In the formidable and essential Inscryption there is a letter called Rat King which, for its cost, life and attack, does not really seem like much to refer to someone who rules over all rats. Anyone would expect more than a 2/1 for a bug called the rat king.
Despite this, the bug became one of my greatest allies to overcome the game due to the power it offered. He gave four very valuable bones when he died. Without really knowing how, that detail made me remember the rest of the times I had seen a rat king in a video game, and I had the painful idea of wanting to know more.
Since I am the first to suffer from it because I am terrified of rats -no problems with the rest of the rodents, but there is something in the agility and speed of rats that surpasses me- before entering this very interesting but unpleasant well, I see myself in the obligation to warn those who do not feel comfortable with these animals turn around and don’t look back.
The King of the Rats, the fashionable monster in the video game world
Rat King. The rat king. A card with four of these controversial rodents that cause panic as soon as they cheer you up a linkin park song. Four bones, as if the bug were actually four in one. And for some reason that clicks into my brain to tell me, “Sounds like something to you? Don’t you want to know more about this?“Sometimes I hate my head.
And boy does it ring a bell. I have met monsters of the same or similar name in books, comics, series and movies, but especially in video game. I know I’ve seen it in more titles than I could name, but there are two that I remember with little effort.
The first of them is Destiny 2. Beyond creating a guide to get it, I perfectly remember Alex telling me about this devastating pistol with rats engraved on the body.
A weapon that, in addition to granting invisibility after reloading when killing an enemy, can increase its damage up to six times when next to other players who are also using it. to more united ratsmore power.
The other is the monster nicknamed with the same name that we must face at a certain point in The Last of Us 2. A disgusting and huge bicharraco formed from multiple infected stuck together each other because of the cordyceps infection.
The true origin of the Rat King
But why the rat king isn’t he a little mouse with a staff and a crown? Why is something so called something that appears to be nothing more than a bunch of rats or things stuck together? Well, that’s where the more literal and unexpected side of what one might categorize as the crude reality.
The rat king is an actual phenomenon in which a kind of entanglement or paste is produced between the tails of various long-tailed rodents, mainly black rats, due to hairs or some type of sticky substance such as the sebum that they give off, sap or their own depositions.
So named because of what appears to be a translation error in the French pronunciation of rat wheel (ratwheel), vs. rat king (rat king), there are about 50 documented cases dating since 1564 to this day.
What for many years was believed to be the typical deceiver of the Middle Ages due to the few examples of specimens sighted or preserved – after all, we are talking about a time when bat wings were attached to lizards to be sold as baby dragons-, recent investigations have shown the unpleasant phenomenon as unlikely but possible.
The most recent case studied and preserved is that of a rat king found in Estonian of 13 rats, which added to other similar cases studied in other rodents, such as squirrelshas led the most skeptical zoologists to look at the phenomenon with different eyes.
And as expected with something so strange, popular culture, including video games, have not wanted to miss the opportunity to take advantage of it. If the trend continues to grow, we will see the rat king more than we would like.
