Animal Hospital Ratthew's Key — the Room 5 Safe and What's Inside

Quick facts

• Appearance

  Small black rat — white muzzle, buck teeth, curled pink tail

• First appears

  Around Shifts 2–4, then roughly five visits across your run

• Anomaly?

  No — explicitly not an anomaly, despite the camera staring

• Leaves behind

  A key to the Room 5 safe, and a note

🐭 The storyline, visit by visit

1. The anonymous patient.He checks in without giving his name — "being small has its advantages."
2. The name reveal. He introduces himself as Ratthew and admits it hurts that everyone treats him like an anomaly.
3. The warning. He tells you to trust no one in this hospital— he chewed up classified documents in Ron's office and doesn't regret it.
4. The confession. He uncovered a government secret and is being hunted for it. He mentions his missing twin sister Rattina— "the smart one in the family" — who worked at Animal Corporation before she vanished.
5. The goodbye. On his final visit he says he has to disappear, and leaves you a key and a note at reception — the note says he lifted the key from one of the doctors.

🔑 The key and the Room 5 safe

Room 5 is at the far back-right of the hallway. Remove the cat posteron the wall and a hidden safe appears — Ratthew's key opens it. Inside:

• A photo of Rattina
• A suitcase stamped TOP SECRET
• A note: "The experiment was a success. The shadow now sees everything."

The community widely reads that note as the origin story of the Stalker — and the suitcase matches the ones Dr. Harlow and Ron from Accounting carry, tying all three storylines to the same Animal Corp experiment.

How you actually end up with the key

The Animal Hospital Ratthew key is not something you find or buy — it is handed over at the end of a conversation that runs across a whole shift block. He first turns up around Shifts 2–4 and returns roughly five times over a run, saying a little more each visit: anonymous at first, then his name, then that being mistaken for an anomaly bothers him, and finally the goodbye where he tells you the government is hunting him, names his twin sister Rattina, and leaves the key and a note behind.

So the only real requirement is letting him talk. He is explicitly not an anomaly — the one animal in the game the wiki states that about outright — which matters because he stares at the camera the way several anomalies do. Tasing him because he looked at you the wrong way is how people lose this questline, and it costs −15 sanity for shooting a normal animal on top of it.

What the Room 5 safe is really telling you

The contents are easy to read as souvenirs and are closer to a case file. Alongside the photo of Rattina sits another TOP SECRET briefcase — the same one Dr. Harlow carries — and a note recording that an experiment succeeded, ending with the line that Shadow can now see everything.

The community reads "Shadow" as the Stalker, the one threat in the game with no kill method and a single rule — do not meet its eyes. That reading is inference, not confirmation: the note never names it and the game has not said so. We are flagging it as the community's best guess rather than a fact, because the difference matters on a page people arrive at looking for answers.

💡 He is also a free anomaly detector

While Ratthew is in the office, he warns you in red text whenever an anomaly approaches check-in. That is worth more than it sounds. Identification in this game is normally a job you do yourself, split across three channels: your own eyes, the Polaroid, and the CCTV feed — and 8 of the 19 anomalies are invisible on anything but the cameras. A warning that fires at the window is a second opinion that does not care which channel the thing was hiding on.

It does not tell you which anomaly, so it does not replace the check — you still have to look, photograph or pull up the feed to know what you are refusing. What it replaces is the worst case: admitting one because it never occurred to you to check at all. On the shifts where he happens to be in the office, that is a real safety net during the same window Barney is running his own visits and competing for your attention.

Which makes the mistake people actually make worth repeating: he stares at the cameras the way Staring at Cameras does, and he is small and odd-looking. Taser him on that basis and you have paid −15 sanity to remove your own early-warning system.