Another Crab's Treasure

Another Crab's Treasure is Aggro Crab's second game, a soulslike set in a polluted, collapsing undersea kingdom. You play Kril, a hermit crab whose proper shell has been repossessed by an oddly bureaucratic ocean society, and your quest to buy it back leads you through kelp forests, coral reefs, sandcastle cities and the unfathomable dark of the deep-sea trenches. The further down you go, the more it becomes clear that the trash strewn across every habitat isn't decoration — it's the thing slowly killing the ocean.

The central mechanical hook is shell improvisation. Real shells are scarce, so most of the game you're scavenging trash — bottle caps, soda cans, toy heads, takeout containers — to wear as a substitute, each with its own defensive stats, weight, weaknesses and special abilities. The Gunk, a mysterious infection tied to the omnipresent pollution, is the connective thread tying the ecological collapse to the story behind your missing home.

Combat follows soulslike conventions but is built around a tiny, fragile protagonist taking on enemies many times his size. Umami Techniques are powerful attacks learned from the sea's denizens — the Mantis Shrimp's punch, the Bobbit Worm's ambush, and a roster of other transferable creature abilities. Approachability is openly part of the design: assist options exist for newer soulslike players, the default game still provides a real challenge for genre veterans, and over fifty wearable shells plus way too many crabs (Aggro Crab's own term) round out the experience.