If I learned one thing from reading countless Redwall books as a child, it’s that in a world of small, anthropomorphic mammals, rats are the bad guys. Mice are pretty good, full of the recognizable European aesthetics that we know and respect, and badgers are tough but honorable, and nobody fully knows what a stoat is, but rats? Rats are intrinsically, genetically, essentially evil. It’s just who they are at their beady little cores.

Not in Tails of Iron, though. In Tails of Iron, you play as Redgi, a little runt of a rat prince who, in true fairytale fashion, proves himself to be worthy of the crown of his little rat kingdom almost immediately upon starting the game. His father is killed after the kingdom is invaded by the ancestral enemies of the rats – frogs, for some reason – and Redgi is left picking up the pieces as the brand new king of a kingdom in mortal peril. It’s a solid starting point for a side-scrolling Soulslike romp. It propels you forward with a need to rebuild. That said, it also left me with a nagging question, perhaps unimportant, but nonetheless persistent: why always kings?

Redgi in his throne room, looking at his underling.

Nothing in the gameplay of Tails of Iron, or even the story, really, necessitates Redgi being the Head Rat in Charge. Despite him being crowned king almost immediately, the plot follows a standard rags-to-riches formula, which works well for this sort of game: Redgi starts out with a dinky little sword and a trash shield, then spends the rest of the story gathering such a wide variety of loot that he looks like the king of 15 different culturally distinct kingdoms by the end. He makes local villages safe again, and does quests for rangers on the outskirts, and gathers resources to rebuild the ruined castle. It’s all progress, and growth, and pure Video Game Stuff, a marriage of story and mechanics that makes everything feel pretty good.

A Chosen One Farm Boy trope would follow just about the same formula, though. Redgi’s story isn’t really about newfound power, after all, but about restoring the throne that is already his, about reclaiming something lost, stolen by dastardly amphibians. It’s clear in all his interactions with side characters, nearly all of whom are consistently subservient to him. Even his brothers are just there to get rescued and perform services for him. On a regular basis I sat down to a dinner table meant only for me, King Rat, where I delivered requested ingredients and leveled up my little rat stats by having my own flesh and blood brother cook and bring me meals. My brother, a servant, relegated to the castle kitchen and never to be seen outside.

Redgi's rat brother hidden in the kitchen like a shameful secret.

Redgi’s a king because it’s a fairytale, you might be thinking. Perhaps you’re shaking your screen as you read this, mumbling, “come on, who cares, it’s a game about a rat who does dodge rolls.” You’d be right, of course. Redgi does a ton of dodge rolls, and he swaps out his equipment to min-max resistances, and he clears out zany little mole foes in the arena to buy blueprints for his other idiot brother, and it’s all a great deal of fun. I did all there was to do in the game, earning myself a coveted PSN Platinum Trophy, one of the greatest honors that can be bestowed upon a human being. Don’t misunderstand me, then: I liked it a lot. I want them to make more of this game. If they make another one, I’ll play it all the way through, even if Doug Cockle doesn’t come back. I want to make the rat do dodge rolls.

Still, Redgi is a king. At first, I even considered that it was just my own deeply-rooted political biases bothering me, and that any complaint I might have about Redgi’s royalty status is a pointless and unanswerable critique that amounts to questioning why the story is the story that it is, as opposed to some other story that I want it to be. Of course, it is my biases. But at the same time, the game gave me small hints that it had something additional to say. I wondered, for example, what exactly the deal was with the frogs. Why did they attack all the time? What did they want? What was their problem with these poor friendly rats? When Redgi went to the frogs’ kingdom for the first time, I immediately thought I was in for some kind of revelation when he observed that the day-to-day of frog life seemed to be not unlike his own:

The land of the frogs, the Heart of Darkness, the dreaded Other.

It was a striking moment, the Head Rat in Charge having this realization that the frogs are not unthinking automatons of violence, but rational creatures with coherent motivations and inner lives, just like his. However, he doesn’t follow this line of thinking at all, instead pushing ahead and almost instantly discovering that the frog shaman – these primitive frogs have shamans, of course – is doing some kind of amphibian necromancy on captured rats, creating literal automatons. There’s no extra layer there. Like Redwall’s rats, the frogs just kind of are that way. They’re Bad Guys, and the rats are Good Guys, and the natural order of things when those are the kinds of Guys around is a never-ending cycle of unprovoked violence and chaos.

I saw another small hint when Redgi got lost in the mole homeland of Moletown. Upon entering, he’s struck by a clash of cultures: the moles use electricity, and petrol, and even have goofy little Richard Scarry Busytown cars they use to get around. It’s not just different from his own medieval European existence, but a kind of difference that he was not aware was possible, a difference that was completely outside the bounds of his imagination. I was particularly curious where this was all going given that Moletown is initially described as “The Molshevik Republic,” and Redgi’s little mole friend calls him “comrat.” Was Redgi going to gain a new perspective on rat feudalism? Was he going to abandon his adherence to the Divine Right of Rats?

In the Molshevik Republic, sword loot you!

No, obviously. This is a game about a rat who dodge rolls, as you already said. It didn’t particularly go anywhere, and Redgi didn’t learn from it. I’m half-kidding as it is: I don’t actually want to see Redgi have ten thousand words of introspective Disco Elysium squeak-monologuing as he considers the failures of every political system around him. I want him to run around and pick up swords, and that’s what he does. I want him to do his little rat hop as he zips around the sewers, non-stop chugging the puke-green gore he squeezes out of grubs. I want him to effortlessly parry creatures three times his size and skewer them to death, thereby proving his fitness to lead. He’s great at that stuff and I love it.

That doesn’t mean there couldn’t be another layer, though, and I think that’s all I really wanted. I kept expecting Redgi to pull back the veil in some small way, to learn something from his experience, but he never did. He’s a king at the start, and he’s a king at the end, the time in between a brief interruption in the natural order of essential Good and Evil that doesn’t particularly mean anything. The dark edges of the story – the violence, and the chaos, and the mud-soaked, war-torn fear – have no deeper implications. They’re just aesthetic obstacles for Redgi to hop over, and climb up, and dodge through. A king, doing kingly duties.

Rat’s in his castle, all’s right with the world.