I have talked in the last two posts about Another Crab’s Treasure by Aggro Crab. I’ve been calling it a sekiro-lite rather than a soulslike, but now I want to call it Secrabo. Someone in the RKG Discord called it Crabiro, which I will also accept.
First, I have been doing my gun run after doing an area the old-fashioned way. This has gone off the rails beacuse there are two ways to go at a certain point, and because I was able to kill the boss that you’re just supposed to run from (in The Sands Between, which by the way, is very on the nose. In Elden Ring, you are traversing The Lands Between) in my gun run, I was able to explore The Sands Between at my leisure. Except for the really fucking irritating sand worms that break any shell if they pop up and hit you. Yes, they are buried in the sand and only pop up when you walk over them. There’s a way to tell where they are, but it’s not easy to focus on them and shoot them when they sudderly pop up in that manner.
Which, you might say, well that’s part of using the gun. Yes and no. It’s indicative of how slavishly the devs are hewing to the From games in certain ways (there is a similar type worm in the first Dark Souls), but then ups the ante by making it so they hit incredibly hard.
Side note: Using the gun has made me see the flaws even more clearly. It’s hard to tell when you’re locked on and when you’re not, which is very important on the gun run. Obviously, if you’re not locked on, then the gun is useless. But, man, the camera makes things so fucking hard. I’m glad I turned off fall damage at least. No way I would have made it through the platforming hell of the last two areas without it.
Here’s the honest truth for me and this game. The combat is just not good enough. It’s loose and janky, and it’s hard to see what you are hitting when you’re constantly clipping through the environments.
Aggro Crab has incorporated the ‘let’s throw a ton of enemies in the area to artificially increase the diffculty’. And, yes, that includes snipers, which frustrates the fuck out of me. The seahorses shoot gunk at you that knocks you backwards–which often means off the ledges.
I ran into a field boss on my real playthrough that made me just roll my eyes. He wasn’t hard, per se, but he was annoying. There is a status effect called gunk that if your meter fills it, ah, not really sure, but I think it slows you down dramatically and drains your health–slowly. And there are swamps of it, which, I mean.
We all know Miyazaki loves his poison swamps, but that doesn’t mean you have to include one in your soulslike. If a game is too devoted to the soulslike formula, then I just think, why am I not playing a FromSoft game?
That is the crux of the problem with the whole genre. For the most part, I would rather just play Elden Ring or Dark Souls III. A soulslike has to be pretty special for me to want to finish it. I did finish Salt and Sanctuary (Ska Studios) and even started a melee run. I did not finish the mellee run and once I put ithe game down, I promptly forgot about it.
A month later, I could not tell you the name of any boss I had fought. I remembered one of them for reasons I don’t want to get into, but for the most part, they were just all a haze to me.
The reason that game worked for me was because it was almost a clone of the From games. It didn’t try to reinvent the wheel, but just faithfully recerated FromSoft environments in a chibi cartoon 2D world. The only thing, weirdly, they tried to do different was that they put the roll on…I want to say RB. One of the bumper/shoulder buttons, and you could not change it when the game first came out. I didn’t buy it at the time, but I was appalled. They did not allow a way to put roll on B? Travesty! That was not the way to make your mark in the soulslike genre. By the time I bought the game, they made it so you could change the buttons.
Back to ACT. Going through the game with a gun was a revelation. The Sands Between is meant to be run through. Going through it and killing most of the enemies netted me nearly 30,000 souls. Er, whatever they are called in this game. Plastic materials? Something like that. For context, I need only a few thousand to level up.
It’s fun doing a gun run, but it takes out all the tension of the game. And, at least for me, there is no reason just to explorce the environment. The game is colorful and bright, and there are a ton of characters to interact with. But, for the most part, they are just flavor text. There are three or four who serve as merchants and a few that may be quest givers/potential future bosses, but it’s mostly just chit-chat. And overtly political chit-chat that doesn’t quite work.
I agree with the stances of the developers, and it’s mildly amusing to hear sea creatures talking about capitalism and other isuses of our world. But it’s very superficial and not anything deep the way the lore is in From games. At least not yet.
When I am in a From game, along with the consuming dread I get in a new area is a sense of wonder and awe. Something new! More wondrous and/or grotesque creatures who are going to kill me! What will I find? Where is the elaborate shortcut that makes me gasp in wonder when I discover it?
There are shortcuts in the game, but I haven’t found them to be that useful so far. Mainly because I can’t tell where they actually end up. The shortcuts are fishing lines that you drop, and they sometimes go down waaaaaaaaaay far.
I’m just not feeling it. Even though I keep playing it. I might actually just do the gun run, but I’m not sure I’m interested enough to even do that. Again, it’s a solid game. It just misses the mmark in a few critical ways, at least for me.