Another Crab’s Treasure review – the Dark Souls of kids’ games-GameCentral-Entertainment – Metro

Another Crab’s Treasure – down where it’s wetter (Picture: Aggro Crab)

For once a new Soulslike tries to do something different, with a clever new spin on the genre that mixes in platforming and cartoon logic.

For years now we’ve been baffled as to why every new Dark Souls clone copies not only the gameplay but also the setting and visuals. Surely the easiest way to distinguish yourself and avoid the most direct comparisons – that are almost certainly not going to go in your favour – is to at least make the games look different. But no, they’re always dark gothic fantasies and they always end up looking and playing worse than the original.

The best thing about Another Crab’s Treasure is that it realises what folly that is and instead offers a completely different setting: a cartoonish underwater world where crustaceans fight for the right to wear the most luxurious home on their back.

Another Crab’s Treasure not only doesn’t look like other Soulslikes but has gameplay elements that most others don’t either, with a lot more platforming than usual. And yet other aspects are much more familiar, including bonfire equivalents, collecting lost experience when you die, and ultra difficult boss battles. Well, maybe not ultra difficult…

Rather than the twee storytelling you might expect from the visuals, the game’s plot revolves around a hapless hermit crab called Kril having his shell repossessed by an actual loan shark. The story only gets darker from there, with pollution being an ongoing, and intractable, problem for the whole ocean and Kril suffering from crippling depression.

Not everything is as hopeless as that sounds but developer Aggro Crab has certainly tried to retain something of Dark Souls’ tone in the fact that evil has already triumphed before the game has even begun.

Kril’s first priority is finding a new shell, since without one he’s virtually defenceless. In keeping with the pollution theme, the shells you find are usually man-made. All of them have different functions too, from a rubber duck that can be thrown as a decoy, to a drinks can that allows you to shoot fizzy bubbles to a tennis ball that allows you to roll around at high speed and smash into enemies.

There’re 69 shells in total and while some of their abilities are just gimmicks they’re all interesting and varied. Even the ones that focus on defence don’t last forever though and the panicked search for a new one, once the current one expires, is always a thrill.

The combat system will be very familiar to Dark Souls veterans, since parries and dodge rolls are vitally important, but the range of attacking moves is surprisingly limited, even given Dark Souls was never one for combos, and generally the game is nowhere near as difficult as From’s games.

There’s no stamina bar but you do have the chance to stun an enemy once a separate meter has filled up, as a result of landing successful ordinary attacks. There’s also a neat twist with a grappling hook (which is actually a fishing line), which has multiple uses including snagging enemies, Mortal Kombat style, during battle via a fishing mini-game.

Another Crab’s Treasure – get busy with the fizzy (Picture: Aggro Crab)

The window for parries is unusually generous and while boss battles are definitely the hardest part of the game they’re far from impossible. The same can be said of the platforming, which can be tricky if you’re being shot at by enemies at the same time but is the one aspect that is unequivocally better than the weird, glitchy jumping of Dark Souls et al.

Rather than the platforming, the main irritations in the game are most due to the easily confused camera and a number of bugs, which make getting stuck inside scenery an unfortunately common problem. The hit detection is also unreliable, although since it works in both directions it more or less cancels itself out. Even so, the inconsistency is frustrating.

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The game’s simplicity, compared to more traditional Soulslikes, is most obvious in terms of customisation, which is quite limited. You’ve only got four different stats and there’s an actual map to make sure you don’t get lost. It’s not quite easy enough to work as a game for kids (and the script is surprisingly foul-mouthed and not nearly as funny as it thinks it is) but it’s certainly the ideal Soulslike to start with, if you’ve not played a similar game before.

Another Crab’s Treasure isn’t quite up to the quality of the very best of the genre, even if you take its simplistic combat as a positive, but the fact that it isn’t a straight clone of Dark Souls stands very much in its favour. The constant sea life-based puns aren’t very clever, but the shells and the other visual gags are. So don’t let the cartoonish visuals fool you: this is one of the most enjoyable and original Soulslikes for a very long time.

Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S, and PC
Price: £26.99
Publisher: Aggro Crab
Developer: Aggro Crab
Release Date: 25th April 2024
Age Rating: 12

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