There's a section that reminds me of the Ballista from DS3 in Smoldering Lake, and I feel they misunderstand why this worked so well in DS3. In DS3, no matter where you were, if you were on the lake part of the map, the Ballista would fire. It would fire in normal intervals and even through obstacles, constantly keeping you on your toes and forcing you to consistently dodge. In Another Crab's Treasure, they reinvent this by instead having it so that it's on a timer of one arrow with it slowly counting down the more it sees you. This stops you from materializing a rhythm and time frame required to roll and dodge. Once you get up to this hill, you then have to fight an enemy that has an attack that has literally 0 telegraphing at all, while dealing with a crab that can basically one shot you with a single attack that is insanely hard to dodge because of said time frame. The reward for getting to the Ballista in DS3 was the freedom to wander Smoldering Lake and explore without constant pressure, leading to more open exploration. Not a silly, poorly constructed mini boss fight. This encompasses what is wholly wrong with this game. They either take horrible aspects of the Dark Souls game and completely fundamentally integrate them into their game, or they take the interesting and challenging parts of Dark Souls and butcher them completely.

While I love this indie studio for trying, and I love how unique this concept, world, and subtext is, I can't get past this complete dissonance between what a Souls game should be. The constant bumpy gameplay ruins this road for me, and while I'm glad this game got attention as I love indie studios getting love, I don't think it's good. At all.

Severely disappointed. 1.3/5