4/5 ★ – Red_Dead_Revolt's review of Another Crab's Treasure.

Another Crab's Treasure, developed by Aggro Crab Games, is a great take on a souls-like, offering a simplified but fun and compelling game. In ACT, you play as Kril, a hermit crab who has spent most of his life living alone with his shell. He is thrust back into the underwater crab society, which he has desired to stay away from, when his shell is stolen for taxes. Thus, our hero’s simple and understandable motivation, until Kril is ultimately caught up in, essentially, the fate of the ocean. Continually rising stakes, and all that. ACT has an obvious message about human’s impact on earth and its oceans through pollution. Plus, how capitalism is bad and destroys all things (always an ironic message coming from a product that exists because of capitalism), but the game never feels like it tries to force this message down your throat and distract you. The game trusts its audience to look around and understand what it is trying to say. Gameplay is your classic mix of dodging and blocking, with parrying also being an important tool to master. Like any souls-like, you fight tough enemies and collect microplastics (souls) that you then expel from your body (leveling up; also, depressing) at Moon Snail Shells (bond fires) that you find and unlock along your journey. When you die, you lose your microplastics and have one more chance to get them back before dying again and losing them forever. The unique gameplay twist of ACT, being the shell mechanic, allows Kril to pick up and wear various trash objects to block and parry with. There are a ton of unique shells, all with different levels of armor and various interesting abilities. The weight of your shell impacts your roll speed, as expected, and the player is encouraged to make interesting tradeoffs on what kinds of shells to take and leave while balancing desired abilities with armor level and weight. Combat is pretty basic with a few fun abilities thrown in (The electric eel and what I dub the“purple-power-punch” abilities are two of my stand out favorites). Nothing crazy deep like an Elden Ring, but I found I like that about this game. The same can be said for the leveling. It’s all very basic and straight forward, no obscure stat and item descriptions where you are constantly looking up wikis and YouTube tutorials to understand WTF is being said or is going on. The boss fights and designs are huge standouts for me. I loved every single boss design, you can really tell they had a lot of fun coming up with them. I never found any fights felt unfair or unbalanced. Each boss has a pretty easy to learn move set that will take only a handful of fights to really master. The world and level design is pretty great and the game has a very colorful and inviting art style that I liked a lot. There are many moments where scale plays a large part in both level design and eye candy. The levels are interesting to navigate through. There are a few bugs and random issues here and there. For example, certain jump pads seem to only work riht like 50% of the time. It can be frustrating but nothing game breaking or that holds you up for too long. This game is also VERY funny at times. Not just in the dialogue, but there are tons of puns and gags hidden amongst the trash in the environment. You will find lots of environmental story telling here, something I always enjoy looking for. There is also a great variety of level design, and of course there is the mandatory poison swamp level. This game has a lot of cutscenes and character dialogue and interactions. Not usually something you would expect to see in a souls-like game, but the lighter tone of this game definitely benefits from this change of formula. I found interacting with the characters and world to be fun and often funny and engaging. The story plays it pretty straight, but is still satisfying....up until the ending. Boy what a stinker of an ending. I can't tell if they were trying to do some kind of subversion of expectations or if they just had no idea how to end this thing. The messages that this game shares with Kril (and you) throughout the game…mostly all conflicts with what Kril decides to do and ultimately where he and the other characters end up. The ending is not a happy one, which is fine. You can have a somber ending, it just had to be interesting and not totally conflict with the messaging of the entire rest of the game. I had a blast playing through this game and seeing all that it had to offer. This is only Aggro Crab’s 3d game, and I think they did a phenomenal job overall and I look forward to seeing their next project. Id say if you have any interest in souls-likes, this a strong recommendation. If you do not traditionally like this style of game, I don’t think this will be the one to sway you. Thank you.