Unpacking Uniqueness - Another Crab’s Treasure’s Helping Hand

“Another Crabs Treasure” was released on April 25, 2024, by Agrro Crab; the game is a mix of a 3D Platformer and the notoriously hard-to-digest soulslike genre. The dev, team however took lengths to support the players as they rose to the challenge of the game itself. Playing “Another Crabs Treasure” feels like you have the entire dev team pushing for your victory at all times despite the harsh nature of the gameplay itself. Today I wanted to explore the ways the dev team gave such a unique feeling to their game and how it helped me finally finish a souslike!

First and foremost are the accessibility options found within this title. “Should Soulslikes have an easy mode” is an evergreen argument for fans and detractors of the genre. Aggro Crab takes their spin on this question by providing a wide range of accessibility modes the player can toggle at will with no negative consequences to their save. These can range from in-game options to help with combat, such as longer I-frames or less enemy HP, to even things that just might stop players from having a frustrating time such as no damage when falling into pits or, the option I turned on for almost the whole game, not losing your microplastics on defeat. 

Microplastics are the games equally-as-funny-as-they-are-depressing equivalent Souls in other contemporary Soulslikes. Usually, in those games, you would drop all of the experience you have earned where you were bested in combat, attached to the enemy who landed the final blow, etc; for you to try and pick up. If you don’t manage to reach your experience before you meet another gnarly fate, then your old sum will be lost. Another Crabs Treasure is no exception to that trend. However, the option to turn that part of the gameplay loop off allows you to never lose your hard-earned microplastics. This option makes leveling up feel more like a traditional RPG and really helped me stave off frustration during the levels of the game. I was able to feel like I could experiment under less stress and really explore the gameplay systems, enemy design, and levels themselves in ways I found myself avoiding whenever I tried other Soulslikes. 

That feature mixed with the comical yet effective option to “Give Krill a Gun” helped streamline elements of retreading levels in this genre of games that I have never been able to get past before. When they say “Give Krill a Gun,” they mean give Krill a real gun. Your shield, think about it as a shield with an ability, gets upgraded with fantastic defense, durability and most importantly being able to one-shot anything in the game from a long distance using its special skill. I pulled out this option whenever I found myself losing after facing partially tough challenges in levels; I felt like I already proved I could overcome this challenge so I simply chose to skip it to avoid starting to feel burned out running the same highly demanding fights again and again.

The last accessibility option I explored on my playthrough was a simple, “respawn before the boss” option. That’s right, there are no running minutes to retry a boss in this game! That is if you don’t want there to be. You can always choose to deny yourself of that convenience and respawn back at the last save point if you really want that classic Soulslike experience, which is what’s wonderful about these accessibility choices. They are just that, choices. You can tell the developers designed these options with the idea in mind that they wanted to push players to turn on options to help alleviate frustration. If the player is struggling most of these options are not a simple “make the game easy” button but instead are ways to help push the player onto the intended feeling of challenge the developers want. They do not want anyone to be left behind because they are not good at the game, but they want to try and allow the fun of the challenge to be accessible to all players as well. Even the “Give Krill a Gun” option does not alleviate all of the challenges in the game. Enemies still hit hard, and in normal gameplay, the gun itself is extremely heavy which slows down Krill when he wears it. Both of those parts of the game, alongside the fact that enemies usually go down in a few swings of your trust fork to start with, can still lead to some lesser-skilled gamers finding a fun challenge to overcome in this game.

All of these choices discussed above mix with a very bright and colorful world that tells a tale about the importance of community to provide a tough experience that makes you feel supported to keep going the entire time. This is a wholly unique atmosphere of this genre that I am incredibly appreciative of. It is incredibly exciting to see how future games going for similar difficulty might be able to explore some of the accessible and supportive nature of “Another Crab’s Treasure” to expand on this atmosphere in their own distinctive ways.