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0 I love a good fishing game, especially when they attempt a bit more of a horror type one. Like Dredge, or About Fishing. This time we play as a Crab fisherman in Crabmeat! A game developed by Nicholas McDonnell and Mitchell Pasmans. It looks rather interesting, and I am hoping for some nice creepy ambience with it. But with all that said, you can pick up Crabmeat on Steam for £6.69, that’s not bad. If you haven’t got the money now, then a demo is also out for Crabmeat. So you have no excuse not to try!
Dark waters, and all I can hear is the sound of pincers.
Gameplay
We play as a no named character, who happens to be caught up in debt. This leads to us being forced to pay it off via sailing and capturing King Crabs. Hence, the game’s name, Crabmeat. The player then awakes on their boat and immediately gets to work. Our overall goal is to haul 500kg of King Crab for our quota. So upon heading to the bridge we set off! To find the crabs, we need head towards the green circles found on the navigation monitor. After reaching them, head out to the back of the ship and prepare the crab nets. First we fill the nets with bait, and hoist them off of the boat into the sea with the crane. After a while, we can return to claim them and sort out the crabs.
I was not sure if we needed all types of crabs, or just the large, and medium ones. So I chucked out any that did not fit the image in the hopper. If you check the navigation, there are also yellow question marks for us to investigate. These offer interesting items which are used on the vessel.
While exploring the sea of Crabmeat, the player’s boat will be attacked by nasty crustaceans. With there being two types. Red, that will attack machines, and the player themselves, and grey, which only attack machines, unless the player lingers nearby. You can defend yourself with either the axe or shotgun, but I found the axe way more efficient. The crabs attack at random, so there isn’t much way of knowing when they will appear. After kicking off any unwanted guest, you should look at the monitors located around the vessel for any needed repairs. At the start of the game the blow torch is one of the first items the player gets, so it shouldn’t be too hard to do.
Graphics & Audio
Crabmeat has that retro look, similar in my opinion to The Thing on PS2. However, they chose to blur human character’s faces, which is an interesting choice. The voices are a sort of Charlie Brown adult womp-womp noise. The crabs look suitably freaky, especially when they’re all wiggling about the hopper, definitely one to make your skin crawl, looking spider adjacent. The ambience was decent and did a fair job at building atmosphere.
Longevity
My time with Crabmeat clocked me at just near 4 hours, and that wasn’t too bad. The game does offer 10 achievements for you to unlock. I am not sure if there is another ending for the player to obtain. But I think the story was rather straight forward.
Final Thoughts
Crabmeat offers a short and enjoyable fishing experience. Using the boats various cranes, and navigation allows the player to easily become immersed as they play. I loved sorting the crabs out, and seeing them bonk each other as they ragged dolled. The overall atmosphere was nice, with the eeriness of what is going on. However, the story itself, or mystery I would say, was rather lacklustre. Another minor issue is with Crabmeat’s movement. I understand it is advertised as a point & click game, but the movement really suffers for this. It would be best to ditch it, or at least offer the player the choice to toggle it off.
It may not be the strongest mystery game, but I would say picking it up for the fishing aspect is decent enough. Especially if Crabmeat is on sale. So I will be awarding it the Thumb Culture Silver Award.
Disclaimer: A code was received in order to write this review.
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