"Another Crab's Treasure" Review - Prepare to Fry

Publisher: Aggro Crab

Developer: Aggro Crab

Platforms: Nintendo, Playstation 5 (Reviewed for), Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Microsoft Windows

Anyone who knows me knows that I'm a man of simple tastes: give me an oceanic adventure and I'm bound to enjoy myself if there aren't any major caveats. What's probably less well-known about me is that unlike most people, I don't have Soulslike fatigue. It's a formula that just ticks all the right boxes for me, again, barring any major caveats. So, imagine my jovial surprise when I heard that there was going to be an ocean Soulslike in which you play as a crab coming out this year? I knew it was being developed before 2024 began largely because of the headlines it made for its most famous accessibility feature. We'll get into accessibility in more detail later, but the feature I'm referring to is the game's official "easy" mode, in which the crab is given a fully-functioning gun with unlimited ammo, which can kill almost every enemy or boss in the game in one hit. Several news outlets picked that story up because of the sheer comedic nature of that feature. As a naturally skeptical person, I looked at the kinds of news sources that were covering this...and it didn't look good. These were the kinds of news sources that were covering No Man's Sky several years after it came out acting like it was a new thing. So, I began to be worried that the gun feature might be the only thing going for this game. But dear reader, I'm coming to you today to inform you that Another Crab's Treasure is excellent. Now, let me tell you why!

In Another Crab's Treasure, you play as Kril: a hermit crab who is, as the name implies, a hermit living in a tide pool all by his lonesome. However, at the start of this story, Kril is visited by a loan shark who informs him that the tide pool has been annexed by a local duchess and he owes a bunch of taxes. Not having any of the microplastics the ocean-dwellers are using as currency these days, Kril is evicted from his home/shell. However, Kril doesn't take this lying down, and he takes it upon himself to go to the duchess to try and work something out. Light early story spoilers here and some hints about the main villain a little later on, but I think it's important to get through these things to talk about the story with any bit of nuance. Unlike just about every other Soulslike, Another Crab's Treasure has an easily-followable front-and-center story that doesn't take any kind of deep diving (no pun intended) to understand. So, after running an errand for the duchess, Kril returns to find her castle turned into an unrecognizable hellscape by a poison gunk. One major story boss later, and our hero finds himself in the big city, chasing rumors of a priceless treasure to purchase his shell back from the "prawn" shop owner his shell was sold to. From there, we have the vast majority of our story.

Now, this story is a tale of two tones. Let's talk about perhaps the most obvious one first. As you might have noticed, there's a bit of a theme of pollution going on. Your "souls" (level-up points and purchase currency) are microplastics, the over-arching threat is a poisonous gunk, all of the temporary shells Kril dons (more on that later), and just about everything that makes a Soulslike a Soulslike is based on trash. 

For example, enemy designs. Lobster knights will charge at you with a spear/shield combo of a straw and drink lid. Sniper crabs will launch their projectiles with rubber bands. High-level enemies will use bike locks as de-facto guillotines. Larger crab enemies will use small hair combs like a greataxe. And perhaps my favorite example is the seahorse enemies that fire missiles at you....and you know what the missiles are? They're those little capsules you probably had when you were a kid, the ones that opened up and turned into little sponge dinosaurs. So, you'll see a missile coming at you (there are three colors with different trajectories and explosion times), and when they explode, a little sponge dinosaur of the same color is left in its wake. I don't care about your opinion on anything I've said so far. If you disagree with me on everything else I say in this review, that's fine, but you don't get to be contrarian on this point: THAT is an INSPIRED design choice!

Then there are the environmental design decisions. Something like a coral reef would be an easy thing to base a platforming level around, but this team doesn't take the easy way out by doing that. Rather, any given level is a combination of ocean geography and trash. For instance, you have a grappling hook, but very little that occurs naturally in the ocean lends itself to that kind of thing...so rather, when you see a discarded fishing net hanging limply off of a bit of coral, you can use the grappling hook on that to climb your way up the net. In a similar vein, you'll often find trash with similar textures and colors to some undersea geography (such as plastic sandals) bridging the gap between pieces of levels or as an important resting point between two points of interest. Just as frequently, you'll find levels that are something like 90% trash-based with the rare bit of ocean geography acting only as a bridge between one man-made item and the next. Then, in super rare levels, you'll find sections made up with 99% trash or nature, with only a handful of the opposite force represented. This isn't the last time you'll hear me talk about how well the team handles "balance."

Everything I've just described is just the tip of the iceberg (we have another discussion about the use of trash coming up when we get to gameplay). Pair that with the fact that the game's main villain is more-or-less the living manifestation of the ocean's unmatched hatred of its treatment, and you have a truly potent theme.

But even so, this is just one of the central themes of the game. The ocean is furious with how it has been tortured and killed off bit by bit, but the game doesn't paint anger and feeling mistreated as inherently bad things. Right from the get-go, our protagonist spends all of his time getting kicked in the teeth, being ruthlessly taken advantage of, and punished for trying to get his sense of normalcy back. There are some crucial low-points in the story where Kril finds himself so depressed, so devastated, and so vocally sick of the world being so mean to him that it got the waterworks started for me bigtime. But the story and its characters never tell him he's wrong to feel that way. Rather, this whole story takes the anger and pain of its characters and teaches an important lesson: It's ok to be angry with the world and how you've been treated by it, but you should use that anger to try and make the world a better place, not to try and make others suffer like you have. Modern media tends to fail when it comes to themes like these. You'll find shows/movies/games that tell you that you don't get to feel angry because other people have it worse than you. By that same token, you'll find plenty of media that tells you it's ok to do whatever you want if you feel like the world has been mean to you. Toxic Positivity AND Toxic Negativity are prevalent in today's media, and it's unbelievable that the most nuanced take on the subject comes in a video game's story. What's even more unbelievable is that this take comes in a Soulslike. With this genre being as grimdark as it is, there isn't usually a lesson, but here we are with a lesson that nobody else in the entertainment industry seems to be brave enough to try and teach.

I said that this is a tale of two tones, and the other tone is another thing that doesn't have a place in Soulslikes. I can describe it perfectly with one example. Remember how I mentioned that Kril's shell is taken by a loan shark? Did you imagine an actual shark? Because if you did, you're half right. It is a shark....but a PEZ-head or grabby hand kind. In addition, the game's art style is highly reminiscent of Spongebob games in how cartoonish and colorful it is. So, the game pairs heavy subject matter with a sense of humor and an overall joyous atmosphere. And somehow, the game manages to balance these tones perfectly. There isn't a single moment in which the tones seem at odds. It's truly spectacular how much care went into the tone management, especially given how easy it would be to screw it up.

So, with story and themes covered extensively, let's get into the gameplay side of things! I've referred to this game as a Soulslike, but honestly, I feel like this game is probably the closest a Soulslike has gotten to the actual From Software formula. That isn't to say I think it's the best Soulslike, that honor still goes 100% to my 2023 GOTY winner, Lies of P, but it IS to say that it's the closest a game has come to getting the build system correct. Here's what I mean: in the mainline From Software flagship franchise, shielding, parrying, and dodging are all valid defensive strategies. But depending on how you allocate your stats and create your build, one of these will be more viable. If you aren't aiming for a heavy armor or giant weapon build, then dodging might be the most viable option, but if you're aiming to have as much weight on you as possible, then blocking or parrying might be the way to go. That's how things go in the Dark Souls games, and Another Crab's Treasure mirrors this far better than most Soulslikes. Even in Lies of P, you can get by with either dodges or parrying, but the game is skewed towards parrying bigtime, and dodging only becomes an equal option by leveling up a specific stat. So, the best Soulslike in my opinion only kind of mirrors the Souls titles when it comes to defensive play. Another Crab's Treasure likes to pretend its all about parrying...but you don't even have the option to parry until the third mandatory boss fight. Until that point, it's just blocking and dodging. But we'll come back to this in a bit. For now, we need to talk about the other facets of gameplay so you can understand the nuances that play into these defensive strategies. So, indulge me as I take us on a little detour.

Like any good Soulslike, combat is made up of a light attack, a heavy attack, magic/abilities, and your chosen defensive strategy. So, that part isn't worth delving too deep into. The thing that deserves a deep delve is the shell system. As a hermit crab, you can slip into just about anything and use it as a shell. As it so happens, every shell option you have here is a piece of trash...in a literal sense, not a figurative one. The first one you gain access to is a soda can, with things like banana peels, party hats, sauce nozzles, and things like that following suit soon afterwards. As the game progresses, you gain access to more and more interesting shells (things like disco balls, baby doll heads, toilet swab brushes, etc). Each shell has a set amount of health, a certain amount of extra damage protection from direct hits you take, a weight level, and a spell/ability. The spell/ability of a shell is largely determined by what kind of trash makes it up. For instance, the soda can spell lets you summon a cloud of fizzy bubbles that home in on enemies. The banana peel and sushi roll allow you to sacrifice some shell health in order to heal yourself. As you can probably tell, some abilities and spells are repeated among the shell types, but there's more than enough variety to warrant trying everything out at least once. Your shell, in case you haven't figured it out from the hermit crab context, serves as your shield. So, if you're hiding in your shell and get hit by an enemy attack, you take no damage, but the shell takes damage. But if you parry an attack by hiding in your shell and popping out at the moment an attack hits, the enemy takes some stagger damage and your shell loses no health. However, if you fail to parry an attack, you lose both character and shell health. If your shell's health reaches zero, it breaks, leaving you defenseless. Any given combat arena has several shells available, so this just means you have to high-tail it to the nearest shell in the area. In this way, parrying is a risk-reward weighing scenario. It's the fastest way to build up enough stagger damage to render an enemy immobile for several free hits, but by that same token, failure comes with serious consequences. And even if you're a Sekiro and Lies of P veteran like myself, Another Crab's Treasure is based off button release timing, not button press timing. So you will be challenged in ways you don't expect.

So with the general shielding vs parrying discussion out of the way, let's talk about stats. Unlike your average Soulslike, there are only 4 stats that you can level up. You can level up your VIT (health), RES (defense), ATK (attack), and MSG (magic). Because that's all so self-explanatory, that's where I'm leaving the discussion. Instead, I'll be returning to the discussion of defensive strategies! As I've mentioned, you can dodge, block, and parry. The only stat that plays even a small role in these decisions is RES, which determines how much mileage you get out of shell health. Every shell, as I've said, comes with its own set health amount, but putting points into RES improves on that amount. So if you're wanting to rely just on blocking damage without risking missing the parry windows, you have a stat you can put points into to compliment your play style. If you want to parry, having more RES won't improve your chances, but it will leave you with slightly more room for error. Finally, if you want to dodge, stats have absolutely no impact. However, going this route means you typically have to forego the better shells because of the weight factor. The sizes range from small to large, and the size directly impacts have useful dodges are. I found that small and medium weren't too difficult to manage, but the large shells significantly increase the time it takes to execute a dodge. Imagine having high equipment weight in your average Soulslike and trying to dodge. The difference between Another Crab's Treasure and your average Soulslike is that in this genre, you can typically increase a stat or equip an item to raise the weight limit and allow yourself to equip better weapons or armor without taking a toll in movement or dodge speed. In Another Crab's Treasure, there are no such options. If you want to wear the best shells in the game, you'll either need to live by your blocks or parries, or you'll need to really work hard at mastering your dodge times. In terms of defensive options, Another Crab's Treasure is the absolute epitome of balance.

Now let's talk about the accessibility features. I've already mentioned the insta-kill gun mechanic, but beyond that, there are also options like extending parry windows, decreasing incoming damage, increasing damage you do, eliminating chip damage when you fall off a cliff, and most importantly, the ability to turn off microplastic loss upon death. I'm always a fan of accessibility settings in Soulslikes because 1) I'm old and 2) it makes gamers big mad, big angy even, and anything not anti-consumer that pisses off the hardcore gamer crowd is completely welcome in my book!

So far, I've been giving this game nothing but praise. Let's change that! Because, sadly, the game doesn't quite measure up as much on the technical front. By far the biggest problem here is the fact that the game is absolutely lousy with freezes on certain area transitions. These aren't hard freezes, mind you, but as I've implied, you can't throw a dart in any direction here without hitting a brief freeze at a specific time. Furthermore, there are plenty of lesser framerate drops. Those are bad in any game, but in a game that is both a Soulslike and a platformer, it's especially bad. In addition, certain platforming sections have a slight unfair bit of difficulty. Things like two pieces of wood seemingly being close enough together to simply walk from one to the next, but you end up falling through the space between them. There are also some times where Kril will get stuck on a piece of geometry in an infinite falling animation....and in the final boss fight, if you fall off the arena, you keep falling and falling without ever dying...and it will happen. It happened to me twice. Thankfully, there's a way to rectify that: the "die instantly" button in the options menu. If you're like me and you turned off the microplastic loss upon death, this button serves as both a fix to the infinite falling and an instant fast travel to the last "bonfire" you were at. However, even this has a crucial flaw: it doesn't actually make you die instantly if your shell is too good or if you have too much health. So if you're aiming to use that feature, you'll sometimes have to navigate through the game's many menus several times in order to get the result you want. Not the biggest thing in the world, obviously, but for a "die instantly" button to not make you die instantly? That's pretty damning as far as QA testing goes. So, sadly, an otherwise great game gets a failing grade on its technical report card. 

But for as disappointing as it is that the game fares so poorly on the technical front, it's important not to miss the exceptional forest for its weaker trees. If Soulslike fatigue hasn't quite set in for you yet, or if you're like me and an ocean setting is all you need to grab you, then you'll definitely find something to love. It brings the tried-and-true Souls combat to the table but strikes a defensive balance that From Software itself has struggled to re-capture in the games since Dark Souls. So despite stumbling at the finish line, make no mistake: This game is, as its title purports, a treasure.

Let us review:

Technical woes - 1.0

The final score for Another Crab's Treasure is...

9.0/10 - Fantastic

Excellent work, Aggro crab, excellent work!