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Oh my God, that crab has a gun: Another Crab’s Treasure takes an aggressive stance on accessibility
4K View2023-11-03
With the launch of Lies of P and Lords of the Fallen this year, we’ve seen the revival of the age-old discourse around Soulslike games and difficulty emerge once again: Should Souls games have easy modes? While Dark Souls developer FromSoftware has resisted most calls for improved accessibility in its notoriously unforgiving games, other developers have been free to experiment with the genre conventions as they see fit—and one of next year’s stranger-looking Soulslike games is taking a unique approach.
The game is Another Crab’s Treasure, and it stars a brave little hermit crab named Kril. It’s a cute idea: Instead of collecting and upgrading medieval weapons like you would in a standard Soulslike, you must find bigger and better objects to use as a shell. Kril can tuck himself into these objects to protect himself from danger, but they can also be used offensively, and change the way he’s able to move around the ocean floor.
As players discovered during October’s Steam Next Fest when they played the demo, Another Crab’s Treasure is a properly challenging Soulslike game. Kril can lock onto enemies, dodge-roll, and use light and heavy attacks, but has to watch out for wild, floor-sweeping assaults from huge enemies. Don’t let the cuddly visuals fool you—this is a real Soulslike game, no question about it.
However, Another Crab’s Treasure is taking a step that most Soulslike games haven’t been bold enough to take: It’s offering players a range of accessibility options to adjust the speed and pace of combat to better suit their abilities.
It’s also giving them a fucking gun.
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That’s right, by checking one option in the menu, you can just have Kril plant his little crab butt in the magazine well of a 1911 pistol. This overpowered weapon will one-shot any enemy, including bosses. If that’s how you want to play the game, developer Aggro Crab says that’s okay. It’s hilarious, maybe a little heavy-handed, and certainly the most truly unique approach to the issue of difficulty in Soulslikes. It turns out, all you have to do is bring a gun to a knife fight.
While Another Crab’s Treasure will be breaking down barriers in approachability, developer Hexworks has been experimenting in the other direction, finding ways to make Lords of the Fallen’s New Game+ modes more difficult.
In Lords of the Fallen, “vestiges” work like bonfires in Dark Souls. They’re places where your character can rest, level up, and teleport to other vestiges you’ve unlocked. Finding a new one is like planting a solid foothold in a new area, and importantly, when you die, you’ll respawn at the last vestige you rested at. Lords of the Fallen adds an interesting wrinkle to this, however: If you hold a vestige seed, you can plant it in certain locations to create a temporary vestige, usually close to a boss arena or other difficult encounter.
Hexworks says its original intent was to remove almost every permanent vestige from the game in New Game+. That way, players would have to basically ironman run from their home base at Skyrest Bridge and defeat each boss without dying or running out of their life-restoring Sanguinarix charges.
It was an interesting idea on paper. Hexworks had done their homework and knew that Souls players enjoy creating community-based challenges for new Dark Souls runs: There’s the “onebro” run, in which a player attempts to complete the game without ever leveling up, and the Lordran Chainsaw Massacre run, in which players much immediately attack and kill every NPC they encounter. The plan for Lords of the Fallen was to incorporate some of the fun of these challenge runs into New Game+.
When it launched, however, players weren’t sold on the idea, and Hexworks came up with a compromise. Instead of removing all the permanent vestiges, each subsequent NG+ run would remove a selection of them, gradually whittling the number down to two (Skyrest Bridge and Adyr’s Shrine) when you hit NG+3.
So what’s the lesson here? FromSoftware has budged only a little on its approach to difficulty. Elden Ring’s open-world format can perhaps be read as a cautious embrace of a more accessible design philosophy, since players are free to roam and level up in the gentler areas outside the dungeons in the Lands Between to their hearts’ content. Traditionalists continue to insist that From’s influential games would lose something if players could modulate the difficulty of these games on their own, and so far, FromSoftware seems disinclined to offer these kinds of customization options.
But if someone asked me to pick three words to describe Dark Souls, I don’t think “hard” would make the list. I think there are so many more interesting things to say about these games, like the way they build their stories around their mechanics and the way their stories are uncovered out of sequence and forensically. Sure, they can be challenging, and that difficulty is often there to serve a narrative and thematic purpose, but other designers should always consider themselves free to bend those rules or discard them altogether.
It’s not written in stone that a Soulslike game has to be difficult or punishing. It’s absolutely fine if one game opts to include difficulty options, or settings to adjust dodge timing and parry windows. Perhaps it’s totally cool to let more players control their experience in a game, even if that means giving them an “unfair” advantage.
Maybe in this Soulslike, there’s a hermit crab who just straight up shoots guys.
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I can’t wait for Another Crab’s Treasure! Would be great for Android, but if not, Switch! 👍👍👍
2023-11-06
Author likedLove the idea of customizing combat speed. Tools like this can make games more inclusive.
2023-11-03
Author likedPersonally, I love that FromSoft has stuck to its guns on keeping games difficult, even if it means I am still stuck on the final boss of Sekiro. That said, I also am glad other developers are playing around with the formula and introducing new ideas for how to make this type of game enjoyable for everyone. I'm hoping the weird crab-game turns out as cool as it looks!
2023-11-08
Author liked