See A Crab Use Cans As Its Armor In New Dark Souls Inspired Crab Game

Inspired by what?

By Jason Collins | Published

This article is more than 2 years old

another crabs treasure

We already reported on a SimCity-inspired video game featuring beavers reclaiming the world from humanity, so it’s only natural for the gaming community to receive a video game about a crab trying to reclaim its shell. However, Another Crab’s Treasure, developed by an indie developer Aggro Crab, is inspired by an entirely different video game — FromSoftware’s Dark Souls. Just how well the hermit crab gameplay will fit with Dark Souls combat mechanics remains to be seen, but the odd mixture got our interests piqued. You can see the trailer below:

The game was announced during Nintendo’s Indie World stream on Wednesday and revolves around a hermit crab traversing the ocean floor. However, as reported by Polygon, the Another Crab’s Treasure’s protagonist lacks a seashell for bodily protection, so it uses whatever the sea provides, including but not limited to cans, cups, and whatever it can loot from the corpses of its enemies. The announced game will be a satirical take on the “Soulslike” genre, a brand of action games inspired by the FromSoftware Souls series, which includes 2015’s Bloodborne — a game whose unique combat system made it into Elden Ring.

Aggro Crab jokingly called the game “Shellslike”during the reveal, which showed a courageous hermit crab battling other crustaceans armed with manmade sea trash — an entertaining pointer to a growing problem of trash polluting the world’s oceans. Another Crab’s Treasure will, for better or for worse, maintain a challenging difficulty of the Soulslike games, as gamers battle the ocean floor residents with all sorts of manmade trash and over 50 potentially salvageable items as temporary shells. Of course, the crabs will also be equipped with their claws, which makes them perfect ocean-floor combatants.

This means that gamers won’t need a Nintendo Switch console or the newly released Nintendo Switch Sports to inflict extensive damage to their personal property — an anger-fueled rampage inspired by the growing difficulty of the Soulslike genre will do the trick just as well. In the end, the internet is filled with rage-quit footage of gamers playing FromSoftware games, so we have to ask: is this game a danger to personal property and the mental wellbeing of gamers? Well, it remains to be seen.

It’s worth noting that Another Crab’s Treasure isn’t Aggro Crab’s first game; its first game was 2020’s Going Under, a satirical take on a dungeon crawler genre set in the abandoned offices of a failed tech startup, or “the cursed ruins” of the aforementioned startup — as the game’s synopsis reads. However, instead of using manmade trash polluting the ocean floor, Going Under protagonists used office junk as weapons for attack and defense.

Apart from the details we mentioned here, there isn’t much info surrounding the announced game. The only discernable details pertained to the Soulslike gameplay, a studio that makes a living by making parodies of the gaming industry’s popular genres, and a release window, for which we recommend adding another 6-12 months, accounting for massive delays plaguing the gaming industry. Another Crab’s Treasure will be released sometime in 2023 for Nintendo Switch and PC.