Another Crab's Treasure progress report #100.
I've gotten quite a bit further in the game, including killing a few optional bosses. The Village Gates level was truly hateful with awful platforming in tight areas where your real enemies are the camera, frame rate drops and your character sticking poorly to nets.
Only followed by a section with lots of surfaces where you can get stuck as you try to avoid an arrow crab that nearly oneshots you in an area packed with enemies. While this sort of gauntlet is a Souls classic, and the design of the level is good for that, the game's issues make it a not fun experience because you or the camera keeps getting stuck into scenery, enemies strike through walls (thankfully you can too) etc.
I really, really want to love this game because it's got so much charm to it. The visual style, character and enemy designs, most bosses so far are really well done, level design is mostly decent and has so many nice little touches like buildings made out of cardboard boxes, milk cartons and other trash that has landed in the sea.
But there's a laundry list of bad stuff:
- Inconsistent inputs. The game desperately needs input buffering because there's a lot of situations where a shell swap or heal doesn't come out when you are in the wrong stage of an animation. Sometimes hold actions also don't trigger, especially charge attack on ground.
- The platforming sucks. It's so easy to get pushed off ledges or get stuck in scenery, you don't have enough forward momentum and jump height to clear even small ledges if you don't jump from further away and use the "scoot forward during jump" move. The grapple hook feels like it should trigger from further away for hanging hooks.
- Bad hitboxes. Sometimes they are clearly not matching what you see on screen well, especially for the spike balls in the environment.
- Enemies can pull off red grab attacks (that can only be dodged) multiple times in a row, including right after being pulled close by the grappling hook which makes them very hard to dodge.
A few things that made the game play better for me:
- Swapping from "hold to sprint" to a separate sprint button (L3 on controller). It's hard to see whether your character is sprinting, so toggling it easily helps. Dodging becomes much easier when it triggers on press, rather than release of the button. The game relies a lot more on "dodge instinctively" timing than many Souls games.
- Learned that you can parry by holding block and hitting the attack button. This is much easier to pull off than releasing block.
- Using block way more than dodge.
- Unlocking the scrap hammer ability. This lets you attach shells to the end of your fork and gives you slower attacks, but much higher damage. It allows you to swap between two shells as well (one on weapon, one on back) so you could have two shell skills available.
- Unlocking the "gain shell health back by counterattacking after taking damage" ability goes a long way to keep your favorite shell.
I really hope they improve the game with bugfixes. I think this could be a good 8/10 game if they just fixed the problems with controls and got the hitboxes tighter so you don't get stuck or get attacked through walls, maybe tweaked the damage values to player's favor a bit because this really requires Elden Ring level investment into vitality to not get 2-3 shot killed by everything.
