Henrik Carlsson's Blog

I just started playing my very first ”souls-like” video game and just a minute ago I defeated my first boss in a souls-like. Hooray for me!

The souls-like in question is Another Crabs Treasure on the Switch. I saw the game on one of Second Winds’ streams the other week and I found it to be adorable. As has probably been established before, I game very infrequently but I’m not completely deaf and blind to what goes on in gaming so obviously I had heard about souls-likes but I’d never tried one. I’m also not a very skilled gamer so something being very hard doesn’t seem that enticing to me but again, Another Crabs Treasure just looked adorable. I also figured it would probably be a game that would be available on Switch.

A week or so ago I did check and it was indeed available on the Switch, and to a reasonable price, so I mentally placed in on my ”let’s play these games sometime” list and tonight I ended up feeling like playing some video games so I decided to give it a try.

First impression is that it is indeed adorable. The story seems interesting and I like the main character. The thing I like less is that it seems poorly optimized. Sure, the Switch isn’t a powerhouse but it does handle games that at least appear to be more complex than this one. ”Crabs’ suffer from drops in frame rate quite often which is particularly annoying in an intense battle. A quick google search told the than unfortunately this seems to be a thing. Lots of players seems unhappy with the Switch version of this game.

I don’t have any other system for gaming so I’ll just have to grit my teeth and make do with what I have.

In the end I played up to the first boss tonight and he completely wiped the floor with me, even though I play on the slightly easier setting. The good news is that it didn’t make me want to throw the controller away and do something else. Instead it made me bite down hard, swear a lot, empty my drink and try again and again and again and again and again. After what must have been at least 15 tries I did get the hang of it and I manage to kill the boss so now I am in some weird catharsis state. Part of me wants to keep going but parts of me wants to go to bed while I’m ahead.