Game: Another Crab’s Treasure
Genre: Souls-like, Adventure, Action
System: Nintendo Switch (also available for Steam, Xbox, PlayStation)
Developer|Publisher: Aggrocrab
Age Rating: US T | EU 12+
Price: UK £26.99 | US $29.99 | EU € 29,99
Release Date: April 25th, 2024
A review code was provided, and many thanks to Popagenda PR.
Another Crab’s Treasure is a Souls-like game with a colorful and cartoony skin over the top of it. It feels like a mix of playing a Souls-Borne and watching SpongeBob SquarePants.
Under the Sea
Another Crab’s Treasure starts with a hermit crab named Krill, who has had his shell repossessed by a loan shark. In order to get your shell back to protect yourself from all the seagulls around your home beach, you venture into the deep blue. Shell-less and unprotected, you find makeshift shells and a fork to defend yourself as you attempt to take down the polluted corruption taking over the ocean around your home.
This is a story about a young hermit crab on a mission, but it’s also more than that. The entire ocean is deeply polluted, covered in pizza boxes, microplastics, food trash, tyres, and other garbage thrown there by the human world. The fish have taken to the trash, making it part of their lives; they eat cigarette butts, wear trash like it’s fashion, use soda cans as shells, trade microplastics like currency, and eventually become crazed by the garbage flooding their systems and their homes.
It’s a pretty dark look at the state of our world under the sea, and I can’t say that it’s entirely inaccurate. It’s a reminder that there is an island-sized collection of trash called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch floating out in the ocean that is approximately 620,000 square miles (1.6 million square kilometres) wide. Another Crab’s Treasure takes this wild fact about the world we live in and makes it the background of a strange and funny tale of a single hermit crab determined to find his home.
The Gameplay of Another Crab’s Treasure
If you’ve ever played a Souls-like game, such as Bloodborne or Demon Souls, you have the general gist of how this game plays. Another Crab’s Treasure is a challenging series of incredibly punishing enemies and bosses. Good Souls-like games are challenging but are fair; if you take the time to learn the move sets of the bosses, you can defeat them with enough proper button presses and patience. So, the mark of a good Souls-like is balancing the difficulty, the necessary precision, the patience, and the fairness all at the same time.
It’s not an easy balance to strike, and many of these types of games have messed it up quite handily. As a streamer, I frequently watch Twitch. As I once said, it’s easy to make something hard, but it’s incredibly challenging to make something both hard and fun.
Another Crab’s Treasure, however, walks the line very well. The upgrade systems make for challenging battles with a whole lot of character; each boss feels unique and different and is incredibly hard but still fair if you are willing to put in the time to learn it (and you have the reflexes). It’s a fairly well-balanced challenge, and I think the battles are very well done. That being said, Another Crab’s Treasure is not without its flaws.
The Cons of Another Crab’s Treasure
Another Crab’s Treasure has a platforming problem. There is nothing I dislike more than having to platform in a game that isn’t about platforming (I’m looking at you, Destiny), and Another Crab’s Treasure is frustrating in a way that takes a lot of the fun out of these parts. If you have tried to jump to the Certain Knight’s Helmet shell, you probably have a good idea of what I am talking about. The jumping feels kind of bad in some situations, and now that I have all 69 shells in the game, I will never ever try to hop over those soap bubble jumps again in that area.
There is a super dark location that you fall to after a dramatic boss battle called the Unfathom, and it is impossible to see too far in the dark here. The developers helpfully put in a little glowing pet fish to light your way (and you can pet him!), but it is hidden and super easy to miss. Neither my husband nor I found him the first time through the Unfathom, and we had to fumble around in the dark instead.
Overall, Another Crab’s Treasure is very fun to play, rewarding, and beautiful, but there are just some moments that really frustrate anyone who is playing. There was one point where there were water jets that push you off of a cliff, and you would immediately respawn in front of the jet, which would again push you off of the cliff. It didn’t happen often, but it happened enough that I had to listen to my husband yelling at the screen for about ten minutes. I feel like some small issues like this are pretty unavoidable, especially in a small indie game, but they do have an effect on the fun of anyone who experiences the same issue he did.
The Accessibility of Another Crab’s Treasure
Most Souls-likes are locked behind a competency threshold; if you aren’t good at video games, if your reaction times aren’t good enough if you just don’t play games that way, you are basically locked out of being able to experience them. While I deeply enjoyed many of them, games like Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice are not designed for some people to play. They are hard, and you have to get good to be able to play them. FromSoft, the developers behind the original Souls-like and many others, have the attitude that if you aren’t good enough to get through it, you just don’t play it.
Another Crab’s Treasure pushes past this idea that Souls-likes have to be impossible for some people to complete. There are difficulty settings in the Assist Menu I have never seen in a Souls-like before; you can shut off losing your money on death, cut down enemy health, slow the game speed, and a whole lot more. One of the funnier additions to the accessibility of Another Crab’s Treasure is Gun Mode.
If you want to just see the story of Another Crab’s Treasure, and you aren’t interested in taking down bosses or long fights, you can turn on the setting called Give Krill a Gun. This is a weapon that one-shots everything in the game, even bosses. It’s a hyper-realistic model of a handgun that you use as a shell, and it makes tackling even the most challenging parts of the game a breeze.
At a talk for the IGDA Game Accessibility SIG, the studio head of Aggro Crab, Nick Kaman, said: “Accessibility is a serious topic, and it’s something I take seriously… And I think accessibility can be fun.” In an interview with Inverse, he added, “The assist settings are there because not everyone’s going to be ready for that challenge. Not everyone wants that experience. A game can be many things to many people, right? There are people who are going to be mainly interested in the story; there are people interested in the art. Then there are people who want that challenge. So how you want to experience this game, there are options for that. That’s a good approach to game design, let people get what they want because they’re the ones paying you money for it. It’s an easy thing to do.”
By adding the gun to Another Crab’s Treasure, Nick and his team added something special to accessibility. It doesn’t just make the game more appealing to more people, but it also gives a fun new experience for those who choose to experience it that way.
In spite of both my husband and I liking Souls-like games, we still experimented with the gun mode of Another Crab’s Treasure. It was funny and weird and a more realistic depiction of what gun violence is; you shoot something, and it dies. It gives more weight to guns and gun violence than more video games do. It’s the ultimate equalizer, but also a dangerous weapon that must be taken seriously because a gun can literally kill anything that you point it at. And I feel like this is an important lesson that is really brought home in a silly way that doesn’t belittle the issue of gun violence in its presentation.
Another Crab’s Treasure on the Nintendo Switch
I feel like many people who have been looking forward to Another Crab’s Treasure are most likely reading this review for one reason and one reason only: is the Switch version good? So here it is: No, the Switch version isn’t good. I have vented about my dislike of Switch ports in the past on many reviews for LadiesGamers, but I did my best to give the Switch version a fair shake. I had a good frame of reference; we were both able to play this game on Switch and on PC.
The Switch’s graphics weren’t as good, and Another Crab’s Treasure runs at 30FPS instead of 60. But if you don’t care much about graphics, you will still most likely have a lot of issues with the Switch version. If you break more than a few bottles at the same time, the animation turns into a slide show fairly regularly. Sometimes, when you travel between zones quickly, the new zone doesn’t load at all, or the whole game crashes. I’d say that happened about six or seven times during my playthrough, especially in the later game.
There is a scene in the Unfathom where you are swarmed by little white crabs, and as soon as more than four crabs were on the screen, the animations skipped around so badly that I couldn’t fight the critters off at all and immediately died. It was moments like this that made me wish I’d gotten a Steam code instead of one for the Switch.
The Nintendo Switch itself is a triumph; if it can load and play Tears of the Kingdom without too many issues, it’s a working system. That game is both incredibly big and detail-heavy. However, games that were originally made for better hardware, like PCs or the PS5, just aren’t going to translate well to the Switch no matter what you do. It’s a system that demands a lot from developers to get games to work well, and most are not willing to put the time and effort into making it run like it should on the hardware available.
The Message Here
Now that my Switch rant is out of the way let’s talk about the message of Another Crab’s Treasure. The game is political in an off-handed way, giving you hints about the thoughts that went into the world. But the messages are very much there and unambiguous: Another Crab’s Treasure is anti-capitalist, pro-environment, and has some hefty ideas about power structures.
It very much dives into the consequences of us filling our seas with garbage, with how money is a societal construct that alters in value because of whims of the market and even touches on the subject of taxation without benefit. It’s a heavy piece with a lot of thought-provoking moments, and I think the story uses humor to really make you think deeply about some heavy topics. Topics that are well worth talking about. I have a feeling some are going to throw Another Crab’s Treasure into the pile of “woke garbage” they have decided to hate on, but there are a lot of good things to consider in the game’s statements, presentations, and thoughts.
Conclusion
Another Crab’s Treasure has some bugs and some issues, it has some platforming challenges I prefer to never do again if I can help it, but overall, it’s a wonderful game. There is a lot of humor, a lot of beauty, and a wonderful story and music in this title (oh man, this review is already over 2,000 words, and I didn’t even talk about how good the story and music were! I have so much more I could say about this game). It’s a triumph of a Souls-like that is welcoming, accessible, and funny.
I love this game more than I can say, and I think it’s art. But sadly, I can’t give it a very good rating based on the version I played. I can say that I recommend this game to everyone who has ever wanted to play a Souls-like but couldn’t get through it. I recommend this to everyone who ever loved absurdist SpongeBob SquarePants humor. I recommend this to anyone who loves Little Mermaid. If you want to laugh, cry, and have a really good time, pick up Another Crab’s Treasure.
But if you have a choice, don’t pick it up on the Nintendo Switch.
Final Verdict: I Like it.
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