Joy, that a team so fresh can learn so quickly and realize a soulslike game that Gets It. A game full of wonder and tragedy and raw emotions. In some ways, the tragedy of the world in Treasure is even more immediate and touching than the most verisimilar environments of Hollow Knight and From Software, and the developers wield it well. This is, on its face, a silly game about a cartoon hermit crab, but in any premise there is an opportunity for deeper digging, for emotional development, and for power. Treasure finds all of these in its exploration of an underwater ecosystem subjugated by human trash (, which becomes alien and new through our perspective of the sea-dwellers), and the character of Kril who is forcibly drawn out of hermitage by necessity and annoyance.

It's remarkable to play through the game and feel the level design learning to be better with each area, up to the final area which is just visually and experientially stunning. The inability to easily look at the (gorgeous) hand-illustrated in-game maps definitely makes an early area or two more confusing than it needs to be, without a really strong directorial-design sense of showing the player exactly how areas relate spatially, but it gets better as it goes along. Even when it's hard to read the macro sense of the area, it wasn't hard to figure out where I could get to from a given point to keep exploring. The art design is consistently fantastic, with plenty of the legitimate beauty that recalls the environs of Spongebob Squarepants and, of course, its accompanying 2003 console classic Battle for Bikini Bottom, but not so much as to be derivative. Structures are often built out of branded trash, which is a consistent source of laughs for me – especially the spin on Marlboro cigarette boxes, which I am still laughing at like a week after seeing it.

Combat in the game is fantastic and novel too. Basically, your weapon and stats are the inert RPG "spend to upgrade" parts of your character, and your shells are environmental disposable objects which determine your weight class and minor magic ability. There are quite a wide variety of these abilities which I found to be well-balanced – I have my favorites, but they have drawbacks and their niches. This kind of breadth and sense of balance is really not what I expect out of any studio's second game (and that feeling of surpassed expectations is, obviously, something that is not rare in my feelings for this game.) The innovation on a Souls's combat formula is that dodging is pretty good, but blocking is REALLY good and is the link into tons of different power spikes. Maybe it's because I'm a very dodge-oriented Souls player (Bloodborne was my first, after all), but the economy of protecting myself in this game was consistently just fun.

The voice acting is fantastic as well, especially for Kril. Not only his line delivery in cutscene, but his gameplay grunts and random other sounds are utterly perfect and could not sell his character any better. It's a cliche observation that, in video game stories, killing is measured in the boatloads to the detriment of many character arcs, and often accounting for that is flat-out just part of the necessary suspension of disbelief. But in this game, Kril's journey of frustration, anger, and self-centeredness feels so obviously powerful especially because all of those emotions are just diegetic to the game and the experience of playing it. You may be surprised by his quick taking to the violence of this world – he is too.

That said, the remaining audio experience is really the only place where I felt some lacking development. Many boss tracks, for example, realize themselves subversively as minimal beat-driven loops, but in many cases I felt it was simply too minimal. Some extra percussion and accompaniment layers in several boss tracks would have gone a long way – for an action game, I don't believe the scoring wheel needs to be subverted too much during the expectedly highlit boss battles. There can be some more genuine played-straight action to this music, don't be shy! Audio mixing is also iffy in places, like the volume balancing on the very first boss's lines vs the music and sound effects. However, there are many, many small details that are fantastically crafted, and while I did miss them when they were absent (the first few bosses have boast lines when they kill you, but many of the later ones have no line at all?), they really tie things together.

Joy, that these folks went from Going Under which was at best 'cute' to me, to this statement of a game. So many opportunites for derivative design practices, instead answered with thoughtful and fun takes on how a Soulslike can be great. Talking like Yoda at this point, I might be. Another Crab's Treasure just hits different.

There are heaps of interesting tactical decisions to make in designing your units to decimate the swordfodder obstacles in the way of you becoming The Nicest King Ever, but at least a quarter of the “skill” i built to play this game was “shuffling around pieces in your unit pre-fight to get a better RNG roll on the battle”. The preview screen holds a death grip on the entire combat experience: the information you are given is neither ‘perfect’ enough to do your own work, nor vague enough to allow improvisation and confidence to be your weapons, and so you ultimately have a black box simulator to press Go on when the numbers are good. I didn’t hate playing it, but from a theory perspective, this thing is not working to its potential.

And while I still have some qualms with 13 Sentinels’ plot despite enjoying it overall – considering its intricacy, I didn’t expect most every beat of Unicorn Overlord to be as complex as a butter sandwich. It is so, so flatly incurious about its characters’ interiority that it’s actually shocking. Every support conversation I saw was like a grey-boxed version of a scene that could be formulaic, but maybe charming too, if it were fleshed out – but they aren’t! The whole reading experience is at a level of cathexis and fidelity similar to a cheap flavored sparkling water.

The art’s execution is unsurprisingly good, though the character designs’ gender dimorphism is offputtingly consistent. Like, listen, I love Yahna’s b-cups, I’m not a joyless dyke, but if the women get to be this flamboyant and cheesecakey then why the hell do the men have no asses and stand like it’s their turn to play the xbox? Like at least give Ithillion some cheeks. It’s right there. Cowards. Anyway the HD2D by way of ‘overworld sprites illustrated like they could be pixelized but are left at full resolution’ is surprisingly good looking as well. also the mining minigame is weirdly satisfying. Overall I just feel worn down by the constant, tectonic level of friction between what the game could be, and what they actually did with it. (played on highest default difficulty, approx 130 hour final time)