It's one of those games that doesn’t do anything particularly well.

As far as being a Soulslike goes, it simply doesn’t have strong enough level design to justify its existence within the genre. The last couple of levels are pretty decent but by that point in the game, I was ready for it to be over.

This issue plagues the majority of Soulslikes, and is why I can count on one hand how many good ones there are.

The exploration was very unrewarding. Apparently, the game begins to understand this and starts throwing upgrades at you in the endgame.

The combat doesn’t feel good, with wonky input buffers, a negative edge style parry, and piss-poor animations that load the enemy model in its finishing location before the animation has completed, resulting in the possibility of getting stuck on air while dodging.

The progression systems don’t exist other than a skill tree that does the beautiful thing where abilities that should be baked into the player’s skillset are carved out and locked behind the skill tree to justify its existence.

Most of the gear is useless--at least until the endgame-- primarily due to the outrageous stat requirements. I nearly finished the game putting points exclusively into the attack stat and still couldn’t use most of the attack buffing stowaways.

There’s only one weapon with two move sets, one of which, the default, is pretty bad, and the other uses consumable resources and is merely passable. If your Soulslike is only going to have one weapon, you need to nail how it feels.

And even with all of these issues, the game is piss easy. I get it that not all Soulslikes need to be butthole-clenching difficult, but man, you need to have some friction.

What almost filtered me was the constant barrage of annoying dialogue and puns whenever characters interacted. When you’re in a continuous yapping contest, and your opponent is Aggro Crab…

The aesthetic is hard to criticize because I doubt this game had a large budget, even for an indie title, but it isn’t exactly a looker.

I think there were a few neat ideas in this, like the use of shells as consumable armor, but there are just as many baffling balance issues that undermine what the game does well, such as most of the stats not mattering. Why would you ever want to invest skill points into resistance or umami? They’re completely useless.

It might sound like I hate this game, but it’s honestly pretty inoffensive even with all of its faults and does have a bit of charm that breaks through the cringe-worthy dialog at times (like a moment in the game where you inspect executed crab soldiers that are crucified outside the castle and their crimes are possessing seaweed)

Oh well, another milquetoast Soulslike experience to add to the ever-growing pile. At least it’s better than Lies of P or Stellar Blade.

I was going to knock this up to 2.5/5 because it has a Mr. Krabs skin but knocked that half star back off because it has an Among Us shell.