Look, I know I’m poking the hornet’s nest starting my review like this, but it needs to be said.
Another Crab’s Treasure is proof that you can create a compelling Dark Souls style game with pausing, difficulty tweaks, and accessibility options, without undermining narrative themes of challenge, struggle, and overcoming daunting odds.
You play as Krill, a hermit crab pulled violently from their life of quiet isolation when a literal loan shark steals their home, forcing them to leave the calm waters of their tide pool on a daunting quest to return to the life they were comfortable with by regaining their lost shell.
While not 100% mechanically identical to a title like Dark Souls, Another Crab’s Treasure clearly pulls a lot of DNA from the wider Souls genre. When Krill defeats an enemy, microplastics are dropped which can be used to level up stats or as a currency with vendors. Microplastics are dropped upon death, with one shot to recover them before they disappear. Tough boss fights litter the land, dodge rolls offer windows of invincibility, you can spec into magic builds to harness spells from defeated bosses, and more.
Where Another Crab’s Treasure differs from the genre it’s inspired by is in some of the specifics of its combat system.
In Another Crab’s Treasure, players only have one option of melee weapon, a small two pronged fork. While you can upgrade that fork’s stats, and gain new abilities to augment your melee moveset, at its core your melee weapon can be used for a regular attack, or a held heavy attack. You can’t change this primary weapon directly, but you can augment your moveset via temporary secondary attacks, and temporary modifiers to your melee toolset.
As you journey through Another Crab’s Treasure, players will VERY frequently find discarded trash to wear as a shell. These shells have a defensive value in protecting you from incoming damage, and can be used to block and parry, as well as having a weight value which impacts your dodge roll speed and range. Shells also however impact the players offensive loadout.
Each shell features a special attack, fuelled by a magic stat equivalent called Umami. These attacks can range from using a Sirrachia bottle nozzle to turn into a spinning top for rapid low level melee range damage, to a fizzy drink can firing bubbles which auto target enemies within range, to a plastic ball allowing for a spinning dash attack at high speeds.
While these shells are by design temporary, meant to be discarded as they take damage and be swapped out for new ones in the heat of battle, you can gain a degree of permanence to your favourite shells by getting them insured, meaning that any time you die and respawn you start a new run with your insured shell automatically equipped.
The offensive use of shells however doesn’t end there, with shells also able to be attached to the end of your fork as an optional upgrade, turning your basic melee weapon in essence from a sword into a warhammer. While this doesn’t retain the magical secondary attack ability of the shell, it does change the damage output and swing timing of your melee attacks somewhat.
Beyond that, the main differences notable in the game’s combat system are the lack of a stamina bar, and the presence of a stagger meter which is filled particularly quickly by Umami fuelled attacks. Your Umami charges can be refuelled via melee hits, meaning that your shell based special abilities and your boss activated spells can be regularly deployed, but can’t be relied on to carry an entire fight by themselves.
While it’s easiest to talk about Another Crab’s Treasure in terms of direct comparisons to the series’ that it draws inspiration from, the game has a few aspects of its toolkit that definitely help it to stand out on its own.
As the whole game takes place underwater, Krill can kick their legs rapidly to stay afloat and extend the length of jumps for example, which allows for a degree of platforming challenge to be offered in game without being as frustrating as it often ends up being in Souls titles. Additionally, Krill has access to essentially a hookshot ability, which when paired with this floating hover jump allows for a surprising amount of late game verticality in environment design.
While it is easy to initially think of Another Crab’s Treasure as a light hearted and colourful spin on the Dark Souls formula, the game’s plot honestly really surprised me with the trajectory it took. What started as a less grimdark and brown filled genre homage quickly presented itself to have quite a serious story it wanted to tell. Without going too much into spoiler territory, the plot involves themes of the importance of anger in the face of injustice, and the temptation of self-interested political apathy, alongside its more obvious themes of environmentalism. While the story starts decidedly silly, by the end it’s a considerably more bittersweet tale that doesn’t entirely indulge in the fatalism often inherent to the genre, but tries to more directly have hope in the face of overwhelmingly difficult situations.
While Another Crab’s Treasure is a little less open to varied build creation than other entries in the Souls genre, and a its bit shorter of a game (I finished my first playthrough in a little under 20 hours), I felt that the game did a really good job of feeling like a sprawling grand adventure, and keeping its plot moving at a pace that prevented the more linear weapon selection from becoming a notable barrier to interest in play. The plot is more directly told than that of a typical Souls game, and is used as a key driving factor to reward mechanical progression.
With that all said, let’s talk about the accessibility settings offered by Another Crab’s Treasure, one of the game’s most notable selling points discussed in the run up to launch.
Firstly, a rarity in the genre, you can pause Another Crab’s Treasure at any time, including during combat. This shouldn’t be a big deal, but it is, and it’s hugely appreciated. You can not only take a break if needed, but also change accessibility settings mid fight, which is really hugely helpful.
In the options menu for Another Crab’s Treasure, players are presented with an Assist Mode menu, which contains a number of options designed to help make the game more broadly accessible.
Before diving into the contents of the assist settings menu, I want to talk a little about a pop-up which appears when first navigating to access the game’s accessibility features.
Generally speaking, I’m not a fan of games trying to discourage players from engaging with difficulty altering or accessibility focused settings options. Sometimes it comes in the form of giving an easy mode in a game a name which mocks the player for selecting it, and other times it comes in the form of a popup telling players that they really should avoid altering the intended gameplay experience unless they really, really have to. The end result is generally the same, making a player feel bad if they find settings options useful.
Another Crab’s Treasure I think does a surprisingly good job of walking the line, offering guidance about its use of accessibility settings without making a value judgement about those making use of them.
The game states “Another Crab’s Treasure is meant to be a challenging game. But everyone plays their own way! If the game’s difficulty is harming your fun, feel free to turn on some of these options to make things a bit easier.”
I really like this particular approach. It gets the message across that challenge is meant to be inherent to the experience, without at all putting the blame on the player if, for them, the predesigned level of challenge strays away from that area of “challenging but eventually overcomable”. It’s pleasingly non-judgemental, and while my personal preference would still be not to have that warning present, it’s by far the best form I’ve seen a warning like this take. If you’re going to have this kind of messaging in your settings menu, this is currently the gold standard of how to approach it in my opinion.
Once selected, the assist mode menu has a number of options available.
Four of these settings, Extra Shell Durability, Reduce Damage Taken, Lower Enemy Health, and Slow Down Game Speed offer a number of different options rather than being simple on or off toggles. Each allows the setting to be turned on at a low or high setting, with Reduce Damage Taken additionally offering the option to entirely turn off all enemy damage to the player.
While I do appreciate the way that these low and high settings options are offered, I do think that Slow Down Game Speed could have benefitted from being presented to the player differently. Telling the player explicitly what percentage the game speed is being slowed down on each setting, and offering slightly more options than the two that were presented, might have been an improvement. It’s not a big issue, the two offered settings are definitely better than none, but there were times where a little additional granularity and transparency would have been appreciated.
Beyond that, there’s a series of on and off toggles offered, including Extra Dodge Invincibility, Extra Parry Window, Prevent Microplastic Loss on Death, and Prevent Pitfall Damage. These toggles basically serve to prevent accidental loss of progress, and to make the game more forgiving without changing the core numbers involved in combat.
Generally speaking, I think these settings offered do a lot to make the Souls gameplay formula a lot more mechanically accessible. They’re small tweaks which generally speaking don’t entirely remove the challenge from the game even on their higher settings, while making sure that the barrier to game completion is dramatically more approachable.
However, there is one accessibility setting which does drastically change the challenge level of the game, and that’s very much by design.
Give Krill a Gun!
If you’ve been following development on Another Crab’s Treasure, you’re quite possibly already aware of this feature. If activated, this tiny little hermit crab is given a huge handgun to wear on their back, with unlimited bullets which will kill any enemy in the game, bosses generally included, in a single gunshot. It’s heavy, and that does impact your dodge roll, but that’s unlikely to matter much given you have access to a literal handgun.
Now, generally speaking, I’ve historically been a bit critical of accessibility features being presented in game as jokes. Often developers handle the idea poorly, and the joke ends up feeling like it’s at the expense of the disabled player who needs the particular accessibility feature.
I feel like this is a pretty good exception to that rule.
Give Krill a Gun is, at its core, an accessibility feature. It’s there to help a player get past a progression barrier that they just can’t seem to progress past. Its inclusion is particularly important given that, at one point in the game, your ability to level up your character is temporarily locked away until you beat a specific boss, creating a potential scenario where a player would be unable to level grind to brute force their way past a boss that they cannot yet defeat.
It’s an accessibility feature designed for sporadic use, but rather than poking fun at the player for using it, its use always feels delightful. You get to briefly make a hugely powerful boss fall instantly at your might.
Not so tough now I have a gun, are you?
Bow to my terrifying might boss anemy.
By injecting a bit of humour, it takes away what might otherwise have been a simple “skip boss” button and a moment of perceived failure for the player, and turns it into a power fantasy, where you briefly unlock your secret super powerful technique to win the fight. It’s like going Super Saiyan for a moment, it’s pretty fun.
However, one thing I’m honestly not a fan of is the fact that, on Steam, there is an achievement unlocked the first time you kill an enemy (I believe the first time you kill a boss) while using the gun.
I don’t think it’s intentional, but to me it came across as the game placing a flag on your Steam account stating you used an accessibility feature during your playthrough, maybe when you got stuck on a boss. That’s not inherently a bad thing, but it feels like it could potentially foster some elitist behaviour from certain players, making the fact that they never unlocked the achievement a badge of honour, or dismissing the accomplishments of players who do have that achievement but completed the game as maybe not have completed it “properly”.
I personally believe that games should refrain from any kind of permanent markers associated with use of assist features. If you use an assist feature it should be your own business as a player, as having a marker that says you’ve used an assist feature is going to be a deterrent to some players, pushing them to avoid using an assist feature they might have otherwise found helpful.
Beyond the assist mode menu, Another Crab’s Treasure also offers players the option to reduce screenshake, the option to turn sprinting into a toggle rather than a button hold, graphical options including a motion blur toggle, and audio mix sliders.
While I was generally really impressed with the accessibility options offered by Another Crab’s Treasure, I do have some critiques of the game from an accessibility perspective.
They’re not huge, and a couple of them feel relatively easy to address, but they did have a negative impact on my playthrough.
Firstly, the map in Another Crab’s Treasure is a stylised rendition of the game world which, while decent enough at representing general directions of landmarks, isn’t particularly helpful as a practical navigation tool if you’ve gotten lost or disoriented in a location.
The map on the pause menu features a fixed view of the world based on your current location. You can’t zoom the map out, or move your view around the map while paused, meaning that if you’re lost you may need to keep pausing the map every few seconds of walking to see a bit of new map information. It’s not ideal, it was kinda frustrating.
This is a particularly notable issue in one area of the game where the environment is deliberately VERY dark, and light sources are rare and hard to locate because of the darkness.
In this area of the game not only is it it incredibly difficult to navigate without accidentally falling off cliffs due to the deliberately low lighting, and hard to locate and activate light sources as they can easily be walked straight past unnoticed, the map also only shows a tiny circle of visibility around the player’s location, making finding one’s way across a ravine to your destination unnecessarily frustrating.
Lastly, one additional accessibility feature the game could really benefit from is an option to not drop your Kelp Hearts, the game’s equivalent of Estus Flasks. These healing items, which are restored upon revival post death, are consumed via an animation where Krill takes one in their hand, holds it for a moment, before eating it. If the player is attacked during that animation the healing item is dropped, lost from your inventory. The player would then need to physically pick it back up from the arena floor, or lose that attempt at healing. This can cause issues particularly during difficult boss fights, and to me feels needlessly punishing. An option to toggle that off would be really appreciated.
Additionally, in a similar vein, there’s an idle animation present when the player leaves the game unpaused but inactive, where Krill will start playing around with a healing heart, keeping it in the air via kicks. There seems to be no way to avoid dropping the heart upon returning to moving, which on a couple of occasions caused my healing heart to drop to an inaccessible location. This again feels needlessly punishing, and is something I’d have liked to be able to toggle off.
I want to end this review the same way it began.
For any small complaints I have, I do fundamentally believe that Another Crab’s Treasure proves that Souls games as a genre can be made more accessible, and optionally less difficult, without compromising their ability to tell a story about fighting against overwhelming odds, pushing through impossible challenges, and growth through adversity.
The game stands as testament to something I’ve said many times on this show – A game that’s challenging but eventually beatable for one person might not be for another, and tools to increase mechanical accessibility can make that intended level of overcomable challenge available to more players.
That’s nothing but a positive, it means more people get to enjoy what’s great about these kinds of games.
Another Crab’s Treasure is a fun, challenging adventure that while perhaps condensed compared to its contemporaries, manages to tell a gripping story. I genuinely loved Krill’s journey of personal growth, and felt no shame in occasionally pulling out a huge gun and just shooting a frustrating boss right between the eyes.