I wrote reviews of games back in the 2010s to no avail. Now I’ve been possessed to write about videogames again. Hopefully, my writing style and taste have matured in the intervening years. These are my thoughts on a game I have been waiting to play for a long time. I played Another Crab’s Treasure on my Twitch stream earlier this month, and upon completing it, I struggled to give my thoughts on the game because I think there is something that requires sitting down with the game for a bit longer. This is what I have:
Another Crab’s Treasure is the second game produced by Seattle-based studio Aggro Crab. It was released in April of 2024 and was one of the games I most anticipated playing on my stream. As an avid player of Souls and Souls-like games, I felt that Another Crab’s Treasure was made for me. In the game, you play as Kril, a tiny hermit crab who has had his shell repressed by the joke municipality of Slacktide. Represented initially by a shark tax collector voiced by Michael Reeves (as a viewer immediately pointed out on my stream). Kril has to scavenge various shells to survive enemy attacks as they battle through the Ocean on their quest to get their shell back. Not only doing souls-like combat but navigating surprisingly involved platforming challenges on the quest for a great treasure that could change the course of the Ocean’s history.
Very early on, the game establishes its tone via humor and reference to previous entries into the genre. A rusty nail has a tooltip that would be “better wielded by a bug” (Hollow Knight). A hub zone is referred to as the “Sands Between” (Elden Ring), and of course, as is expected, there are multiple poison swamps (a classic of the genre.) The magic of Another Crab’s Treasure is UMAMI
, and the player’s corresponding MSG stat boosts their UMAMI damage. The whole first zone of Slacktide is constructed of such tightly observed Souls references and fish puns that you can feel that the developers are pretty pleased with themselves. This is deserved because the game is charming and funny while still delivering on the live, die, live again, kill boss play loop that defines the genre. Even if I, the player and the reviewer, react adversely to fish puns due to a character from the webcomic Homestuck. Aggro Crab does seem to delight in making Kril dramatically utter the phrase “mussel-shucker.” After about 20 hours of play, it begins to drag, yet I’m willing to look past the game’s excesses in favor of its charms.
The worldbuilding is one of the high points of Another Crab’s Treasure for me. It's bright colors and constant rain of microplastics in a polluted ocean in which sapient crabs have built a society. It's unclear When the game takes place in the human era, but it is clear that the pollution results from human waste. What Another Crab’s Treasure taps into is a particular fascination of mine. The Northern Pacific Gyre and its trash island. In the game New Carcinia, the hub city has Trash Day, where the trash island drifts overhead and drops trash upon the city. The world and its economy are predicated on the trash that enters the Ocean. Milk cartons become houses, and cvs receipts (due to their length) become roads and bridges, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention there is a boss that fights you with what is, unmistakably, a Hitachi Magic Wand (™).
Like Aggro Crab’s previous game, Going Under, Another Crab’s Treasure embraces a methodology of Games as Social Commentary. While many games will engage with higher themes beyond game play. Something that the Souls games often do. Aggro Crab makes it that much more direct. The phrase “dismantle Crabitalism” is even featured in one of the trailers for the game. While Going Under was tightly observed jabs aimed at West Coast startup culture, Alphabet, and Amazon; Another Crab’s Treasure engages with more diffuse concepts: Pollution, capitalism, and complacency, which are both simultaneously enabled and enabled by. Kril wants to get his shell back and return to his tide pool, where he mostly did nothing. The characters in the game begin challenging him because you can’t just do nothing when there’s a world happening.
What Another Crab’s Treasure asks, at its core, is, “Where’s your rage” “Aren’t you tired of being nice? Don’t you want to go apeshitt?” Something that it repeatedly asks in its second act as a mysterious force draws you further and further into “The Drain,” the deepest part of the Ocean where all garbage and souls inexorably go. “Doesn’t it make you want to just SHUCKING SCREAM?” The writing taps into a deep rage at the state of the ocean being slowly filled with garbage. A sentiment that you can feel coming from the developer even as they make jokes about it.
The crux of the game is that you cannot only be self-interested; you have to care about the world and the people in it. Part of that will necessitate getting angry and not letting things slide. Beverly Wildung Harrisons’ essay The Power of Anger in the Work of Love is something that I recalled when initially sitting down to write this. Anger is an awakening to the abuses and iniquities of the world, rather than resignation when things are just wrong natively, the awakening to one’s ability to change the world that creates anger and rage at the injustice of it all.
Praya Dubia, the game's penultimate boss, is the avatar of this anger. The congealed soulmass of everyone that was lost. Pulled inevitably in the downward spiral to The Drain. Wresting control of the bodies of crabs through their rage and the never really narratively developed *Gunk* Praya Dubia is the anguished cry of the Ocean that is being killed by trash and pollution. To its horror, no one except the souls of the dead seems to care. It is twisted and raw and ultimately self-destructive as it tears itself apart attempting to kill the player. Something that I candidly responded “What?” to. The swansong of rage incarnate was so poetic, yet it wasn’t the end of the game. Instead, the game's final boss is Kril’s “rival,” who gets the Whorl Shell that makes you crab God and initiates a half-baked plan to end suffering by dropping trash island onto New Carcinia. Checking the final box of the JRPG list: Fight God or at least the approximation of God. It was expected, but reflecting back, it was a bit like seeing a train exiting a tunnel vertically.
The writing is the tipping point for me on this title. For a game that snows you completely from the jump with its jokes and references, what can get lost is that this is a title with something to say. Where does homage begin to feel like a limitation? In Another Crab’s Treasure, you play through multiple poison swamps, arrive at the game’s Anor Londo/ Farum Azula, and are often reminded of other titles like “Elden Bay Seasoning” sight gags. The ominous “gunk” is reminiscent of the infection from Hollow Knight or Phazon from Metroid Prime Corruption. After the first act finishes so strongly. I won’t spoil it entirely, so if you know, you know. The game begins to struggle, only to find its feet again in the dying moments of its second act. My wish for Another Crab’s Treasure was that it had engaged further in what it was doing with its second act while laying the groundwork in its first because the second act felt obligatory to me, as though boxes were being ticked. After all, this is an entry in the souls-like genre. I can’t claim any insight into the minds of the developers. Their aesthetic inspirations are very clear, and, to me, the player/reviewer, they got a lot out of Dark Souls 3.
Yet despite the number of times the game says, “This cannot continue. This will not continue.” You beat the game, and life goes on. There isn’t an earth-shattering apocalypse that’s reckoned with. Instead, you get your shell back only to give it to another crab and become an itinerant warrior, never to return to the tidepool from whence you came. This was somewhat disappointing to me as someone who enjoyed the ending of Going Under, where the world is torn down to preserve the human soul's inviolability from an overreaching, nigh-omnipotent algorithm. While the themes of Another Crab’s Treasure are strong, the payoff does not feel as good. Indeed, the world becomes different after New Carcinia is covered in the trash, but it doesn’t dismantle capitalism. Certainly, all of its agents are killed in the story. Yet, all of the rage and grief in the entire Ocean that is being choked to death by garbage (something that we know to be happening in our actual world) can only awaken one crab to the possibility of being in community and caring about other people.
Ultimately, Another Crab’s Treasure is the difficult sophomore album for Aggro Crab. It takes many risks, from a procedural roguelike to a 3-dimensional platforming world with over a dozen bosses. People new to the genre will find a challenge and an enjoyable story. Those who have come from other parts of the genre will find a curious pastiche of other titles that they have played before well remixed with comedic writing that aggro crab delivers in spades. While some story beats left me wanting Another Crab’s Treasure, it was well worth my time, and if you enjoy Souls games, it will be worth yours.