Everything is Crab Review: A Roguelite that Grabs You, But Not Without Cracks

Video games are really trending right now, and “Everything is Crab” is quickly gaining popularity. It’s a quirky game all about evolution, with fun gameplay and a charmingly cute look.

I spent about 10 hours playing the game and exploring its evolution system and various challenge modes. While there’s a lot to experience, not everything is fantastic.

I had fun playing Everything is Crab, but it needs a few improvements to become as popular and long-lasting as games like Vampire Survivors. The good news is the developers are planning to add more content without charging players.

What is Everything is Crab?

Despite its charming look, this game is a classic Roguelite. Each playthrough takes around 20 minutes, and you’ll need to eat different foods to survive, grow stronger, and evolve. You’ll pick new abilities as you find food, battle enemies, and ultimately try to defeat a powerful boss.

As you play through different difficulty levels, you’ll steadily become more powerful. Each level increases enemy strength and health, but also offers rewards. By completing these challenging levels and reaching certain goals, you’ll unlock Genetics, which provide various upgrades to enhance your gameplay.

Some genetics simply give you direct benefits, like extra health. Others are more nuanced – for example, larger creatures have a better chance of evolving into rarer forms. These genetics let players customize their approach with each new run, keeping the gameplay fresh. After you reach Pressure 1, you can combine two genetics at the start of each run for a unique starting advantage.

The game also includes challenge rounds that add extra difficulty by limiting what you can do during a run. These challenges last as long as a normal game and feature the same enemies. To unlock harder levels, you’ll still need to reach certain Pressure milestones, just like in the main game.

An Adorable Art Style

One of the best things about this game is how charming the main character, Darwin, is. Even as he transforms into strange and unusual creatures, he’s still fun to watch. No matter how many eyes, tentacles, wings, or legs he gains, Darwin’s animations always look great.

The game’s visuals are fantastic, from the creative enemy designs to the imaginative world itself. What’s especially fun is how often those designs are used for comedic effect. For example, you’ll encounter fish people with oversized heads and tiny legs, and small creatures that comically stretch their mouths wide when they attack – it’s funny from the very beginning.

The game’s environments are decent, but the characters are much more visually appealing. A neat feature is how the creatures around you change and develop as the round progresses. This added challenge felt natural and well-integrated into the gameplay.

The game’s simple visuals aren’t a drawback – they actually make it easy to learn and focus on the interesting transformations that happen as you progress and evolve, creating unique and unusual combinations of features.

A Mile Wide, But an Inch Deep

It’s frustrating to encounter limited options in games, particularly in Roguelikes, as it significantly reduces the fun. Everything is Crab suffers from this issue – the game essentially offers only a few viable strategies, with very little diversity among them.

The game’s evolution system feels limited because not enough changes feel significant. The core issue is that only a few evolutions offer a real choice in how they develop. As you progress, you can specialize an evolution in one of two directions, which is a good way to create diverse character builds and add variety to the gameplay.

Currently, useful benefits from evolving creatures are rare throughout the game. We need many more meaningful rewards for evolving, so players won’t always choose the strongest, quickest option and ignore other, potentially more interesting, evolutions. However, this is only part of the issue.

Everything is Crab suffers from a significant issue: gameplay is limited to just a few effective strategies, and those strategies aren’t very diverse.

After playing this game for about ten times, it becomes pretty clear that there isn’t much new to discover. While a short game can be good, here it’s a problem because some character builds are much stronger than others. I found myself consistently focusing on increasing size and health, as those stats showed up most often when my character evolved.

If I didn’t get certain upgrades, the game usually became much harder later on. While some adjustments are needed to make things fairer, adding more ways to specialize and gain upgrades would be a great help. However, even with those improvements, the game would still rely too much on random chance, which is a major issue.

A Little Too Random

I realize this might seem strange for a game like this, but a big part of what makes Roguelite games fun is the ability to overcome bad luck and steadily improve. While random chance is key, it’s equally important to be able to lessen its impact. Unfortunately, this game offers very few ways to do that.

You can slightly influence things as you play by picking evolutions, which increases your chances of getting similar ones in the future through a system called Affinities. However, this isn’t usually the main problem when it comes to random outcomes in the game.

Your success in the game will mostly depend on two things: Alphas and POIs. Alphas are tougher enemies found throughout the map, and they drop Mutagen, which is essential for improving or changing your evolutions. POIs are random encounters that let you choose between two upgrades, like restoring health or boosting your regeneration rate.

While random chance is a key factor, it’s equally important to be able to lessen its impact. Unfortunately, there are very few ways to do that in this situation.

These might seem minor, but finding several of them near your starting point significantly improves your chances of success. If you don’t find many, you could end up with a weak build and limited options for getting stronger.

It might seem minor, but the random genetics you receive each time you play a new game really impacts your strategy. You’ll get to pick from three random genetic options twice, and these choices largely define your character’s build. Some genetics aren’t very helpful, offering little benefit, while others are so good you’ll want to choose them whenever they appear.

For example, the ‘Patient’ perk lets you skip improving your abilities to potentially get a rarer, more powerful upgrade next time. However, this isn’t very useful because it relies on luck. While it can be combined with other perks, waiting several levels for a better upgrade actually goes against what makes the game fun.

A World of Evolution Locked Away

Even ignoring the random number generator problems, the game just doesn’t offer much content. It feels a bit harsh to say, but there aren’t enough different options to keep things interesting. Most of the best upgrades are tied to beating bosses and choosing specific evolution paths, meaning you’ll only find a handful of them during any single playthrough.

If you want crab claws in the game, you first need to unlock the arm evolution. Similarly, to spit, you have to get the beak attack first. While this makes logical sense, part of what’s enjoyable about these games is creating wild and unexpected combinations. However, in Everything is Crab, you can’t really combine things in a useful or interesting way.

I always found it strange that the game doesn’t allow for more unusual character customizations. Why not let players create truly wild combinations, like a character with a beak and a trunk? I understand the need to avoid confusing abilities or visuals, but it definitely limits the fun.

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While it does give you a bit more to choose from, the game can quickly limit your options, and your chosen upgrades might not work well with your overall strategy. This problem should become less noticeable once other issues are addressed in future updates.

A Limited Evolutionary Path

While branching evolutions are a great feature, there aren’t many of them, and they often feel unevenly distributed. The game would benefit from having more evolutions overall, but especially more branching paths. Currently, there are only eight branching evolutions available.

As a player, I’ve noticed a lot of the upgrades just don’t lead to any further cool evolutions, which is a bummer because I’d rather focus on ones that do give me better perks. Honestly, some, like Alpha and Tentacles, are just too good to ignore. Why would I pick something like Wings, which just makes me a little less slow, when I can get something way more powerful?

The limited number of upgrade choices is a problem, because a bad one can quickly ruin a playthrough. It would be great if upgrades had a bigger effect – for example, the Wings upgrade could give you a weak attack that pushes enemies away, creating some breathing room.

The game still feels incomplete, like it’s lacking some content. However, what is there is genuinely great and fun to play. You can definitely spend a lot of time with it, though it does become a bit repetitive after a while. Luckily, the developers are planning some changes and new features in the next major update, which is exciting for this unique Roguelite.

Closing Comments

Okay, so Everything is Crab is seriously different. It’s like a roguelike where you evolve your crab, kinda like in Spore, which is a really cool combo. Honestly, sometimes it felt like luck played too big a role, which was a little frustrating. Visually, it’s pretty neat – the art style really shows off all the crazy evolutions you can get. There are definitely some things holding it back, but overall, it’s a fun game, and I think with a little more work, it could be amazing.

2026-05-12 01:41