Video Game / Another Crab’s Treasure

A soulslike adventure set in a crumbling underwater world.

Another Crab's Treasure is a 2024 Soulslike RPG video game released by Seattle-based studio Aggro Crab.

You play as not a desperate waste from a dying world, but instead a humble and timid Hermit Crab by the name of Kril; who wakes up to find that his tidal pool has been annexed by a local despot known as the Duchy of Slacktide, and eventually finds his shell taken away from him in an attempt to get him to pay his back taxes; both things he has absolutely no idea about. Left vulnerable and afraid, Kril must pluck up courage and voyage into the deeper ocean beyond his tide pool, find his shell, and return home. But he has a lot to learn about the many, many dangers of the open ocean for a little hermit crab...and what the world above has done to it.

Unlike a lot of Soulsborne games, Another Crab's Treasure is actually a much more Lighter and Softer game with a more overtly comedic, satirical tone to its story and characters than its contemporaries, with gameplay and story elements that wouldn't seem out of place in games like SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom, and some combat elements that call to mind later releases of the The Legend of Zelda series. That doesn't mean it's any less tough, however, and its central gimmick revolves around the rapid use and recycling of various bits of ocean garbage to replace Kril's lost shell; each giving him different abilities based on whatever he's managed to scrounge up as a replacement home as he battles the many hopelessly insane crustaceous denizens of the deep.

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Another Crab's Treasure contains examples of:

• Achievement Mockery: One of the games achievements, "You fell off", is, of course, obtained by dying by falling into a bottomless pit.
• "Anger Is Healthy" Aesop: Played With at the climax of the story. After Kril is forced to enter the ocean to get his shell back, it's eventually revealed that he has a lot of repressed rage over having left his safe space and states that he misses the blissful ignorance of living in the tide pool. Near the end of the game, Chitan is possessed by the Praya Dubia, which wanted Kril to surrender to his anger so he would use the Perfect Whorl to destroy the world. After the fight, Chitan realizes she was only able to be possessed because she held on to her rage, but encourages Kril to use his anger to help others, rather than make things worse. He seems to take it to heart, because he doesn't just unleash his anger on Firth after he nabs the Perfect Whorl for himself, but also on Prawnathan when he refuses to reward him.
• Antepiece:
  • Before long in the game, you can encounter polluted hermit crabs that can hide under their shells, parry and use attacking maneuvers with their claws as well as rolling attacks. This serves as early practice for Petroch, the False Moon, who uses similar moves with the ability to summon Umami crystal spikes.
  • In The Old Ocean, you encounter more durable polluted crabs that are slower and stronger than crabs you've fought before. After depleting their health, they molt their thick, gnarled shells and become much faster and delicate to the point one strong attack can finish them. King Camtscha turns out to have a similar ability for his second phase.
• Anyone Can Die: As Lighter and Softer as is by genre standards, it's still a Soulsborne. By the end of the story, the only three major characters still confirmed alive are Kril, Tortellini, and Nemma. Every other major male character is dead, and who knows who else died in Trash Island's impact on New Carcinia. Fortunately, the post-credits epilogue reveals that Chitan survived her wounds from Praya Dubia's control and her duel with Kril, as she is shown training under Grovekeeper Topoda.
• Arc Symbol: A reoccurring motif in the story is the Spiral, described as an inevitable process where all living things begin on the edge of an enormous whirl that travels towards the center until it eventually ends before starting over—up to and including the world. This is represented visually both in the Big Bad, the Praya Dubia, which even identifies as the Spiral itself, but also in the Perfect Whorl, whose name literally refers to its spiralling shape.
• The Bad Guy Wins: Even though he himself doesn't live long enough to attempt to benefit, Firth's goal of dropping all of Trash Island at once on New Carcinia goes off without a hitch thanks to Kril being too focused on beating him to a pulp to realize this.
• Bittersweet Ending: With a heavy emphasis on "Bitter", almost borderlining a straight Downer Ending. The bad guys are all dead by Kril's claws and he ultimately reclaims his shell by brute force, but Kril loses both of his mentors, blames himself for destroying the Perfect Whorl in his fight with Firth and burying a hopelessly naive New Carcina in trash (thus speeding up the city's inevitable demise with its trash-based economy), and his whole worldview has soured to the point that he even questions if getting his shell back was worth this much trouble. But at the same time, Kril decides to try to do some good in the world and continues exploring the ocean to see whom he can help. He starts this off by donating his shell to a far more helpless hermit crab.
• Black Eyes of Evil: Enemies encountered attack because they've been driven mad by pollution, gaining pitch black eyes as a sign of their corruption. Kril notices the strange eye color in his first enemy encounter, but before he acquires a weapon to defend himself.
• Capitalism Is Bad: The game's setting uses this trope on two levels. Humans' consumerist hubris has polluted the oceans with their garbage, forming the game's central economy, while sea creatures with capitalistic ideals like Firth and Roland are presented as villains whose plans and actions endanger and kill the other characters.
• Colony Drop: Firth's plan after attaining the Perfect Whorl is to drop Trash Island onto New Carcinia and create an economy where everyone can have as much trash and microplastics as they want. Due to being blinded by his rage, Kril's final attack actually accelerates the process and leaves the city buried in trash.
• Companion Cube: While a good chunk of the Stowaways are living things, many are inanimate objects like a fruit sticker, a razor blade and a cotton ball, to name a few. Since one of Nemma's selling points for buying/hiring Stowaways is company on long trips, the inanimate ones operate as this.
• Company Cross References:
  • Nephro's boss fight takes place near a vending machine for a soft drink called Fizzle. Fizzle is the soda brand that takes center stage in Aggro Crab's previous game, Going Under. Fizzle cans are a commonly found shell throughout the game and an outfit can be found based on Jackie, the protagonist of Going Under. Additionally, the opening cutscene takes the form of a documentary by the Neo Cascadia Documentary Association, implying the two games take place in the same world.
  • Shellfish Desires also sells an outfit based on Lizzbeth Talby, one of the protagonists of Subway Midnight, a game which Aggro Crab published.
• Corpse Land:
  • The garden that Grovekeeper Topoda tends to is littered with the husks of corrupted crabs he's killed.
  • An even more extreme example is the Bottom of the Drain, where the Praya Dubia resides. It gets bonus points because Praya Dubia resurrects them to fight you.
• The Corruption: The Gunk is more than just mere pollution, it’s also a virus that spreads to every sea creature, making them into nothing more than a mindless husk of their former self.
• Cosmic Horror Reveal:
  • Before Praya Dubia is fully revealed, it telepathically speaks to Kril once he enters the Unfathom. It calls itself "This ocean's only God", and casts itself in the same role as the Spiral, a metaphysical concept representing the natural and inevitable end and rebirth of all things, including the world itself. Even after it is shown to be a giant siphonophore, the apocalyptic consequences of its actions coupled with its spooky deep-sea appearance nudge it near to, but not fully into Eldritch Abomination territory.
  • The true Eldritch Abomination of the whole story is, of course, humanity. The crabs never understand or question where the trash that pollutes their reef comes from, and only a few seem to realize that the madness-inducing gunk is connected to it. None of them even have a concept of what a human being is, let alone that what they consider priceless treasure at best and apocalyptic at worst, is merely humanity's discarded and forgotten waste.
• Crapsaccharine World: While it is much sillier than most Soulsborne games, with puns everywhere and just about every person with dialogue cracking some form of joke here or there, it's still a game that is sharply pointed at how badly the oceans are polluted and what it's doing to the creatures that live in it; with trash floating or having sunk to the seafloor everywhere, and just about every enemy you face has been driven hopelessly insane by direct contact with pollutants, or having some piece of refuse plaguing it in some way.
• Cut Himself Shaving: After Kril is horrified at killing Nephro, he tries to get his story straight:
  Kril: Shuck shuck shuck… okay, play it cool… If anyone asks, he just… tripped and broke his leg. And landed on a sword.
• Cutting the Knot: How Kril ultimately gets his shell back at the end of the game. After Prawnathan negs out on his deal with Kril (since the whole thing was an Uriah Gambit on Prawnathan's part to get rid of Kril), he attempts to tell Kril (a.k.a. the guy who just shattered Trash Island all across New Carcina) to get lost unless he has something he really needs. Kril kills him and simply takes his shell back, ending the game.
• Dark Reprise: The music that plays at The Bottom of the Drain is a somber piano version of Crab Rave, of all things.
• Degraded Boss:
  • Downplayed with the lobster guards gone mad from the Gunk. They fight identically to Nephro save for being unable to grapple.
  • The Royal Shellsplitter is encountered in various locations through Flotsam Vale and Scuttleport, smaller than the original boss and do not respawn.
  • Other bottle-wielding crabs emulating the Polluted Platoon Pathfinder are encountered in the Sands Between and also do not respawn.
• Despair Event Horizon: Anyone infected by the Gunk will slowly lose any hope or joy they might have had, lamenting how meaningless their pursuits were before they become raving monsters who can only say "worthless" over and over again.
• Developer's Foresight: If you get the map pieces out of order, the map piece will instead point to the place you've just been to, and Konche'll scold you for failing to follow directions.
• Easier Than Easy: The Accessibility settings are genuinely very good, but at the very bottom of that particular menu is an option that says "Give Kril a Gun", which does exactly what it says it does; it gives Kril the shell of an otherwise accurately sized handgun and effectively trivializes the game from there.
• The Executioner: The Royal Shellsplitter, who carries a makeshift guillotine when encountered. Fittingly, his grapple move has him use it on Kril with a Smash to Black.
• Fish out of Water: Or rather Shellfish Into Water. Kril spends most of his life outside the ocean in a tide pool, and only dips below the surface to retrieve his stolen shell.
• Fool's Map: Played with and subverted. Since the "treasure map" is a torn up cereal box that the ocean denizens are reconstructing, one would expect it to lead nowhere. But by coincidence all the locations Konche deciphers from the "clues" do indeed contain a piece of the map and a treasure chest full of real – if useless to the trash economy – money.
• Fork Fencing: Kril's main weapon is a rusty two-pronged fork he finds shortly after jumping into the ocean, which he can upgrade with "stainless relics" (actually keys). Considering its size relative to him, he both swings and stabs with it like a polearm.
• Functional Magic: Called "Umami", it is only available to hermit crabs; who can use it to augment their offense, heal themselves, and unlock new abilities.
• Glowing Eyes of Doom: Bosses, Elite Mooks and certain enemies will have purple glowing eyes.
• Green Aesop: The game none too subtly jabs at microplastic and petrochemical pollution of the world's oceans, as well as the greedy corporations who facilitate it for the sake of short-term profits.
• Go Mad from the Revelation: It's never outright stated, but implied that those infected with the Gunk realize that all the trash that dominates their lives is "worthless", which drives them Ax-Crazy.
• I Always Wanted to Say That: When Kril and co. are sailing over the polluted slurry off Flotsam Vale, Tortellini – the town greeter of New Carcinia – shouts "Land ho!" from the frontmost point of the ship. He then excitedly remarks that he always wanted to before repeating it for fun.
• Knight Templar: Nephro, Captain of the Guard certainly qualifies, likely already going mad from the pollution by the time he's met. He attacks Kril on sight, assuming him to be a criminal and uses his last breath to claim the hermit crab can't outrun the law forever.
• Late to the Tragedy: As is typical in Soulslike RPGs. By the time Kril leaves his tidepool, pollution and its effects are already well underway. Later he even gets chewed out by Nemma for wanting his life to "go back to normal", when none of the others got to live "normal lives" at all.
• MacGuffin Delivery Service: Kril isn't happy about everyone getting the chance to read the reassembled map when he's the one collecting the pieces. After getting the second piece in Flotsam Vale, he recognizes that he's giving away information to – technically – his competition. But he also recognizes that he needs Konche to decipher the map for the next locations and decides that he can get the treasure first if he's managed to get two map pieces first so far.
• Madness Mantra: Being infested by the Gunk causes a crab to realize all the trash they surround themselves with is "Worthless" and utterly transient.
• Magic Knight: Along with martial skill, Kril discovers an affinity for sensing and channeling Umami to cast spells.
• Mind Hive: The Consortium in Flotsam Vale operates as one in its boss battle, being a cage held together with knotted fishing net crammed full of crabs, lobsters and at least one octopus that move as one being by jostling the cage. Its methods of attack include a claw and tentacle to strike with, slamming the whole cage into the ground and a flare gun wielded in another tentacle.
• Money Is Experience Points: Microplastics, the currency of the game, is used both for leveling up and buying items.
• Nervous Wreck: Kril, appropriately. He is usually the smallest creature on screen aside from helper characters, and the lack of a shell doesn't help the poor kid.
• Ominous Obsidian Ooze: Called Gunk, this toxic oil-like sludge will strip you of your hope, your sanity, and even your sentience. Enemies infected with it even weaponize it as Bad Black Barf.
• Pardon My Klingon: While the game does contain mild "normal" swears, what would normally be vulgar swears are replaced with undersea equivalents like "coddammit", "oh shuck", "gullshit" and "crab". The characters are somewhat sparing when it comes to the former, but throw the latter around like nobody's business.
• Polluted Wasteland: This is what the trash mine of Flotsam Vale is, what the Expired Grove is in the process of becoming, and what may happen to all of New Carcinia after Trash Island is dropped on top of it.
• Power Copying: Defeating bosses gains Kril access to a special move that they used called Adaptations. These take the form of Umami constructs that create limbs to strike with, explosives, concussive blasts and more.
• Precision F-Strike: While sometimes censored or euphemized, the game makes use of this trope to make a point about how its adorable, cartoony exterior doesn't make it a children's game.
  • Played for Laughs in the opening cutscene, which is framed like a nature documentary and uses this trope in a similar manner to True Facts.
  "What word comes to mind when you think of the Earth? [...] Others might say the world is 'hateful' or 'evil' or 'unstable' or 'full of s--t'."
  • Parodied with Kril calling the final boss a “mussel shucker” before landing the final blow.
  • Played straight when Inkerton calls Roland a "bastard" upon defeat.
• Pungeon Master: Just about every location, and friendly NPC.
• Purposely Overpowered: The accessibility option "Give Kril a Gun" is Exactly What It Says on the Tin; Kril starts wearing an accurately sized .45 automatic handgun as a shell, and it has Bottomless Magazines to boot. The gun will One-Hit KO everything from Mooks to bosses, making the game Easier Than Easy.
• "Ray of Hope" Ending: While things look bleak with the oceans polluted and the Gunk unaddressed, there is still a chance for a comeback to restore things to how they were. And if nothing else, Kril is still out there fighting the good fight to protect the people of New Carcinia and bring some good back to the ocean.
• Ridiculous Repossession: What starts off the entire plot; a loan shark comes to Kril's tide pool and demands he immediately pay ten tides worth of back taxes to a government he didn't even know existed, and when Kril can't pay the loan shark immediately seizes Kril's shell and runs off, not even bothering with discussing an extension or alternative pay plan.
• Scavenged Punk: The ocean is filled with litter that's made its way down to the seafloor, and quite a lot of it is used to form the underwater civilization, from buildings made from cardboard boxes to roads made with old receipts, and microplastics as the dominant form of currency. Garbage is also used as weaponry by Kril and many enemies, and makes up the vast majority of shells you can use.
• Shout-Out:
  • When you get to the reef, you can buy a costume for Kril that turns him into a dead ringer for Mr. Krabs (which is ironic given his role and personality).
  • Shellfish Desires also sells outfits based on Cult of the Lamb and Subway Midnight, the latter of which Aggro Crab published.
  • Outside of Shellfish Desires, you can also find outfits based on Solaire of Astora from Dark Souls, Jackie from Going Under, and Forsburn from Rivals of Aether.
  • One of the shells you can purchase at Shellfish Desires, Lil' Bro, is based on the Shellder attached to Slowbro's tail from Pokémon. A crewmate from Among Us is also among the shells being sold.
  • An area in the game is called the "Sands Between", a not so subtle nod to the "Lands Between" from another Soulslike RPG.
  • One of the pieces of scenery is a Bland-Name Product McDonald's fry box, with a drawing of a crewmate in place of the "M" logo.
  • Another huge one is the Bleached City, which is a Big Fancy Castle made of white styrofoam that surpasses any architecture you've seen so far, but has since been left to fall into ruin and is only inhabited by some of the game's toughest enemies and their insane immortal king. In other words, it's a massive reference to Anor Londo.
  • One boss is named Firth, the Crab Who Stole the Whorl.
• Shown Their Work: Almost all the enemies in the game are based on real species of marine animals, so much so that some Visual Puns rely on the player knowing that. For example, the boss Heikea doesn't merely unsheathe its weaponized chopsticks from their wrapper like a samurai would unsheathe a katana because it's cool, but is based on the Heikegani, also known as the samurai crab.
• The Shut-In: Played for drama. A flashback of Kril's youth following the crew's drop into the Mouth of the Drain reveals that he left his shell – too big for him to carry then – towards the ocean once but was scared back into hiding by a seagull. When he was finally big enough to carry his method of defense with him, he stared at the open ocean before turning away, appearing scared while also hating himself for it.
• Stomach of Holding: When seeing a crab depicted on the center of the maze, Konche fearfully deduces that Pagurus the Ravenous has swallowed a piece of the map. After it’s retrieved, the map piece is in no way damaged from being in Pagurus's stomach.
• Straw Nihilist: The Praya Dubia, who is revealed to be the one speaking to Kril once he enters the Unfathom, show shades of this, as it talks about the inevitable destruction of the ocean and how there's no point in saving it.
• Subverted Kids' Show: In video game form. The game's aesthetics look like a cutesy cross between SpongeBob SquarePants and Splatoon and make it look like a typical 3D mascot platformer at first glance, but it's a Teen-rated affair set in a Crapsaccharine World with overt Capitalism Is Bad themes, with the mechanics and difficulty of Dark Souls and high levels of violence. As such, it's one of the few examples that doesn't rely on shock humor or exaggerated horror to prove a point about not being a "kiddy" work.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: The first step Firth's plan to fix New Carcinia's economic issues is to sink trash island because microplastics are their form of currency underwater and Firth believes that covering the city in trash would boost their technology, thereby making their technology more advanced and the economy would be self-sustaining. In the end, Kril destroys the trash island and the player is led to believe that the trash will make everyone in New Carcinia incredibly rich anyway. However, once Kril actually returns to New Carcinia, only a few people are actually happy about it. The mass production of trash doesn't change anything and instead causes additional problems on top of the rise in Gunk. Nemma is still too poor to leave New Carcinia with her family, and Prawnathan is overjoyed by the large amount of trash because it means he can boost his prices due to inflation. The mass amount of trash falling on a city also renders a few people homeless and possibly causes a few fatalities as Firth is crushed by a liqueur bottle.
• Suspicious Video-Game Generosity: If you see an area where there are a ton of shells next to each other, you can guarantee that that area is where a boss fight will take place.
• Teach Him Anger: This seems to be Praya Dubia's plans for Kril. It hoped that by making Kril see how awful the ocean has become, he'd become so angry that he'd willingly join it in destroying the world. While Kril did become angry as planned, he still remained somewhat hopeful, leading to Praya Dubia renouncing Kril and trying to kill him.
• Technicolor Magic: The supernatural power of Umami is associated with violet energy.
• Theme Naming: Overlap with Punny Name and Shown Their Work. Most of the bosses' names are truncated references to their real life Latin species names.
  • Captain Nephro is named after the scientific family for lobsters, the Nephropidae.
  • Duchess Magista is based on the Dungeness crab and named after its species name M. magister.
  • Heikea is based on the samurai crab, Heikeopsis japonica.
  • Grovekeeper Topoda is a peacock mantis shrimp, from the order of Stomatopoda.
  • Pagurus the Ravenous is an edible crab, known as Cancer pagurus.
  • Voltai the Accumulator is an electric eel, named after Electrophorus voltai.
  • Petroch, the False Moon is a giant hermit crab, also known as Petrochirus diogenes.
  • King Camtscha is an Alaskan king crab, species name Paralithodes camtschaticus.
  • The Praya Dubia is literally just named after the giant siphonophore's species name.
• This Is Gonna Suck: Nobody's happy to find out the third and final piece of the map is guarded by none other than Pagurus, the Ravenous.
• Trap Is the Only Option: When traversing The Unfathom, Kril sees an Unami current in the distance and realizes that he can warp himself and the other survivors of the fall down the Mouth of The Drain back home. Upon closer inspection, the current has already become a Moon Snail shell instead of needing to be activated, which might make wary players suspicious. Attempting to pass it by reveals a barrier blocking the other paths, requiring the player to enter and have Kril kicked out to trigger the fight with Petroch, the False Moon.
• Unanthropomorphic Transformation: As crabs get corrupted by pollution they slowly start to lose their sentience, no longer walking upright on two legs and gaining bestial black eyes, before they eventually stop speaking altogether and turn into fully animalistic killers.
• Violation of Common Sense: In the Lower Crust of New Carcinia, you can encounter an urchin who warns Kril away from touching him. Kril is determined to prove the urchin can be shown affection, but gets hurt every time he tries as directed by the player. The urchin goes from self-pitying, to annoyed at Kril’s continued attempts, to resigned and attempting to ignore him, to accusing Kril of being masochistic, to finally giving him an Adaptation just to get him to go away.
• Weird Currency: Microplastics. You can see larger bits of it floating in the environment just about anywhere in town areas, and it's picked up or broken down from all sorts of trash floating in the water and found throughout the game world. It even counts as In-Universe for Kril, since the heartkelp bulbs he used to use as currency are actively laughed off by the Loan Shark.
• Welcome to Corneria: Many of the crab NPCs in New Carcinia just repeat the same dialog if you talk to or listen in on them again. Of most egregious note, a couple of crabs on the outskirts of the Lower Crust who can't afford a place inside the city say it's still better than being outside the scent barriers keeping Pagurus the Ravenous out. They repeat the same conversation even after you defeat Pagurus to retrieve the final map piece.
• Wipe the Floor with You: Nephro's grapple involves snatching Kril and grinding him against the seabed while continuing to gallop before tossing him aside.
• Worthless Yellow Rocks: The treasure that Kril and co. spend half the game seeking is a giant chest filled with cash — which is completely worthless as far as the trash economy is concerned.
• Xanatos Gambit: Prawnathan's deal with Kril to trade the latter's shell back for the Treasure of Captain Clawbeard practically screams this and Uriah Gambit. If Kril gets himself killed going after the treasure, Prawnathan's free to sell the latter's sell at his leisure. In the off-chance Kril succeeds, Prawnathan's rich. Unfortunately for him, his greed backfires on him when he tries to neg out on his end of the bargain, and Kril has had enough.
• You Can't Thwart Stage One: Firth's plan to dump all of Trash Island onto New Carcina to make it richer still succeeds because Kril, in his anger, used the Perfect Whorl to beat up Firth, which accelerated Trash Island's descent and destroyed New Carcina.

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