After Act expressed her disappointment with this game, I decided to try it myself to form my own opinion… and I’m glad I did, because this is indeed a treasure.

What struck me the most as I played was that it actually managed to fix one of the biggest problems I have with the Soulslike genre, namely: the camera. I have complained about the camera in every one of my 3D Souslike reviews: It doesn’t zoom out far enough, so the screen cuts off big enemies and makes their tells unreadable; it constantly gets stuck in walls or behind scenery, again leaving you unable to see anything; and it often occludes the ground when you’re locked on, making it way too easy to dodge-roll into bottomless pits you can’t see. Even the biggest Dark Souls fanboys complain about this. It’s really, really bad and I’ve lost count of the number of stupid, unfair deaths I’ve received from it.

This game fixed it. The camera still has some trouble with getting crushed against walls, but otherwise? No problems. It always zooms out enough for you to see giant enemies in their entirety, and it’s centered such that you don’t lose sight of your character’s footing.

This was genuinely revelatory to me. A good Soulslike camera is possible. It’s not an intractable problem we just have to live with; it’s a deliberate choice, either because the devs were too lazy to fix it or because they actually think it’s better as part of some deranged Dark Souls cargo cultism.

The other interesting thing is that the game has an assist mode. Not an easy mode; like Celeste, it features several toggles you can tweak independently. These include making you stronger, giving you more defense, reducing the game speed, turning off corpse runs, and even giving you an instant-win button if you’re really sick of a boss and just want to skip to the next part. I like this way more than set difficulty modes, because it gives me control over which specific parts are too hard for me, rather than a universal adjustment that could make other parts too easy for me. (Speaking of which, it feels weird to say this, but the game did feel a little too easy to my Soulslike-honed reflexes. That probably means it’s just right for people trying to get into the genre, though.) Amazing how after all the debate over whether giving Dark Souls an easy mode would make you worse than Hitler, turns out you can just do it and it’s fine!

The gameplay itself is nicely streamlined, closer to Sekiro than Dark Souls. (The control scheme is almost identical to Sekiro‘s, actually.) There’s no consumables or equipment, and combat focuses more on blocking and parrying than dodging, which is my preference. (There’s also a similar posture-break mechanic, though it only opens the enemy up to a critical attack rather than an instant kill.) There are still stats and levels, but to be honest they feel a bit redundant; you can also upgrade your stats by collecting items in the world like in The Legend of Zelda or Hollow Knight, and I honestly think the game would have been better if it were balanced purely around those upgrades. As it is, I ended up feeling really overpowered by the midgame, as my level upgrades combined with my item upgrades made me snowball in power faster than the enemies could keep up.

The core game mechanic is that, being a hermit crab, you can wear one of several shells that each have their own health value that is drained when blocking attacks. (All of these “shells” are human trash rather than legitimate shells, and get increasingly absurd as the game progresses.) Sturdier shells have more defense but are heavier, which nerfs your dodge roll. The shells are also incorporated into the corpse run mechanic, as you pick up your old shell along with your currency when you retrieve your corpse; this can help you preserve a rare shell and give you a little extra boost when retrying a boss fight, similar to the cocoons in Silksong. You can also pay to have shells “insured”, which means you get a free copy every time you respawn; while I appreciated this from a convenience standpoint (especially in regards to rare shells that only appear in one specific location), I also think it discourages experimenting with the game’s main mechanic, as I found myself just sticking to a few shells I liked rather than trying out new ones.

There’s also platforming — like in Sekiro, you can jump and use a grappling hook to get around. This, unfortunately, was the weakest part of the game for me, and frankly needed a lot more playtesting. I lost count of the number of times I got wedged between objects and had to suicide to get out, or jumped on a seemingly-solid surface only to discover it was inexplicably coded as a slope and yeeted me off (oftentimes into spikes which, again, stunlocked me with no way out). There are also a number of rather embarrassing coding oversights that allow you to skip huge sections of the game with weird platforming tricks, which you can find on YouTube. When it wasn’t glitching out the platforming was fine, but it glitched out way too much. I appreciate that this was an indie game made by a small team, but they really should have tightened this up more.

But what I really want to talk about is the story.

Like Act, I love Soulslike combat but hate their grimdark misery aesthetic, so the idea of a comedic and cartoony Soulslike was really appealing to me. What I wasn’t expecting was that this veneer actually hid a shockingly dark, serious, and deeply angry story about capitalism and environmentalism. Going in, I expected the kind of facile rebellion chic seen in most “anti-capitalist” games; superficial jabs that fail to interrogate the deeper structures or say anything meaningful. Instead I found shockingly pointed and cutting political commentary on a level I haven’t seen in video games since Disco Elysium. Unfortunately, no one seems to be talking about this; the internet seems entirely preoccupied with simply memeing on the funny cartoon crab game, which, while understandable, does a serious disservice to the effort behind the writing here.

For all that people say Dark Souls is extremely dark and bleak, it always does so in an oddly safe way. Its fantastic settings safely abstract it from any real-world commentary. There’s some tepid criticism of organized religion buried deep in the lore, but that’s never the focus. Gwyn and Vendrick aren’t criticisms of real-world authoritarianism, they’re allegories and parables for the abstract philosophical themes the story is actually about. Even Sekiro, which was set during a real historical civil war, sidelined the plot’s political elements to a frankly absurd degree so it could focus on its very important message about how we should all commit suicide. Moreover, precisely because the settings are so bleak, it’s hard to get emotionally invested in any of the characters or events enough for the game to actually hurt you with them. Whenever I see a likeable character in a Soulslike I assume they’re going to end up dying horribly, and most of the time I’m correct! Why should I bother getting attached when I know the pattern? Why should anyone?

So in a weird way, Another Crab’s Treasure is actually able to hurt you a lot more, not in spite of its cartoony aesthetic but because of it. It presents a world that isn’t completely hopeless and where misery isn’t a foregone conclusion, so you have reason to get invested. And perhaps most importantly, it has, y’know, an actual plot with fun characters who display actual personality. All of this resulted in me being far more emotionally affected by the deaths of these characters than I ever was by Solaire or Lucatiel, even though their stories were objectively darker.

Having established that, let’s talk about the plot. The story begins with Kril, our main character, living a simple life in a tide pool, before he’s suddenly told his home has been conquered by a petty lord and he now has to pay taxes. Having no money, his shell is confiscated, spurring him to leave the safety of the tide pool and venture into the wide open ocean to get it back.

I expected this conflict to be resolved at the end of the first act only for Kril to get swept up in some greater plot that he realizes is greater than his own problems so he continues fighting even after getting what he initially wanted, etc. etc. you know how it usually goes. To my surprise, this was not the case: Kril’s quest for his shell remains his driving objective throughout the entire plot, and the story engages with this in a really interesting way. Even as Kril learns about the wider world and gets involved in conflicts that dwarf his personal problems, he maintains that he’s only doing this to get his shell back and that the moment he does he’s going to forget about all this and retreat back to his old, normal, isolated life. The other characters point out that not only is this selfish, it’s naive — Kril can see that the ocean is being polluted and that nowhere is really safe, but he still clings to this fantasy that if he can just return to how things used to be, everything will be fine. He’s ultimately forced to reflect on the fact that the happiness of his “normal” life was in fact a lie — he was lonely and isolated, and even in the tide pool he was still in danger from predators.

I was shocked by what an incisive criticism this was. It cuts straight to the heart of conservatism: The fear of change. Our society is a large and complex one, and it’s only becoming bigger and more complex with advancements in technology and global communication. This is understandably frightening to some people; to someone who grew up in a small, close-knit community that never had to worry about anything beyond the white picket fence, the scope of global society can be overwhelming, something not unlike the eldritch monstrosities Lovecraft used to represent his own fears at the time when society as a whole was going through this change. We’re forced to be aware of horrors and suffering beyond our comprehension happening all the time all over the world. It is a comforting fantasy to think that that anxiety will go away if we just go back to the way things were when we were children, when the world was small and comprehensible. But of course it is a fantasy; the world has changed and you can’t turn back the clock. Ignorance is not safety; global warming and world wars don’t go away by burying your head in the sand. Resisting the tide of change — resisting reality — only drives you deeper into misery as you’re left wondering why you don’t feel happy even when you get what you thought you wanted.

At its core, the story of Another Crab’s Treasure is the story of this emotional journey and realization. Of literally “coming out of your shell” — which is even reflected in the gameplay of forcing you to try out many different shells without getting too attached to any one. Indeed, I think what’s most telling is that in gameplay terms, Kril’s original shell isn’t even that good — most notably, it has no shell spell, which are explicitly generated by the memories of a shell’s past life. Kril’s home is hollow and empty, just like the idealized past of conservatism; it was never as good as nostalgia made it out to be.

This is even echoed again in the game’s final act.

Unsurprisingly, this critique of conservatism is paired with a critique of capitalism. Given the game’s overtly comedic tone, I expected this to be the kind of superficial critique seen in works like Suits, and initially, that’s what it appears to be. It’s actually more anti-feudalist at first, with the Duchess who takes Kril’s shell in the name of taxation being called out as an egocentric tyrant who doesn’t even fulfill her promise of keeping her citizens safe, but afterwards it sets its sights on capitalism. We learn that the currency of the crab economy is microplastics and trash, so money is literally poisoning people. We’re introduced to a new villain, a stereotypical evil greedy CEO, and discover the crab capital is sharply divided between the pristine public-facing upper crust and the slums that make up the city’s foundation. Everyone is a pretty exaggerated caricature, though at the same time, I felt they didn’t sound that far off from some of the stuff real-life capitalists say — Poe’s Law and all that. It was amusing, but I didn’t expect anything deeper.

The first thing that really raised my eyebrow was at the second-act climax. See, the evil CEO is shown to have a super-scary murder pet he uses to intimidate people. I expected this to work the way it always does in video games: We fight the underling before the big boss, because of course that’s how you escalate tension. Except, no. You throw down with the CEO first, and it’s only in the next area that the murder pet gets fed up with his abuse and unceremoniously kills him before taking out his rage on you.

Yes, let me repeat that: The main villain for most of the game gets taken out like trash by the underling he treated like an extension of his will, and the underling turns out to be the harder boss fight. From a narrative perspective that seems backwards, but if you think about it, doesn’t it make sense? Of course the trained assassin is stronger than some fat cat CEO. And of course a pet assassin would murder a rich twit as soon as he becomes more trouble than he’s worth, why wouldn’t he? The employer thinks that because he holds the purse strings he’s the one in control, but the underling is the one who’s holding the gun. I know the term is overused these days, but it’s a genuinely Marxist perspective on the scenario. It’s also shockingly irreverent; it refuses to engage in the lie that the boss deserves more respect just because he has money and a title. That unceremonious and undignified death is, in fact, exactly what such a puffed-up nobody of a villain deserves.

The second thing that surprised me was Firth, a fellow hermit crab who’s a pitch-perfect bootlicking capitalist frat boy. After discovering the CEO is evil and his workers are miserable, Firth declares an intent to donate his money to charity… but not without attaching a very revealing rider.

FIRTH: So I see only one way to fix things around here! I’ve gotta get as rich as Roland, so I can then donate a lot of that money towards making things better. That way I’ll be super rich, but also be, like, a good person, y’know?
KRIL: Why not just let the people who need it have the money in the first place?
FIRTH: Well, who says they’d know what to do with it?

This demonstrates an awareness of classism that goes beyond what people are normally willing to express. See, I want to make something very clear: Philanthropists are evil. If they really just wanted to use their money for good, they would pay their damn taxes so we could afford universal healthcare and UBI. But that’s not what they want. They don’t want a democratic government determining what to do with their money; only them, in their unique genius, can possibly determine how to use it. They get to be the gatekeepers of who deserves charity and who doesn’t. It is not kindness, it is control and egotism.

…But I didn’t think the game would actually go that far. I thought it was just another jab at capitalism — a surprisingly socially aware one, but still just a joke. After all, Firth is just a comic relief character! It’s not like he’s going to get the resources to actually do this, or if he does it’s going to be a footnote in the epilogue about how the capitalist got redeemed by becoming a marginally better person.

Right?

So no, they were actually completely serious the whole time. Firth’s aspirations to philanthropy were never meant to be seen as a good thing, and the criticism thereof was not just a throwaway joke. Another Crab’s Treasure could have bought into the propaganda that philanthropy is good, that it is possible to be a good capitalist. (And, interestingly, much of the fandom does; “Firth redemption arc” is among one of the most popular AU scenarios.) Instead it puts its foot down: No, you cannot be both super rich and a good person.

I genuinely didn’t expect all this. For all the jokes and silliness, there is real anger and real bitterness here. There is bite underneath the bark. The writers really get what makes capitalism so insidious on a very deep level. And I haven’t even mentioned Chitan and her championing of justified anger, which I kept expecting to be condemned but is ultimately wholeheartedly condoned. In the preamble to her detective game reviews Act observed that furry media seems conspicuously more socially conscious than the mainstream; I wonder if this is another example of that, that the funny cartoon crab game was willing and able to make more incisive political commentary than the serious-as-a-heart-attack grimdark fantasy series.

…I will say, though, that I think they leaned a bit too hard into comedy overall. Maybe that was to soften the political commentary and give them plausible deniability of the “Haha just kidding, unless…?” variety, but if so I wish they had stuck to their guns more. The voice acting is hit-or-miss, with some actors hamming it up way too much to take seriously. I especially don’t like the swear-censorship fish puns; they’re so obviously and painfully artificial that they just take me right out of the story. (They also don’t censor “shit”, so it wasn’t even to sneak into a lower rating category, they just did it for the love of the game…?) I know it’s just an April Fool’s joke, but I genuinely do think the game would be improved by an option to remove the swear filter.