It’s a bright, sunny day and Kril the hermit crab is chilling in a tide pool when a literal loan shark pops out of the water. He informs Kril that this beach has just been taken over by a duchess who is now imposing a tax on residents. Kril is unable to pay up, so the loan shark takes the crab’s shell as collateral, sending this otherwise conflict-averse crustacean into the open ocean to retrieve it.
Thus begins the story of Another Crab’s Treasure, released on April 25 by developer Aggro Crab. The undersea adventure that follows is one of the best Soulslike games in recent memory. A Soulslike, for the uninitiated, is a game that takes heavy inspiration from Dark Souls, the punishingly brutal, genre-defining game franchise by Japanese developer FromSoftware.
At a glance, the comparison seems befuddling. Whereas the worlds of FromSoftware’s games have been described as, well, dark, Another Crab’s Treasure is filled with cartoony aquatic critters who take more after the characters of Finding Nemo than the Lovecraftian monstrosities you’ll find in Dark Souls’s Lordran or Elden Ring’s the Lands Between.
But if video-game critics have learned anything in recent years, it’s that the most successful Soulslike don’t have to copy Dark Souls to the letter to craft an experience that resonates with its devoted fan base. A game like Lords of the Fallen may look like a game FromSoftware would make, with its hulking knights and crumbling castles, but it doesn’t play like one. While many Soulslikes are all show and no substance, the beauty of Another Crab’s Treasure — like Dark Souls’s before it — lies hidden beneath the surface.
Another Crab’s Treasure incorporates all the fundamental trappings of a Soulslike, including exploration-based gameplay, limited healing items, level-up currency that disappears upon death, and save points (“bonfiresâ€) where players respawn and restock their loadout. In truth, however, all of this is just window dressing for two secret ingredients that helped make Dark Souls the cultural phenomenon we know and love today: environmental storytelling and engaging, nail-biting combat.
Another Crab’s Treasure serves up both. Its combat, while not nearly as challenging as that in FromSoftware’s titles, revolves around the mechanics of switching shells (something hermit crabs do in real life!). Each shell has a different ability — Coke bottles can produce homing carbon bubbles, and sushi rolls can be eaten to regain health — and each has limited durability, meaning you’ll have to constantly switch out and try different playstyles.
Where much video-game combat can devolve into mindless button mashing, both Another Crab’s Treasure and Dark Souls give players a sense of agency with the limited durability of each shell encouraging them to go into fights with different equipment, abilities, and strategies. Outcomes aren’t determined by stats as much as skill, so when you finally overcome a hair-pulling challenge, you feel all the more elated.
Environmental storytelling is perhaps the most important, but frequently overlooked, aspect of the Dark Souls franchise and, indeed, FromSoftware’s output as a whole. Like the Legend of Zelda games before it, Dark Souls doesn’t guide players through levels with mini-maps or trails of shiny goodies. While rich with lore and intrigue, the story isn’t spelled out through cutscenes but must instead be pieced together by close-reading item descriptions and environmental clues like enemy and area design. (Players who rush through the levels without taking note of their surroundings will finish the game without knowing anything about the story, which is exactly why this aspect of Soulslikes can fly under the radar.)
Another Crab’s Treasure does use some cutscenes and dialogue, but its conceptual approach to world-building and storytelling remains close to its inspiration. It’s a game largely about pollution: Currency is called microplastics, and much of the ocean is infected with an oily plague (another Soulslike narrative staple) that turns the animals into bloodthirsty monsters. The pollution theme is explored not only in the game’s story (Kril ultimately resolves to fight the trash economy itself, rather than the loan sharks that profit off of it) but also in the design of its underwater world, which, from the structures its denizens live in to the weapons they attack you with and even the shells on Kril’s back, is almost entirely made of garbage discarded by us humans. In addition to the soda cans and sushi rolls, you and your opponents fight with rusty dinner forks and chopsticks.
Clues like these make the game’s setting feel real and lived in as opposed to fancy clothing hanging on a line of cold, static computer code. And by the time you enter the final stretch of the campaign, Another Crab’s Treasure evolves into something darker and more profound than the innocent Saturday-morning cartoon it originally presents itself as, delivering a message about the cost of environmental pollution that contrasts with the game’s jolly aesthetics and is genuinely haunting and tear-jerking. Just as there turned out to be more to the original Dark Souls than its memeable difficulty, so too is there much, much more to this little homeless hermit crab.