I read a horrible theory recently that nature wants to turn lots of things into crabs. I think the theory was basically talking about crustaceans, but the gist of it was, regardless of the evolutionary challenges crustaceans faced, crabbiness seemed to be a preferred answer. The raised body and tail, the flat shell, the lofty pincers. Crabs are OP.
Another Crab’s TreasurePublisher: Aggro CrabDeveloper: Aggro CrabPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Out 25th April on PC, Switch, Xbox X/S, Xbox One, Xbox One, PS5 and PS4.
And this came to mind when playing Another Crab’s Treasure this morning. It’s not just that there are crabs all over the place in this game – and there really are! It’s that Another Crab’s Treasure is a Soulslike, and the Soulslike increasingly feels like the equivalent of evolutionary crabbification for mid-budget video games.
To put it another way, I can imagine a time, a few years back, when Another Crab’s Treasure would have been your classic action platformer. Its setting – a kingdom on a micro-plastics-ravaged seabed – is perfect platformer stuff. There is outsize junk scattered in the sand that would have given simple jumping and bottom-bouncing that Carpet People vibe: here’s a cliff made of an old flip-flop, here’s an enemy hiding behind the curving gloss of a beer bottle. There are castles that are also sand castles, with lobster guards and fence posts made of cigarette butts. And actually, Another Crab’s Treasure is a bit of a platformer still: I’ve just played a sequence that required finding a secondary path into a complex environment, and it had me jumping between battlements and drifting from one tower to the next like I was Yoshi.
But in between that it’s definitely a breed of Soulslike too. Instead of bonfires, there are shells where you can rest and restore health, and also restore any defeated enemies hovering nearby. There are huge progress-blocking bosses. There are shortcuts you open after navigating challenging areas – open a door or drop a line down from on high and voila, distant points are suddenly surprisingly close.
And there’s that combat, with a lock-on and then the one-two-three attacks, as you see how far you can push offence before you need to rely on a dodge. No stamina so far – I’m only about two hours in – but I’ve just unlocked a parry and a dodge, and there’s that same feeling that Souls games have: one of these enemies I could handle, but with two or three at once I’m more likely to overextend myself and make mistakes.