After 2 Hours Playing This Spore-inspired Roguelike, I've Evolved...
Everything is Crab is a fascinating genetic adventure.
What I have learned after two hours playing an early build of Everything is Crab is that you're all very lucky that the path of evolution is directed by the whims of genetic drift and natural selection rather than by me, a guy who thinks the peak of survival is standing in a field growing apples on your own backside.
This fascinating action roguelike feels like a modern spin-off of 2008 god game Spore. Starting as a cute little blob creature, your goal is to survive in an increasingly dangerous ecosystem. Initially you're easy prey, but as you eat food you level up, gaining new genetic traits and (hopefully) rising to the top of the food chain.
As I set out on my first few runs, what immediately impresses me is the sheer variety of different traits, particularly because a really large selection of them are reflected visually on my creature. I can cover them in scales, fur, or an exoskeleton; give them claws, poison spit, bull horns, or spines; make them huge and lumbering or quick and tiny; and much, much more. It all combines seamlessly, both visually and mechanically—whether I've built the ultimate predator, or (more often) one of God's mistakes.
Past the evolutionary theme, some of it boils down to familiar action-RPG concepts. Traits can grant new attacks, or boost stats like health regeneration, dodge chance, or damage—all useful when attacking other animals.
But this is an ecosystem, not a dungeon, and survival can take stranger forms. You can increase your feeding speed, and give yourself a bonus to eating prey you didn't kill yourself, becoming the perfect opportunistic scavenger. Or go for increased heat or cold resistance and better speed over terrain, allowing you to range into other biomes like the desert or the tundra. You can even abandon life on land altogether to swim or fly across the oceans instead.
My favourite run so far was one where I discovered I could go fully herbivorous. At first, that seems impossible. You can certainly subsist purely on plants, but at regular intervals, alpha predators enter the map to attack you, functioning like boss fights—killing them and eating their valuable remains seems to be the only answer. But in truth if you can simply outlast these attackers, they'll eventually leave, and still grant you a reward to boot, making more pacifistic runs possible.
I ended up combining increased size, ruminant stomachs, regenerative tissue, and armoured plating
Source: PC Gamer
