Another Crab’s Treasure

Another Crab’s Treasure is a 2024 Soulslike developed and published by Aggro Crab, released April 25, 2024 for PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Windows, and Nintendo Switch, arriving day one on Xbox Game Pass. It holds a Metacritic score ranging from 65 on Switch up to 82 on Xbox Series X|S, with an OpenCritic recommendation rate of 81%. It’s the second game from Aggro Crab, a small Seattle studio previously known for the roguelike corporate satire Going Under, and it applies that same appetite for social commentary to a genre usually associated with grim castles and dying kingdoms — this time from underwater, as a hermit crab.

The pitch is straightforward and, by the studio’s own account, deliberate: a FromSoftware-style action RPG built to look and feel as little like a typical Soulslike as possible, trading gothic dread for bright colors, dark humor, and a genuinely pointed environmental message.

Technical Specifications

From Corporate Satire to Ocean Satire

Aggro Crab’s first game, 2020’s Going Under, was a roguelike beat-’em-up built entirely around skewering startup culture and Silicon Valley excess. Another Crab’s Treasure, revealed during a 2022 Nintendo Indie World presentation, carries that same instinct for social commentary into a completely different genre. The studio has been explicit that it wanted the game to look as little like existing Soulslikes as possible — a deliberate reaction to a genre that, by 2024, had produced a wave of visually similar dark-fantasy imitators — while still respecting the mechanical DNA that makes the genre work.

Kril and the Shell Tax

Players control Kril, a small hermit crab whose shell is repossessed over unpaid taxes by the joke bureaucracy of Slacktide, represented by a shark tax collector voiced by internet personality Michael Reeves. Left defenseless, Kril sets out across the ocean to earn his shell back, picking up increasingly unlikely pieces of human trash to wear as armor along the way. It’s a simple premise that mostly exists to get Kril moving through the game’s world — the writing leans harder on tone and setting than on plot mechanics.

A Society Built on Human Trash

The game’s real personality lives in its setting. New Carcinia, the crab society’s hub city, holds a recurring “Trash Day” event where an entire floating garbage patch drifts overhead and rains debris down onto the city below — debris the crab society has built its entire economy and architecture around. Milk cartons become houses, CVS receipts (because of their absurd length) become roads and bridges, and the game’s own currency is literally called microplastics. It’s blunt, and deliberately so — dialogue in the game outright references the goal of “dismantling Crabitalism,” extending the same anti-consumerist streak from Going Under into an ocean-set environmental parable rather than a corporate one.

Soulslike Combat Without the Grimness

Mechanically, the game blends genre staples with ideas pulled from platformers and character-action games. Rather than a traditional stamina bar, Kril’s attacks have a built-in recovery pause discouraging button-mashing, closer to Sekiro‘s rhythm-based approach than a typical Souls stamina meter. Kril keeps a single weapon — a discarded fork — for the entire game, with progression instead coming through the Shell system: swappable shells scavenged from the environment that function as armor, each with its own stats, weight, and special abilities. Traversal leans heavily into 3D platforming, with running, grappling, and gliding across large environments giving exploration a different rhythm than the genre’s usual tight corridors. Uniquely for a Soulslike, difficulty can be freely adjusted at any point mid-playthrough — the game defaults to Hard, but nothing stops a player from dropping it down for a specific tough encounter and raising it back up afterward.

Reception

Critical reception was strong on PC, PS5, and Xbox, generally landing in “generally favorable” territory, while the Switch version scored noticeably lower — a gap several reviews attributed to technical strain running the game’s larger environments on weaker hardware. Reviewers consistently praised the writing, the confidence of the game’s tonal choices, and its accessibility for players intimidated by the wider Soulslike genre; GameSpot’s review, titled “Shellden Ring,” was typical of the pun-heavy coverage the premise invited. The most common criticism, echoed across several outlets, was that the deliberate pause between Kril’s attacks — while never unfair — occasionally felt a beat too long for the game’s own combat rhythm.

A Modest Hit, Then an Accidental Blockbuster

Commercially, Another Crab’s Treasure was a genuine but modest success: 600,000 to 700,000 units sold against a roughly $1.2 million budget, solid enough for a small studio but not enough, by Aggro Crab’s own account, to easily fund another multi-year project afterward. Facing burnout and funding uncertainty, the team pivoted to something deliberately small: a one-month game jam collaboration with fellow indie studio Landfall Games called Peak, a cooperative climbing game built as a stress-relief side project rather than a serious commercial bet. Peak sold 100,000 copies in its first 24 hours in June 2025, passed a million within a week, and crossed ten million copies by that August — outselling Another Crab’s Treasure within days, a result Aggro Crab reacted to on social media with a level of disbelief the studio didn’t try to hide.

Where to Play It Today

Another Crab’s Treasure is available on Steam, PlayStation 5, Xbox One/Series X|S, and Nintendo Switch, and remains available on Xbox Game Pass and PC Game Pass.