I’m a pretty huge fan of horror games, be it playing them myself or watching others on YouTube scream their way through the latest titles. Every single night before we go to sleep, me and my husband watch one of our favourite online personalities play the new horror hotness. Because of this I’m pretty well versed in the trends of the genre, and in recent years have watched them go from mascot horror, to anomaly games, and more recently to mundane work sims with a twist. Crabmeat is the perfect example of the latter, as it features infinitely more fishing than it does jump scares.
In this dystopian future, your character finds themselves in a whole heap of trouble. The Australian government has you in custody for a particularly heinous crime – poverty. With no way to pay your debts you’re sentenced to crab fishing, and until you gather enough kilograms of King Crab you will be banished to the icy tundra. Even though you only get a glimpse of the world in Crabmeat it’s one of the most interesting elements of the game, shining a black mirror on our own capitalist nightmare.
The entirety of Crabmeat is set on your little trawler, which is kitted out to drop crab traps and store the crustaceans you reel up from the depths. You’re given a manual that does a fairly decent job of explaining how this works, but really you’ll want to explore the deck and figure out where all your tools sit on board. With very little hand holding you’ll probably begin the game pretty overwhelmed, but with a bit of trial and error you’ll soon be an expert fisher and have plenty of crabs to sort through.
Before you get to crabbing though, you’ll need to make your way to a location rich with tasty crustaceans. These are marked by green circles on your map, and you’ll need to navigate to them yourself as the only one to captain this ship. Once you’re there you need to dump a baited trap into the water and wait, although with a time limit for your debts you may want to keep being productive as the cage floods with crabs. When you’ve left it long enough you’ll need to harpoon and reel in the trap next, which requires some precision boating. Then it’s time for the star of the show, the sorting of the catch.
There are lots of shapes and sizes of crab in the ocean you’re trawling, and you don’t want all of them. This is because all crabs under a certain size are considered unpatriotic, and won’t count towards your total haul. You’ll need to use the mouse to drag the big crabs into the hatch leading to the tank, while keeping the tiny fellas and any other fish out. With lots of wiggling and crawling to deal with this sorting isn’t easy, but it’s pretty damn entertaining.
If a few frisky tiddlers were all you had to deal with in Crabmeat it’d be a hell of an easy game, but these are just the tip of the crab-berg. At any time you may hear the alarm sound on the ship, which lets you know there’s an intruder on board. These are crabs that are hell bent on destroying your stuff, and you’ll need to rush to axe them to bits to protect the boat. The bigger crabs won’t take kindly to this though, and with their spider-like legs they’re a little intimidating.
Crabmeat is a cool concept for a horror game, but the main problem with it is that it’s lacking anything even slightly scary. I suppose if you had a fear of crabs or possibly spiders it could be a rough ride for you, but you always get a clear signal when you’re going to encounter them outside of your traps (and they’re more focused on your machinery than you). There’s also very little tension from your time limit, because you’re given so long to complete your goal. I finished the game with half of my days left, and because of this wasn’t particularly worried as I did my boating busywork. I also have to mention that the ending portion of the game is miserable, and I had to repeat it multiple times as frustrations increased. I won’t spoil this because it’s the end of the game, but it really took the wind out of my sails.
I had quite a lot of issues with Crabmeat, but it does do one thing that’s really cool. The entire game can be played with only the mouse, which means it’s entirely a one handed experience. Because of this it’ll be accessible to a load more gamers, and the control scheme never feels like it limits the game.
Crabmeat is a fine way to spend a couple of hours, and sailing around gathering crabs is entertaining in a sort of zen simulator kind of way. It severely lacks in the horror department though, and the end of the game is just a painful slog. As long as you don’t go in expecting a whole lot of stress then Crabmeat could be a nice way to spend an evening, but you certainly won’t scream in terror at any point.