Pragmatic Play Swaps Big Bass for Rat Royale’s Dark Kingdom

Nate U · 23 October 2026

Pragmatic Play has swapped sunny beaches and sweet shops for a crumbling, candlelit dungeon this week. Rat Royale, the studio’s newest video slot, went live at UK sites on 22 October 2026, and it leans fully into horror season with a throne room ruled by a rather vicious rodent monarch.

What’s been released

Rat Royale is a 5×5 grid slot with 259 ways to win, built by Pragmatic Play for UK-licensed sites.
The game features 5 reels, 5 rows and 259 ways to win, with stakes ranging from 20p to £5 per spin in the UK, subject to applicable limits.

Medium volatility and a 24.39% hit frequency complete the basic setup.
It carries a headline RTP of 96.52% and a maximum win of 15,000 times the stake.

Visually, it’s a sharp departure for the studio.
A rat in crimson vestments and a flame-gold crown presides over a flooded gothic cathedral, skull-topped staff in paw, red light burning in his raised hand.

With Pragmatic Play releasing darker-looking games, such as Killer Night, Forever Split Megaways and Sanatorium Secrets, it was no surprise to see the Rat Royale slot turn up, set in an underground lair run by rat kings, a world away from their Big Bass games or candy-themed titles.

How it plays

The whole game is built around wild multipliers.
During the base and bonus games, standard wilds can land carrying multipliers of up to 100x, while rat king wilds can land on the centre reel carrying multipliers of up to 500x, and if more than one wild multiplier forms part of the same winning combination, their sum boosts the total win.

The Rat King Wilds themselves split into four gem-coded variants, each doing something different.
The Red Gem Rat King Wild is an expanding wild that can stretch to cover the entire reel, triggered if there has been at least one winning payline on the spin, with its multiplier increased by 1x for each high-paying symbol on the screen.

The Purple Gem version adds all normal Wild multipliers present on its screen to its own, the Green Gem version adds its own multiplier to all regular Wild symbols present, and the Blue Gem Rat King Wild turns all rat symbols holding a blue gem into Wild symbols.

Scatters open the door to three named bonus modes, each starting with ten free spins.
All multiplier wilds that land during Blood Ritual free spins have a value of at least 2x and rat king wilds hit more frequently; a rat king wild is sticky on the centre position throughout Blood Pact free spins with a progressive multiplier; and in Blood Lust, an expanded rat king wild is sticky on the centre reel for the duration of the feature, also with a progressive multiplier.
Landing further scatters during any of these rounds extends the feature with extra spins, and two ante bet options plus a straight bonus buy give players ways to push towards the higher-paying modes more quickly.

Where it fits

Rat Royale slots neatly into the gloomier corner of Pragmatic Play’s catalogue that’s been expanding through the back half of 2026, sitting alongside titles like Killer Night and Sanatorium Secrets rather than the studio’s fishing or confectionery-themed staples. For UK players who’ve grown used to the provider’s Big Bass and Sweet Bonanza families dominating lobbies, it’s a reminder that Pragmatic Play is just as comfortable building a mechanically dense, multiplier-stacking game around a horror theme. With Halloween approaching, the timing is no accident, and the layered wild system gives Rat Royale a distinct identity even among the studio’s own darker-themed output.

Pragmatic Play Swaps Big Bass for Rat Royale’s Dark Kingdom

What’s been released

How it plays

Where it fits

Sources

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