{"id":11530,"date":"2026-05-27T20:08:10","date_gmt":"2026-05-27T10:08:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/?p=11530"},"modified":"2026-07-02T21:19:39","modified_gmt":"2026-07-02T11:19:39","slug":"everything-is-crab-carcinization-comes-for-us-all","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/2026\/05\/27\/everything-is-crab-carcinization-comes-for-us-all\/","title":{"rendered":"Everything is Crab: Carcinization Comes For Us All."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

There are not many games that can sell me on just the concept alone. To be sure there’s a novelty aspect to it, something which is certainly overvalued by long term game reviewers like myself, but there’s an ocean between liking the idea<\/em> and actually wanting to play it. My wishlist is filled with semi-guilty entries of games that I’m sure at one point I was red hot to play but for whatever reason just don’t seem to clear the bar anymore. Thankfully not so with Everything is Crab<\/a> as it manages to sell me on two points: the hilarious realisation of the concept of carcinization<\/a> in game form and<\/em> it being a progressive roguelite which I’ve taken a shine to. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t<\/svg>\n\t\t<\/button><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The concept is pretty straightforward: you start off as a kind of amorphous blob that has the ability to move, dash, headbutt and consume whatever you decide is food. That allows you to grow and evolve which will present you with a list of evolution options which include fun things such as growing all manner of limbs, claws to attack and a litany of other abilities and buffs that you’ll need as the world around you starts to get increasingly hostile. Like any good roguelite there’s synergies across the various different abilities, many of which become utterly broken when combined in just the right way. Difficulty scales as you do too with each of the main bosses appearing at set intervals as you level up. There’s a host of challenges, starting modes and other modifiers you can use to ramp up the difficulty and earn yourself some different starting options in the process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The pixel art is simple, charming and clear. This is one of those games where things (including yourself) could easily start blending into each other as it’s rather<\/em> easy to annoy a whole bunch of creatures in short order and have them piling on top of you. Every animal is some kind of weird mishmash of a number of different real world animals which, on the surface, sounds positively horrifying but the artists have done a great job of making everything inexorably cute even when it’s trying to take a chunk out of you. As you’d expect performance is top notch although I have noticed that I have to stop myself from ticking the “unlimited” option on the frame rate limiter these days. There are many, many games that will completely flatline your hardware doing so for absolutely zero benefit when a capped 120fps keeps the hardware from screaming its head off.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t<\/svg>\n\t\t<\/button><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Progression during a run comes at a steady clip, ensuring you’re never too far away from getting another evolution that could make or break your current build. The game deliberately doesn’t tell you a whole lot when you’re starting out, preferring instead for you to learn through your inevitable failure, which does mean some of the nuances of certain mechanics will be lost on you. For me that was the DNA drops (mutagens) which can be spent to reroll your choices, straightforward enough, or<\/em> upgrade the rarity which for your chosen upgrade sticks around afterwards. Whilst this isn’t exactly build\/run defining it does make those particular choices much more meaningful once you get a feel for the ones that work well for you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Given this is a roguelite you are very much at the behest of RNGesus for every run which is both part of the fun and annoyance all at the same time. Once you’ve landed on a solid build pattern you often want to replicate it and quite often you simply won’t be able to recreate that same magic once again. The devs are aware of this and have structured many of the challenges and their rewards around experimenting with things that, honestly, don’t make a ton of sense up front but can get you to experiment out of your comfort zone. Plus sometimes it’s fun to make the biggest or smallest character you can just because. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t<\/svg>\n\t\t<\/button><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I found the jumps in difficulty between pressure levels pretty savage even with my choice genetics giving me a solid starting point. This would be fine for the most part, you need more challenge to keep things interesting, however the lack of variety in enemies and overall game play made those challenge jumps more defeating than encouraging for me. The lack of a meta-progression system also meant I really didn’t feel much drive to keep on playing once I felt the challenge had run out at my current level and the next didn’t have much more to offer me. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

So whilst putting a game down around the 4 hour mark might be somewhat premature I was at a point where I’d seen what I needed to see, enjoyed my time with it and wasn’t in the mood to potentially spoil that by trying to push through another level. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t<\/svg>\n\t\t<\/button><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Everything is Crab has all the trappings of those roguelites that you can easily lose weekends to. The pixel art graphics, the fail-fast-fail-often gameplay loop and the RNG evolution mechanics that make chasing the dragon of that perfect run just oh so sweet when it comes off. What had me putting it down was the repetition without a bigger overarching goal I could sink my teeth into. That’s not to say that everyone would find similar fault, indeed many people have sunk many more hours than I into this and are still finding enjoyment in it, but this old gamer decided to tap out rather than potentially ruin a good thing.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rating: 7.75\/10<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Everying is Crab is available on PC right now for $14.50. Total play time was 4 hours with 15% of the achievements unlocked. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There are not many games that can sell me on just the concept alone. To be sure there’s a novelty aspect to it, something which…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":11534,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[9,16],"tags":[3554,6826,733,2033,6281,6395,6694,6449,5716],"class_list":["post-11530","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-games","category-review","tag-2d","tag-odd-dreams-digital","tag-pc","tag-pixel-art","tag-procedural-generation","tag-roguelite","tag-secret-mode","tag-singleplayer","tag-survival"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/Everything-is-Crab-Review-Screenshot-Wallpaper-Title-Screen-scaled.jpg?fit=2560%2C1067&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/ppBqt-2ZY","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11530","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11530"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11530\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11535,"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11530\/revisions\/11535"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11534"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therefinedgeek.com.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}