'Another Crab's Treasure' PS5 review: Who says soulslikes can't be colorful?
My experience with Another Crab's Treasure can be summed up with the following observation: after 20 hours adventuring the ocean floor, the game crashed during the final cutscene.
A refreshing take on the soulslike genre, Another Crab's Treasure is the latest game from Seattle-based developer Aggro Crab, makers of other indie hits Going Under and Subway Midnight. And while the game markets itself heavily as an attempt to be the cute soulslike, at its core it's an action-platformer with some very dark and existential themes. At times really fun and sometimes really frustrating, Another Crab's Treasure is a memorable entry-level souls-like that is, unfortunately, plagued with performance issues.
Another Crab's Treasure is a cute — but bleak — undersea journey
Set under the sea, the game's hero is Kril, a hermit crab who spent most of his life topside until one day when his shell gets repoed by a loan shark. Kril's adventure takes him into the ocean, wearing trash as protection, on a quest to get his shell back. During this mission, he discovers that the sea below him is polluted by trash and is being slowly corrupted by its gunk — meaning whether he likes it or not, he might be the only one who can save it.
Unlike some games I've reviewed like Harold Halibut, which use mild critiques of late-stage capitalism as set dressing for their stories, Another Crab's Treasure is a brutal satire that isn't afraid to feed players a message loud and clear: how we live truly fucking sucks. Throughout the story, Kril quickly learns the undersea society he's been avoiding lives and breathes the trash and pollution his fellow surface-dwellers produce. The game's hub city, New Carcinia, runs on trash, with all goods and services using microplastics as its currency.
In the city, you'll quickly notice the clear wealth disparity between the citizens in the upper and lower levels. In the Upper Crust, the roads are CVS receipts, with houses made from coral and expensive bottles of whiskey. Down below, there's a stark lack of any type of road along with the building built from wonky boxes of cardboard. Even though it's all junk, talking with city-goers will make it obvious that to them, there's a difference between good trash and bad trash.
It's hard to take a lot of Upper Crusters seriously when they flex their clothing to you — made from silica gel packets and discarded orange peels — whereas the lower city inhabitants wear literal garbage bags as dresses. It's all one big, unified trash concept, and it's a sort of subtle, but at times very explicit, form of environmental storytelling that is built into the details.
The creatures that inhabit New Carcinia and the ocean around them are memorable if a bit one note. Firth is a blue hermit crab who is an obvious riff on annoying libertarian tech bros; Neema is a motherly, down-to-earth crab who runs the dive bar with her two daughters in the poor part of town and lives just one day at a time; Chitan is a noble lobster knight who seeks for the power to save the ocean.
Aggro Crab's cute soulslike is unabashedly a critique of how man-made climate change and pollution are destroying our planet. It's refreshing to see a developer take an actual stand for an issue rather than just dance around it hoping not to make anyone upset. Despite all the charm and color, Another Crab's Treasure grapples with a form of existential dread that's just as gloomy as any other soulslike without being a grimdark medieval European fantasy.
Another Crab's Treasure is a Soulslike at its core
Like many other genre imitators, Another Crab's Treasure's combat is of the dodging, rolling, and slashing variety. However, it's not as deep as Dark Souls or Lies of P, instead, it's sort of like Sekiro and Fallen Order — fairly static combat that meets you at your level and asks you to master what's been handed to you. What makes Crab's Treasure's combat stand out is the ability to, at any time, swap between shells filled to the brim with unique magical abilities called "umami."
There is a heavy emphasis on shells in combat, as they serve as both your armor and access to your umami abilities. Just like everything else in the ocean, these shells are everyday human junk that's been thrown out — from tennis balls, springs, soda cans, to even boxing gloves. Most shells have their own unique abilities that riff off their common use by humans. Soda cans can launch a magical blast of fizz; wearing fuses will shield your armor in electricity that will shock opponents that attack you; and wearing a shot glass or salt shaker can turn you into a sharp ball of glass.
Along with your "umami" abilities, you can attach stowaways to your shell. These are pieces of junk and small animals that give you enhanced abilities in combat. Examples include a sea star that grants you extra health, or a rubber band that makes you immune to electric attacks.
The combat is never that hard compared to Dark Souls, but it's not without its challenges. After reaching the second or third major area of the game there's a noticeable lack of enemy variety. You'll get different enemies to fight, but they mostly all exist within the same archetypes — except now they do more damage. Additionally, there is a deliberateness to the combat meant to punish button mashers. This includes input lag and a lack of I-frames when dodging. But it's not always clear where intentional challenge ends, and performance issues (I'll get to those in a minute) begin. I can't tell, for instance, if the game doesn't recognize that I'm trying to heal myself, or if I'm timing the command wrong or something.
As if to try and be fair to the player in light of the added challenges, certain gameplay elements make things much easier too. Enemies telegraph their moves to an annoying extent. And if somehow combat is still giving you trouble, the game has accessibility features that can negate damage, add extra I-frames, or even give you a gun that insta-kills enemies (that is not a joke, I swear to God).
At its heart though, Another Crab's Treasure feels like a spiritual incarnation of classic platformers like Jak and Daxter, as there is a level of verticality you will not see in any other soulslike. As you adventure around, you can climb on fallen nets, access high areas using a fishing hook, and make long gaps by pressing and holding X, which will enable you to float through the water. It's an invigorating mechanic for a souls-like, even though at times it's way too frustrating – especially if, like me, you have fat fingers and while you're floating towards a gap you accidentally press the dodge button and now you've air-rolled into the abyss below.
Another Crab's Treasure is buggy
As much as I love the game's story and characters, it's buggy. The review copy given to me by Aggro Crab and Popagenda was played on PlayStation 5, which has had performance issues of late with games like Dragon's Dogma 2. There were multiple instances where the game would crash, mostly from loading up new areas within the map.
During combat, Kril would mysteriously launch into the air after doing — or being hit by — certain moves. Other times had Kril getting stuck in the world's geometry, to the point where I had to go into the menu and use the "die instantly" option so I could reset. There was an instance in grappling over a lake of gunk that caused the game to trigger the falling death animation because Kril's hitbox would barely glide over the gunk.
Even more annoying, when nearing the end, I inadvertently warped into the final area of the game after glitching through the floor.
Some games have taken advantage of the PS5's SSD to do things like hide their loading screens via transitional gameplay mechanics, such as taking an elevator, or by making the character navigate through a narrow crevice a-la Bloodborne or God of War. While Another Crab's Treasure attempts this, it's quite obvious that a cutscene or new area is being booted up because the game will freeze and stutter until it's loaded.
Although finding shortcuts is a big component of the genre, soulslikes have long stretches of gameplay in-between areas where you can save your progress — so imagine the feeling that all your hard work can be wiped at any moment because the game often crashes trying to load up a new area. And as I said at the top of the review, during the game's final cutscene, it crashed — which forced me to fight the final boss again just so I could watch the last half of the ending.
It's an added layer of challenge that doesn't add any fun, and instead sort of feels like a hostage situation.
Is Another Crab's Treasure worth it?
For just under $30, Another Crab's Treasure is an excellent, if a bit basic, soulslike for anyone looking to get into the genre. From its beautiful environments to its cast of charming, cute characters, the game's story is clever, witty, and a biting reminder that we live in community with each other and not for ourselves.
However, I'd hesitate to recommend this straight away unless the game gets a hearty day-one patch to shore up its myriad performance issues on PS5. Outside of those complaints, Aggro Crab's cute soulslike is, so far, one of the best games I've played this year.