I went back and forth on this game as I was playing it, torn between its incredible charm and the ways in which its design left me frustrated. I didn't quite jell with its level design philosophy: the way it lays out big open spaces with scattered hazards and enemies and paths that often felt almost random. I liked its combat, but the frantic simplicity of it didn't always click. Alongside that, the jank and bugs I encountered, while rarely game-breaking, still got pretty frustrating at times. There's only so many times a game can fling you into the sky as a giant spider crab prepare to blast you with its laser eyes before it gets a bit old.

But when I actually got to the end, none of that really seemed to matter all that much. Because this game and I — we love the same thing, and I think we love it for the same reasons. Which isn't something I can say for most soulslikes: games that copy the mood and vibe of Dark Souls without digging into the ideas at its foundation. On the surface, Another Crab's Treasure doesn't seem to do that: it's bright and zany, with a kind of upbeat, sardonic irony that, were it not written so well, would remind me way too much of webcomics I liked ten years ago. But the story that unfurls in this game is unabashedly Souls in its shape and its concerns: a dance of doomed characters towards a coming apocalypse they're either too greedy, too inept, too blinded, or too passive to see coming. It, like Dark Souls, is a game about endless consumption, pushing a failed society onward long after its flame should have burned out — and the wasteland that lays at the end of that road. But unlike Dark Souls's many imitators, it never feels like a hollow retread of a better game's ideas. It might wear Souls like a shell, but everything inside is still unmistakably its own.