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I stare deep into the maelstrom chaos of someone else's Dropbox server on the first day of the fourth week at my new "job." The file paths seem to wrap around one another like the cables behind my desk. I am looking in the second of two places where the desktop publishing files I'm supposed to be zhuzhing up have been reportedly stored. I blink and squint. I minimize the window. I chew on a pen. I pull it back up. Nothing happens. The project manager has ignored two of the three questions I asked today. Oh my god, everything is so expensive. I try to count and breathe at the same time like they tell you to.
In the kitchen I carefully pour hot water over some coffee grounds and stare out the window. I should take a Mental Health Walk—even though that inevitably leads to a Mental Health Shower and a Mental Health Lay On The Bed Staring At The Ceiling Fan until I Mental Health Say Fuck It and Smoke Weed and finally Mental Health Decide To Really Buckle Down And Get Work Done Tomorrow.
I carry two cups of coffee back to our shared office. I place one of the cups down on my boyfriend's desk and return to mine. He's salaried and spends his downtime honing his competitive Super Smash Brothers Melee skills. I listen as he swiftly clicks the buttons on his custom arcade controller and watch characters clash against a colorful background until returning my eyes to the Dropbox of Madness.
The new work chat app on my very new, very expensive work computer chimes its signature chime. It's someone else asking a question about something which A. I realize I know that answer now that I've read how they worded the query, and B. realize I've been doing this part of the production process wrongly for the last week. I will have to go back and fix about forty hours worth of tiny errors across two different books.
I decide it's time to relent for the sake of my Mental Health but I skip the Walk.
Around the living room window golden sunlight shapes move as the leaves casting the shadows are moved by the wind. Incense smoke twists and vanishes above the windowsill. Dust gathers under the chairs. I try to count and breathe at the same time like they tell you to.
Another Crab's Treasure was released on April 25th, 2024 on the Windows PC, Sony PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, and Microsoft Series line of consoles. It was developed and published by Aggro Crab Game. Before Another Crab's Treasure Aggro Crab Games published Subway Midnight (2021) and developed Going Under (2020.) Two games I promise to play once I finish Animal Well.
I'm going to go out on a limb and assume based on the developer's name that this title was the one they've had in the oven the longest. Its position as a magnum opus is entirely earned.
Another Crab's Treasure is a triumph in the world of the Soulslike; it repudiates the anti-political game, it repudiates the impersonal game, and it makes itself understood without sacrificing originality. Another Crab's Treasure relinquishes nothing. It is beautiful—its claws are beautiful.
Another Crab's Treasure subverts its inspiration by going wild with color, personality, good jokes, and innocently genius music. However, and this is the most important part of this review, Another Crab's Treasure subverts itself by going so much deeper and darker than the Souls, or the Soulslikes, have yet dared.
The Soulslike genre is named for a single developer's oeuvre. It represents a broadly popular swath of the body of work of Japanese developer From Software. Creators of King's Field, Armored Core, and, of course, Dark Souls. Dark Souls is a dark, fantasy action game, the first or second in a series of three or five or seven titles depending on who's counting.
The impact of From Software's output feels like it can't be overstated. Souls crept in and fed Gaming the most exquisitely bitter medicine it's ever been made to swallow. We've been reeling ever since. It contains within its Game Design DNA answers to questions which the Art of Game Design both knew it should be asking and which it did not yet realize it even could ask. How should an interactive medium "tell" a "story"? What constitutes a multiplayer game? How responsible is the player for their own experience?
Souls did not change everything—but anything it did change was changed completely and forever. Even the most recent mainline Super Mario game of all things contains a Souls mechanic or two, so, maybe I'm still underselling it after all.
Meaningfully, the way this shakes out is a lot of games quoting mechanics directly, retrieving the goodies you drop when you die from the spot where you died; save points dotted around a map that allow you to heal, level up and respawn enemies; a dodgy/blocky/animation-trading battle system. These mechanics are good. Yes, they are Good. However, within Souls, not deep down but not always on the surface, is a confident literary stance that somehow also informs the tuning of the gameplay as well. The world is deep and the mechanical interaction the player experiences with it feel inevitably appropriate for it, what I mean is, Dark Souls is a world so well realized that it can only be touched and felt on its own terms.
From Software's influence will reach even farther into the future than we can say now. The shadows cast by the fires of Souls are long. One of these shadows has resolved itself into Another Crab's Treasure. This game is proudly and vocally a Soulslike, or "Shoalslike." From the direct in-game references ("The Sands Between," Solaire's outfit, the loading screen tip which reads "this is a Soulslike.") to the fundamental structure and aesthetic (Yes! The aesthetic is From! We'll get into that later...) Another Crab's Treasure is committed to entering into dialog with From Software by envoking specific references and tropes even while transcending them. The cast, for example, the characters who follow your adventure have grim hopes and their lightly sketched backstories help to nestle within and further the themes. And yet! They are lively, endearing, even touching. Another Crab's Treeasure pulls off what it sets out to do, and goes beyond it, with such brilliance and heart that it earns the right to shout "Here I am! Put me on the shelf in-between Elden Ring and whatever's NEXT."
Another Crab's Treasure is the story of Kril, a hermit crab whose shell is seized by a tax collector. He's informed that because he's failed to pay taxes to "the duchess," his home, a pink conch shell, is forfeit to the state. Shucked and forgotten, Kril sets off from his tiny tide pool to get his home back. The motivations are concise and relatable.
As the player, controlling Krill, sets off, they quickly adopt a hermit's paranoia of the outside world. The Shallows, the game's first largish area is skulked about by dangerous predators and other crabs. Some of the crabs seem off, they are violent and totally nonvocal. This is a Talking Animals Story afterall, so seeing other creatures behave aggressively, growling and striking out, is subversive and scary. Kril does not understand. He wields a tiny crab fork like a sword and presses on. But a hermit crab is vulnerable without his shell. At the sandcastle gate, the lobster guards tell us we can't meet the duchess without a shell and are sent to retrieve one from a reliable source.
To the east of the sandcastle is a submerged soda machine. We see it from a sandy hillside. We approach. Pressing a button ejects a number of soda cans which drift, empty, to the sea floor.
Here's where the primary theme of the game, glimpsed throughout the intro, finally takes center stage: the ocean, the world, is irrecoverably polluted yet we must live in it.. We must wear the trash as our shell. It's a heartbreaking spectacle, one that's existed before this game; a hermit crab harbored in a piece of trash. It feels like the dark inevitability of mankind itself.
Meaningfully, the game never really talks about humans or our involvement. It leaves the unspoken in the air to hover over every moment we spend in this filthy ocean. That I, the plastic-loving, controller holding, canned food consuming primate, am part of the alien force that dumped the poison here in the first place.
But here is where the game builds its themes: the crabs, like us, see all the metal and plastic and chemicals as value. These cans, in fact, belong to someone. It's under guard! In fact, the biggest, meanest lobster warrior yet is here to add Kril to the row of staked crab corpses lining the area. He will be displayed flayed—with the other thieves.
Nephro, Captain of the Guard, is our first boss. He announces himself with a scream of "CLAWS OFF LAWBREAKER!" He speaks briefly about the necessity of upholding the law. Genius-Brained players will notice: for a second time in a short period the might of the State has been leveraged against our boy Krill. He is persecuted for needing and finding a place to live. But this ain't a tax collector, this is a cop (a Cop Lobster) and he's ready to kill.
This is it, Aggro Crab. If you've really got what it takes to inherit 'that which thy fathers have bequeathed thee' you've got to stick the landing on the bosses. We need to feel the pressure! Souls' greatest, possibly, expression of its battle mechanics, arguably, the designers skill in characterization, seemingly, and epitome of world-building, possibly, are the bosses. Bosses represent the largest actors in the story of the world. They are the forces that shaped it into the adventure setting we players experience. Boss Monsters are the designers' avatars the way that the Kril is ours.
Good news! Nephro is perfect. Beginning with his introduction, he's voiced by the powerful Gianni Matragrano who also voices Roland; he cries and hollers, just like a cop. In the cut scene his voice becomes far away as the camera cuts around the scene. This struck me as a somewhat sophisticated joke., but it may be the result of the game's sound distance systems working automatically with the in-game rendered cutscene. Choosing to leave something in rather than change it still deserves credit. It was a moment of "Oh, this game might be... really good."
Kril wants to talk rather than fight, but the Cop Lobster won't budge.
The fight begins. There's a stagger gauge! When the cutscene ends we are in control of Kril and tense up while Nephro, animated like a centaur, gallops towards us. He brandishes a straw and dome lid from a slushy cup as a lance. The music begins. As if to emphasize the waiting and the dread, this boss' track begins with a ticking like a clock—and a dull roar.
Nephro moves fast when charging ahead, but takes slow, wide arcs when turning, much like the mounted swordsmen in Elden RIng. It's when he's most vulnerable, but it is my own vulnerability which grinds my brain to a halt. The split-second choice the Another Crabs Treasure player will make a million times is here blaring through your nervous system before you have ever had to choose it before. This is another moment, like the introduction, like the vocal performance, where the difficult-to-please Souls-player will realize what they have on their hands.
The designers have initiated a game-long (indeed, genre-long) dialog with the player about whether they ought to dodge an incoming attack, or if it were better to focus on blocking that attack. The choice we make, the personality test which calculates in aggregate what our nerve-endings have always known are the steps which any true
As Nephro, Captain of the Guard, galloped closer and closer I could see he dwarfed me in every way. His lance is easily five Krills long and he gallops like a warhorse. My eyes grew wide. I thought, "Oh shit. The first boss is General Radahn."
The day passes into evening quickly. We eat Chipotle for dinner (beef burrito with rice, beans, and vegetables—no guac) and watch an episode of that new Doctor Who (Ncuti Gatwa might be my favorite Doctor already.) I return to Nephro.
He beats me again and again. I had Nephro's health down really low a couple times. I figure with a higher attack power and I'd have him. Sensing the unexplored edges of the map in the corner of my mind's eye, I make my way away from the boss arena. I think about grinding some microplastics, the game's equivalent to souls, to trade to improve my stats. The player can collect as many microplastics as they like by killing the enemies that respawn every time they rest.
I observe another idea while I explore and think over the boss: You can't enter the castle without a shell, you can't get a shell (empty can) without triggering the Nephro fight, and you can't run from the fight. You have to put him down. Therefore, you don't get to explore the world and experiment with the shells until you Kill The Cop. This is clever. It solidifies the barrier between "Prologue" and "Early Game," between the letters A and B, alphabetically. Game-mechanically: there is Shell and pre-Shell.
I explore The Shallows. I kill a bunch of crabs and tiny fish, literally small fries. I encounter a terrifying optional boss in a Grim Reaper lobster carrying a a bike lock and razor blade rigged as a make-shift guillotine which he swings like a hammer. Like a Guilty Gear character. I trade my plastics and return, slightly buffer, to Nephro. He continues to wreck me, shrieking, "Your FILTHY SOUL is DESTINED for The DRAIN!" every time I die. I love him but my blood pressure is rising. It's past midnight.
"This might be the kind of boss," says my boyfriend at my side, "you die to over and over again and then beat the first try the next day." He is right of course. I consider him, for all my devotion to the games, to be the sole Souls authority in our house.
I shut it down. I take a walk and check my work messages.
I lay awake for about two hours staring at the Dark. I think about how I'm going to afford health insurance on top of everything else. I think about the plastic in the water. I try to count and breathe at the same time like they tell you to.
In Another Crab's Treasure we experience the ocean by living as a creature on the seafloor, a member of what a marine biologist might call the benthic community. In fact, I don't think you have a conversation with a single fish in the game. No, Inkerton is a squid but he's debased himself. The storytelling utterly focuses on the bottom dwellers and their experience with the trash that rains down on them—the trash that never stops coming down and entering their bodies before they even know it.
Once we've bested Nephro, Kril has time to wonder aloud: "T-that was self-defense, right? That's gotta be self-defense. Anyone would agree. He came at me like a crazy guy! What was I supposed to do?"Then, the current of the game's story carries us forward.
We meet the Duchess, she's horrible and scene-chewing and iconic. We acquire the brilliant fishhook grappling hook mechanic and go flying high above the seafloor. Kril can't swim exactly but his jump includes a Yoshi-like hover that can extend his reach a bit. A combination of the hover, the grappling hook, and the aerial attack or dodge comprise the platforming schema.
We next meet the MoonSnail who acts as a Souls-ish Firekeeper, explaining magic (called "Umami") and the checkpoint system to us as well as providing a place to upgrade the Skill Tree.
Another Crab's Treasure utilizes a Skill Tree system to activate certain gameplay mechanics and provide bonuses to the player. When the player destroys purple crystals out in the game world, or kills a boss or extra hard enemy, they receive a few "Umami Crystals." These crystals pay for Skill Tree Upgrades. This expands Kril's abilities, in some cases activating what will come to feel like totally necessary mechanics, like the parry or air dodge. This is critical: you can gather as many microplastics to raise your stats as you like from fighting enemies but each area contains a set number of Umami Crystals. The Skill Tree cannot be completed without progressing the plot.
There is no Dark Souls game with a skill tree (although, they appear in Sekiro.) In the Souls series the player acquires new abilities by either equipping a weapon that allows them to perform a certain action or by finding or purchasing new magic spells. While a player uses their Souls currency to level up attributes that may be necessary to utilize certain spells or equipment, there's no map to progression they're investing in. The point is, because Another Crab's Treasure is so dedicated to being a Soulslike I feel any addition or subtraction from the formula is an invitation to consider value.
Was adding a Skill Tree to Another Crab's Treasure a good idea? Is it ever? Maybe. It metes out skills and upgrades at a pace controlled by the designers. And it feels good when you unlock a new skill. It makes the good noise; it satisfies The Lizard. But, see it in the inverse: they made a character with a wealth of nuanced and intricate moves and then chopped them all off one by one and stuck on price tags. Would a fighting game do this? Imagine selecting Ken or Ryu in Street Fighter and you can only punch, you have to progress a plot to unlock kicks. Maybe that sounds absurd, even selfish ("But I want my upgrades NOW!") But that's only if you think of them as upgrades and not as indispensable parts of a whole. I guess they aren't indispensable though, huh? I mean, I did play most of this game without them.
Honestly, when I see a Skill Tree I feel like I'm seeing a Flow Chart. Flow Charts make me think of work and work makes me imagine meetings in a room with a dry erase board. Drawn on the board is the Skill Tree. Thus, I behold a Design Document rather than a Design. A map rather than a landscape. I feel like you were supposed to make a game around this, not just stick it in the game for me to see.
But this is the same puritanical tyrant inside me that insists that there should be no sequels, that everything needs to just be new and let the old thing stay itself (we'll get into that if I ever review a Metroid.) So, I could just be over thinking what is obviously the perfect solution to preventing bloat by having a gillion pieces of armor and items that have to be considered, art designed, modeled, implemented, and then placed by a designer somewhere in the game world. Instead, they just have to design a place for Umami Crystals in the game world. Plus, Kril won't have to keep equipping and unequipping... And I get to Delight The Lizard.
Perhaps I've been inhaling too much second-hand Super Smash Brothers Melee, but I dream of a cutting edge action game with complete and complex movement and fighting right from the word go. But like I said, it seems selfish and tyrannical in the case of Another "Better-Than-Hollow-Knight" Crab's Treasure; which delivers cutting edge action and satisfying progression, Lizard or no.
It's about tea-time and I think I've killed about five-hundred stormtroopers with reflected blaster shots alone.
The sun has finally set. I'm not yet accustomed to the world still being bright and hot at 8pm but the late-Spring Atlanta night has finally, cracklingly settled. My livingroom's colorful smart bulb is set to Vibe. Dust gathers under the chairs and I think about Another Crab's Treasure while nearly one-hundred percenting Star Wars Jedi: Survivor (gun to my head I would not have guessed that's where they chose to put the colon in that title.) My little hero character, Cal, his, robot and his weapons are fully customized and gleaming as I hop him around a planet collecting even more customization options.
I enter a fight with a small group of enemies. They are indefatigable in their screaming. They scream at me, each other, when no one is around they will tirelessly soliloquise. The combat is sometimes like watching performers who work well together. They are practiced. My character and the enemies do not chaotically crash into one another, but rather they snap into place to enact complex fight choreography. It's stiff but some of the animations are cool. Dragging a stormtrooper forward to hover in a vice-like force-grip and then lightsaber gut stabbing them feels great. I think about Krill and the crabs.
Star Wars Jedi: Survivor is technically also a Soulslike. It's got Souls-adjacent aspirations. It's all here, retrieving the goodies you drop when you die from the spot where you died; save points dotted around a map that allow you to heal, level up and respawn enemies; a dodgy/blocky/animation-trading battle system. I think about it's heart though. Some of this writing is so dull; our hero Cal may be the least charismatic Star Wars protagonist of all time. He gets going as a character a bit more towards the end of this, his second game. But let's be honest, his existence, his very name, were created just to make Kyle Katarn redundant and keep him out of the Canon. The enemies do have stagger gauges though.
As Cal, I grapple to a distant point and then wall-run to double-jump to climb to air-dodge through a forcefield which recharges my air-dodge, then time out three more controller inputs before he lands on a ledge and opens a box to reveal a set of five new lightsaber paint colors. I leave him on that ledge and make a PB&J. At some point it starts to rain outside.
I think the platforming in Another Crab's Treasure is superb. I miss it, now that it's over, even the wild little off-the-beaten-path challenge courses in the final area of the game. It lands somehwere between the formality of Star Wars Jedi: Surviver and the ebullience of Pseudoregalia.
Some game players' hands and eyes might tell them that bumping, bouncing, and sometimes soft-locking is "jank" and then those same game players' will say that this is bad and the game has "bad platforming" but they would be wrong. The "jank" here isn't "jank," it's Honest Motion.
Have you ever stood on one foot? If you're not a yogi or a flamingo then when you think about standing on one foot, then you aren't thinking about standing on one foot, you're thinking about wobbling. You're leaning too far, you're over correcting, your hands and arms are swinging around to out-gravity gravity. The complex systems of body muscles, inner-ear gyroscopics, and nervous system relays are tap-dancing inside trying not to prevent any movement at all outside. This is Responsible Motion. The player is Responsible for their Actions. It's the ugly reality that an Assassin's Creed one-button platforming lies to you about. It's evidence of a game that wants you to play it, not a game that wants you to passively spectate its character animation. And sometimes, you will fall and fall far.
I think about the accessory (which the game calls a stowaway because most of them are tiny animals and they are supposed to be sort of hiding out in or on your shell) that you can equip that prevents you from taking damage by falling. When Krill falls off a ledge into the universal Don't Land Here Bottomlessnesses of Video Land he reappears seconds later on the last bit of firm footing he possessed before he fell. In a Zeldian gesture the game docks a bit of health from the player for the slip up. If you equip this stowaway, a styrofoam packing peanut you can purchase using microplastics, you do not lose any health when you fall. However, in the options menu there quietly awaits an accessibility feature that provides the same effect. It does not use up one of your stowaway slots nor does it have to be earned through gameplay.
Like the Skill Tree, does a lack of (explicit) Accessibility Features in the Souls games represent an invitation to ruminate on its inclusion in Another Crab's Treasure? Yes.
Well, as Noah Caldwell-Gervais points out in his mandatory-viewing-in-my-house video essay on the subject, the Souls series does in fact ship with a kind of sliding difficulty. Because you can equip and spec your character however you like with broadly varying builds and loadouts,you can really make those games extra difficult for yourself or you can play in a way that maximizes your advantages. Is this the same as a clearly worded and findable menu option? Not at all. But it comes to mind when ruminating on the comparison.
I was not above a degree of Old Man's Grumpiness about having menu options in games to reduce challenge for a short time in my life (pre-COVID, let's say), but I'm not about to talk smack on accessibility today. The first System Shock had difficult tuning options across literally four different vectors; and reader, neither of us alone are as smart as Doug Church and Warren Spector combined so let's just leave it at that.
OK, so, what am I thinking about? I'm thinking about this little piece of styrofoam. I'm thinking about how two different reviews I read, a close personal friend, AND my close personal boyfriend—under my own roof—all professed to utter goblinization when faced with a jumping puzzle. Here's another Souls-Crab difference: the pause menu pauses. Gameworld action totally halts like Super Mario Brothers when you enter the menu screen. Therefore, it would be quite easy for an honorless wastrel to pause the game, apply either the styrofoam stowaway OR the No Fall Damage option, unpause, and experience a free pass on what would be a pitifully minor loss of HP. It's just the fastest way. I learned about this little move after beating the game. Do I think it makes me better than these people that it never once occurred to me to do this? Of course I think so, but I have very little pride normally so I need this.
I needed to ask, why include the styrofoam packing peanut stowaway accessory in the first place? Why should I pay with my hard-won microplastics for something that will use up one of my accessory slots when I could just flip a switch? But I think I know now: I think it's for role-play.
But what role am I playing? Is my darling crabboy Kril stuffing a loose packing peanut into his shell within the literal fiction of Another Crab's Treasure? Am I embodying a character when I use the pause menu to change my equipment? Let me tell you one thing I did purchase and use the styrofoam packing peanut when I played it. I used it for the hard platforming section because I wanted to fail as often as I needed to without having to schlep all the way back from the save point when I ran out of healing items and faced A Watery Grave. Maybe doggedly pursuing a goal and making due with the tools available is something like Kril. I don't know, but I loved those sections.
No, I am role-playing. I'm role-playing the Idea of Being A Good Game-Player. I am calmly Following the Rules and Earning My Way. Maybe all this is is the acceptable, natural reverse of using Accessibility Options to play games. I am playing the way I want to and the outcomes of my triumphs feel good to me. Maybe there's a difference between feeling like a role-player and feeling like a performer... the realization makes me feel a little thin, like a man who suddenly learns he's only semi-visible, ghostlier than solid. How do your hobbies make you feel about how you feel about how you do your hobbies? Something to hold onto for later.
Poor Cal "Star Wars Guy" Kestis—I run him off the ledge over and over until his HP is spent and he warps back to the checkpoint. It's just the fastest way to return to the checkpoint.
The world of Another Crab's Treasure is a ruin of filth and Gunk stands in for all the chemical horrors of the ruined Earth. Gunk is a congealed mess of pollutants that looks like spilled oil. It runs like a heavy liquid, an ichor, across the seafloor forming little rivers and streams. The game capitalizes the word, Gunk. When it appears in dialog boxes the letters have a special color and effect applied to them. We learn all we need to learn about Gunk from the second boss fight: the confrontation with the Duchess.
When we finish with the Moon Snail we are given the power to warp between save points, the Moon Shells, so we teleport ourselves back to the Shallows. We exit the arrival shell and look around.
Something is off. The music is straining. The theme is there but skeletal, uncertain. As we approach the duchess's sandcastle we see... is this fog? Something... clouding the water. Sand? At the gate a title appears across the screen to name the new area as usual, but it's grown uncertain. "Slacktide Castle?"
The front gate has been demolished. It seems the entire castle has endured a pummeling. The same lobster guard who chided you for being "naked" when you first approached has glowing purple eyes... just like other polluted creatures you've faced. She attacks! The lobster guards move and fight like Nephro, but with less health and hitting power. As Krill we find our way over the parapets and into the castle proper. All the guards, crabs and lobsters, have gone mad and will attack on sight. Eventually we find our way to the throne room to face the Duchess.
Kril wants to talk rather than fight. "H-hey, I don't know if you noticed. But your guards are going nuts out there!" She knows. Vomiting Gunk nearly constantly, the Duchess rants that their minds are clearer than ever, that life is pointless and that she ordered them to attack the castle. She wants to tear it all down. The Duchess thought her kingdom was beautiful but now she sees it as a transient thing, nothing like the reefs, destined to wash away. Well, it IS a sandcastle. But there's something else going on here. Something has got into her head.
"But of course, my worthless life will wash away as easily as any other... almost as easily as yours, little hermit!"
A boss health bar appears at the top of the screen, "Magista, Tyrant of Slacktide." She attacks. One of her moves is to vomit a huge puddle of Gunk. It pools for several long seconds on the battlefield and will fill a poison meter at the bottom of the screen. When filled, the player becomes "Gunked," their health drains for a period of time and movement is sharply slowed. This is noteworthy, and very gross.
When she's defeated the castle feels quieter. We might take a moment here, with hindsight, to engage in some lore theoretical speculation: I think Magista, due to her position of power, was an early failure of Praya Dubia to expose a mind to the "agony of the ocean" and it broke her. Or maybe the "agony" is transmitted to anyone who gets sufficiently Gunked? Or maybe it has nothing to do with Praya. Or maybe it's the Gunk itself. We'll talk about this a bit more later but rest assured, we're playing Dark Souls now, baby.
As Kril frets above the body of the Duchess (another kill!) that "tax collector" appears with our shell and taunts us onward to New Carcinia, the reef city of the crabs. On the way meet Firth, the sniveling little opportunist—on the road. And get side-tracked with some shockingly fun platforming. The platforms lead to the city.
New Carcinia is two tiered, home to all the important shops and replete with TWO banger music tracks. It is the main location we will return to for the rest of the game. Exploring it the first time we meet some of the citizens of the city, all excellent and worthy of exhausting their dialog. We discover the "tax collector" is a tiny tyrant, a pawnshop owner who will sell our shell back to us for 999,999,999 microplastics. Unfortunately, you probably won't save up that amount. Although, I'm sure if the scene exists, it's hilarious and interesting. I don't have the drive to collect those plastics and looking it up on YouTube IS cheating.
Soon, a kind of main villain appears with Roland and precipitates the main hook: a hunt for pieces of a "map" (maze on the back of a cereal box) which will lead to a Fabulous Treasure. Well, in a world where everyone is either dead broke or utterly bourgeoisie, we all want the treasure. It's a fine little plot. It starts and ends more or less during the course of the game, it gets us along to the various areas of the game as well as seeking The Lords' Souls/Great Runes ever did, it gives the various characters something to react to to express their individuality. I don't buy treasure hunts, but that's not worth discussing. For Kril it means getting back to having his shell and being alone in it. He remains true to his Hermit nature.
Along the road we meet Chitan, a total badass warrior lobster. She calls us vagabond and we look forward to our periodic conversations with her and the cutscenes she shows up in. Nemma, Shoal, and several other characters pop up on our journey, clearly this is kind of a buddy road trip with all our little crab friends along for the ride. On the edge of a ledge halfway up a putrid oil barrel Nemma remarks that all the killing we're doing... those are people. This sticks out to me.
Ok, we reach Roland's hideous company town full of suffering crab workers. Here, Firth ruminates on how someone needs to tell Roland about the deadly and degrading working conditions at his factory as surely he'll fix things up. The workers here are trapped and the Gunk is actively causing them to lose their minds. Pain upon pain, humiliation upon humiliation, poisons within poisons. Surely Roland just didn't know it got so bad.
Eventually, we will fight Roland, quite spectacularly, on the board of a jangling pinball machine that teeters on the edge of the Drain. A cartoon pirate treasure chest is pulled by crane up from the deep, Roland stands on it and taunts the townspeople. Kril leaps up to shut his mouth and tips the pinball cabinet. Everyone falls into the dark together.
It's the weekend. The mayor of my city has declared a State of Emergency over the rupture of, what was it? Five water mains all bursting within 24 hours of one another. For about twenty-four hours we have zero water pressure and what water we can get has to be boiled before use. We were just within the edge of the affected area. I watch videos of water gushing up out of the sidewalk downtown. The streets flood with water. My partner returns home with a case of bottled water. I pick at the plastic lid.
The Drain is a deep, dark ravine on the ocean floor. It represents the kind of thoughtful story-telling that's snuck in alongside the delightful gameplay and charming art. The Drain, despite being the open maw consuming the ocean of Gunk we cross to reach it, predates the Gunk. The priest refers to it as the Holy Land. It is clearly the foci of any spiritual talk you come across in the game. From Topoda to the Moon Sail, there is talk about how everything in the world is a part of a great spiral, everything has to journey to the center of it to die and make room for new living things. This natural spiritualism is frankly the perfect faith for animals in the ocean. Kril's journey away from his secluded tidepool is also a journey away from narrow, materialist thinking. He enters the dark and comes out better understanding his fellow creatures.
But first, he must awaken alone in the dark.
At the bottom of the Drain we are shell-less and friendless. A terrifying voice speaks to Kril from out of the dark. The voice is harsh and many-layered; it is genderless and bodiless. This is Praya Dubia. They accost us directly about what we must do now that the ocean is turning to acid, now that the world is going mad. No one seems to hear them but us.
And out of the darkness, Firth. He's shrieking his hatred towards us for getting him into this mess. He stands before the Treasure. It is a stereotypical pirate's booty-type chest. Here on the deep sea floor it's busted open to reveal an amount of wadded up hundred dollar bills which in real life would be paralyzing to look at. Firth declares it was all a waste, nothing usable here! Just wet paper!
Shortly, Nemma rescues us from a horde of mad pale crabs. She mentions when we wake up that we were pretty badly Gunked. Hindsight lore theoretician again: do we hear the voice of Praya Dubia now that we've been Gunked so severely? Do they, the fish and crabs we've been fighting this whole time, hear the voice too? Did The Duchess hear this voice?
The deeper we go into "The Unfathom" the older the trash is, ancient 80s-huge cell phones, an atari, VHS tapes. We are going back in time. There are more gameplay surprises and delights here than I can get into: the False Moon, the diegetic acknowledgement that the main character can teleport, the H.G. Wells-ian deathray striders, the Inkerton fight!
Kril's personal journey into the spiral eventually leads to old Carcinia. The "ancient" kingdom which Shale, the old man who runs the New Carcinia museum, reveals he remembers. Carcinia, the old Carcinia, at its height of power is where he's from. And he wants to return. This killed me. Shale wants to venture into the horrors and dangers of Carcinia to find the Perfect Whorl, a magical Umami artifact created by the old Hermit Crab sourcerors. He believes Kril could use it to, what, fix pollution? It could at least help New Carcinia, which becomes heartbreakingly more and more Gunked as you continue to return there in the late game.
Carcinia is the kind of failed kingdom that creates the most breathtaking ruins. There are floating chunks of castlesque carved styrofoam floating over the deepest dark. Disintegrating Farum Azula. This is where the optional obstacle course drove me to acquire and use the Styrofoam Packing Peanut, apropos in a styrofoam kingdom. It is my favorite area for level design and enemy encounters in the game, and its final boss, "Camtscha, the Bleached King," puts up a brutal and thrilling fight.
This close to the center of the Great Spiral, the pollution is not only of the environment but of spirituality. You encounter more of those glowing purple spirit-like entities that speak to you of death in the voice of Praya Dubia. Hopelessness in the face of climate destruction. Praya declares that if the ocean has a god then they are it and the only prayers they hear are screams. It shook me. It makes me stop and think about spiritual pain as a broadly unexamined aspect of environmental destruction. The magical cartoon hermit crab and I are faced with the same horror. What the fuck am I supposed to do with my knowledge of microplastics and forever chemicals? They are in my blood too—behind my eyeballs too.
This is how Another Crab's Treasure builds on Dark Souls. In Souls the Age of Dark is a sort of imagined New Era for the gloomy, metal world of Lordran. It's associated with humanity. The corruption, the curse of undeath, is a notion in the make-em'-up lands of fantasy. An interesting idea to wrap a world around—which itself is a wrapper for extremely good sword combat.
However, If at any point you believe I would flatten Dark Souls' presentation or story, let me be clear about this: Another Crab's Treasure only reaches the depths of nuance it does because From Software has been doing the excavating these many years. Dark Souls is fundamentally a story about how the privileged and wealthy fuck over everyone else and now we have to live with their consequences. But in my world... an Age of Dark, one strongly associated with a difficult-to-quantify element called "Humanity"... we call it Anthropocene. Where the rains are acid, the plastics are micro, and the chemicals are forever.
I see a news update on my phone, another water main has burst. This one's only a block from my house. I try to count and breathe at the same time like they tell you to.
At the back of the boss arena is a full on toilet, it is the throne room afterall. We flush ourselves and end up at the true depths. A dark realm hemmed in by mountains of dead crab, a landscape of corpses. A glittering, shining thread, a thread that must mean hope, curves gracefully through the water above our heads and away like the Yellow Brick Road. The thread is the body Praya Dubia. A siphonophoric colonial life form, one from many. Praya dubia is real and can be found all around the world. I encourage you to look up. They are massive, strange, and otherworldly.
At the center of the dark, sandy necropolis is the Whorl. The Whorl is spotlight illuminated on a pillar, interior rainbow color lights it like a gaming rig. The shining thread has led me right to it.
You know what happens next, I hope so anyway if you're reading this. The false double-cross. The murder of Shoal. The rescue of Chitan. Here is the smartest, more delicate and controlled writing. Chitan admits that Praya used her anger to control her but she never lets it go. She does not go on to say "I was wrong to have no much anger in my heart." No, Praya used her anger but her anger is Her's. It really is righteous. She tells Kril to take it, to use it. We fight Praya Dubia.
Praya Dubia dies as they lived: hysterical with justified hysterics, powerful with impotent powers, terrified of deep terrors. We avoid a storm of Umami blasts while the Agony of the Ocean's HP bar slowly empties on its own. Inevitable.
What's next is also inevitable: the appearance of a true evil in this universe: the shrill, optimistic entrepreneur. The person who looks at the ugliness of this world and thinks "Tragic of course, but we can make it work for us." Firth takes the Perfect Whorl and becomes the Avatar of Waste. The wretch. His characterization remains pitch-perfect, if a tiny bit Twitter-brained. But, of course, boys like this really do talk like this.
He dies by the sword. The Perfect Whorl dies with him. In a way that's true to the rules of the game world, his shell takes too much damage and breaks. Kril manages to use the last of its juice to explode the plummeting island of trash and save New Carcinia from being crushed. We wake up in an alleyway.
The city is choked with garbage, driving the population ever closer to Full Gunkhood. Of course, they are celebrating: for them it's raining money. To the people this means they got their treasure after all. It's a melancholy scene as we slowly walk through the streets of the lower city. We see the homeless hermit, we share a few words with Nemma and walk on. Past the pills of plastics and foam, the crashed R/C car, and the puddles of Gunk there's the prawnshop and its scummy proprietor. Our final kill.
The shell we started out chasing we give to the homeless hermit. Kril, without a place he's ready to call home, leaves New Carcinia. He is without a shell. Krill walks into legend carrying only his fork and sorcery, becoming the vagabond Chitan clocked from the start. It's a relief that the world is increasingly admitting that violence itself was never the problem. Sometimes you need to deal with the tyrants.
There are some players who've expressed distaste that we don't fix everything by the end. They flatten their own opportunity for Proper Despair by reframing it as kind of Consumer's Indignation for an Unsatisfying Ending. Well, let's not yet let these tenderhearts see Romeo and Juliet—they'd tear down The Globe Theatre in the name of User Satisfaction.
But what now? Did you think Kril would solve pollution? Not a chance. We have to live in the mess our forefathers bequeathed us. We have to suffer the consequences, and, as Nemma says, "Survive."
JRW 2024