• Game: Aggro Crab's Another Crab's Treasure
• Release Month: April
• Started: 03/12
• Completed: 08/12

Developers are cottoning on to the fact that "Soulslike" isn't so much a genre but a style; more a condiment than a meal. It's a saturnine tone and aesthetic married to a few crucial mechanics and tempered with a higher-than-average difficulty curve; however, it doesn't necessarily have to be a RPG, it doesn't necessarily have to use a high fantasy theme, and it doesn't even necessarily have to be 3D. Some of the more captivating examples to come from the format, beyond what FromSoftware itself puts out (and they've been experimenting with it too, between Sekiro and Armored Core VI), are odd hybrids created by the Indie gaming scene and in particular the explormers like Hollow Knight, Salt and Sanctuary, Blasphemous, Ender Lilies, and the Momodora series. Turns out there is one genre that is closer to my heart than even action-RPGs and explormers, however: 3D platformers. Here scuttles along Another Crab's Treasure to prove that combination is even more effective than lobster and garlic butter.

Another Crab's Treasure presents a subaquatic world that is somewhat Elden Ring by way of SpongeBob SquarePants. The hermit crab protagonist, Kril, has his beloved home shell stolen from him by an obnoxious tax collector and leaves his relatively safe rockpool home in pursuit. This puts him up against various hostile figures including a tyrannical duchess and a salvage mogul, but the biggest threat is the mind-warping "gunk" that continues to plague the sea floor as it continues to be choked with familiar-looking garbage. Thankfully, some of that trash proves useful to young Kril as substitute shells, providing some degree of defense as well as several other benefits. By swapping shells as they get damaged and pushing forward with his trusty fork weapon, Kril begrudgingly eliminates obstacles in the way of recovering his precious conch domicile.

Despite the cutesy, cartoonish vibe of the visuals the story's can be as moribund as the Souls games it homages, with the gunk transforming several NPCs into mindless monsters—an environmentalist take on the hollowing process of Souls' hapless undead—and Kril struggling with the darkness taking over his being as more villains fall to his cutlery. His fork may be stainless, but his soul increasingly is not. There's a range of supporting characters also, and the game does tend to show off its sense of humor often enough that it doesn't drown (as it were) its Under the Sea setting with too much dolefulness and heavy themes. The game explores corruption in all its forms: wealth, political power, pride, delusional righteousness, and in a pure physical sense with the noxious effects of the slimy gunk, showing how easily any one type might take root and foment until it destroys everything. It's also an imaginative interpretation of the way the careless disposal of human waste is causing ocean ecosystems to slowly die out, and somewhat tongue in cheek given how every shellfish you meet is addicted to eating microplastics (it's also the game's souls equivalent; both currency and what you use to level up stats) or that the economy of the main town of New Carcinia is dependent on regular bouts of trash dropping down from a floating trashburg on the surface as it floats past overhead.

Though the game has plenty of 3D platforming by way of mechanics like a flutter jump, a grappling fishing hook, bouncy sponges, and fish netting to climb, a significant chunk of it still follows the Souls pattern of cautiously passing through the world opening new shortcuts and fast-travel-enabling save points, fighting enemies that are just as capable of defeating you in a few solid hits as you are them. It streamlines a lot, of course: there's only one weapon that uses a light attack combo and a heavy stab attack that needs charging first; the shells are your temporary armor equivalent and are sorted into weight classes that determine how quickly you can evade roll at the cost of more protection; there's only four stats and they govern health, mana, attack strength, and defense/resistance respectively, and can be increased with certain collectibles and shells in addition to traditional leveling; and your finite set of healing consumables are restored upon hitting a save point (which, of course, also respawns most enemies). The game's spells require a stat called "umami"—a vein of mystical deliciousness that flows through all fish, cephalopods, and arthropods—which can be found around the environment in crystallized form and occasionally dropped from enemies with glowing eyes. These umami reserves can then be spent on a skill tree of very useful abilities—I have a few favorites I'll get into—and can be used to modify "adaptations", or abilities borrowed from other creatures, in a similar way to the hunter tools of Bloodborne. The umami used for these attacks can be restored by damaging enemies, and most shells also have their own distinct umami spells that usually relate to the type of item it is (a banana skin, for instance, can be eaten for a health boost at the cost of the shell itself). So it's fair to say the game has no short amount of nuance to its combat and character development, even in its mostly streamlined form.

It wouldn't be a Soulslike without some parries and ripostes, but rather than rely on the timing for them—they involve split-second guarding as attacks come in, and relying on guarding tends to damage your current shell too much to be worth the hassle—there's instead two really cool synergizing skills you can pick up where you can perform a quick evade dodge backwards by hitting the evade button without also holding a direction and then, should you avoid an attack this way, can quickly respond with a pretty strong counterattack. Mastering this pair made several of the bosses much more manageable, especially as the dodge ignores your own armor type: you can evade hits and respond in kind while still packing enough defensive power to weather the attacks you didn't quite avoid in time. The boss fights are naturally where the game's combat system shines, while also being at its most demanding, and the usual approach of taking a few losses to memorize patterns and finding the right mix of defense and maneuverability is vital for success. I struggled with quite a few of them, especially the optional ones that are often meant to be fought way later such as a brutal (and French) mantis shrimp named Topoda, but the game does have a host of accessibility options if you just want to enjoy the game as a more casual platforming affair and either reduce or skip the combat difficulty all together. A notable accessibility feature that did the rounds on the internet close to the game's release was just spawning a gun for a shell: one capable of destroying everything, even bosses, in a single shot.

While Another Crab's Treasure doesn't quite nail the Souls combat or 3D platforming individually—the combat can sometimes feel a bit off with the input lag and the platforming occasionally does the annoying LittleBigPlanet thing where you slide off the rounded edges of platforms far too often—its merging of the two proved to be quite compelling, allowing me to split up the deliberate pace of fighting off enemies that are frequently too dangerous to just run past with some flightier 3D platforming challenges and vice versa. I also enjoyed its story and characters, particularly as they find themselves imperiled with some new unexpected catastrophe after every act, and the sense of humor won me over between its endless fish puns, euphemistic swears like "shucking", a few risqué jokes that hopefully went over the heads of the younger, less-internet-corrupted players the game's visuals may have drawn in, and a general sarcastic cynicism from most of the cast that often served to dispirit the Jack McBrayer-esque friendly and innocent Kril. It's not the most stable game (though I thankfully avoided anything too deleterious; just a few visual glitches and some missing collectibles) but that's only to be expected when you see the level of ambition on display here, especially with how substantial its world is—I clocked in at somewhere around a 25 hour completion time, which isn't that much shorter than most Souls games. For me, Another Crab's Treasure is this year's Tinykin: something that superficially looked to just be a fun and breezy 3D platformer, which I'm already on board with given how precious few games in that genre are released most years, but turned out to have so many more layers to appreciate. (Rating: 5 out of 5.)

Current GOTY

1. The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom
2. Another Crab's Treasure
3. Pepper Grinder
4. Botany Manor
5. Doronko Wanko

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