranging from a standard dash to a charged long dash).
    • Once Mad Rat mid-air jumps then dashes, he cannot jump again, even when attacking a Nightmare. You can easily find Mad Rat failing to jump before you find out that you automatically did a mid-air jump before dashing. Drop-kicking lets Mad Rat jump and dash again, but Mad Rat needs to be centered on the top of the Nightmare, first.
    • Later stages add spiky Nightmares that hurt on contact, complicating the process further.

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