Another Crab's Treasure is a Soulslike with an approachable charm but not a lot of depth. The idea of a defense-oriented Souls game is interesting and synergizes well with the setting. That setting is a real highlight, with colorful underwater environments and a strong environmental message. While the writing is a generally amusing, the game is way too verbose, especially during major story beats.

Unfortunately the great ideas are slowly buried under a mountain of tedium. Enemy variety is very low, and levels frequently feel too long. Items are strewn across large open spaces, but generally just offer more currency, which is a real disappointment. The game's underlying systems feel half-baked, which makes progression uneven and unsatisfying.

On top of this, bugs like disappearing bloodstains and bad collision caused more loss of progress than any errors on my part. The game doesn't save your location when you exit the game, which means you have to reach a bonfire or else lose all your level progress. I made it to the final level before the tedium got to me. There's a lot of great ideas here, but to me this ended up feeling like an early access or beta. Hopefully the developer will learn some lessons and we'll get an amazing sequel that executes better on these ideas.

Furi is a bullet hell twitch-reflex boss rush dipped in neon. The story is pretty vague, but there's a lot of vibes and hinting at a big twist down the road. Your moveset is large enough to offer a lot of variety without being overwhelming. Dodging, shooting, parrying, and charging all feel easy to learn but have a high skill ceiling. Unfortunately, the bosses are designed to wear on your patience more than your reflexes.

Each boss has multiple phases, with movesets that slowly evolve to become more intense and complicated as you progress. Each player death sets you back to the beginning of the current phase, and a third death forces a complete restart of the boss. This works out really well until the phases start splitting into sub-phases, each with a different necessary approach. Some of these sub-phases become tedious busy-work as the player has already cracked the code and is simply going through the motions to get to the next part.

The advantage of a boss rush game is that you can cut out the chaff of no-brainer mobs, perfunctory levels, and tedious run-ups. If you then replace that with thoughtless, perfunctory boss phases then you've just reframed the tedium. This may very well appeal to some players, but I prefer my difficult games to offer a 'practice makes perfect' approach. Furi kept making me retake tests I'd already passed.