There’s something I love about the concept of finding horror in mundane work. Give me a limited environment, a repetitive task, and the crushing horrors of late-stage capitalism, and you’ve got the start of a great little game. Titles like Threshold, Iron Lung, and Dead Letter Dept. all took this concept and ran with it, making for wonderful bite-sized horrors. But the key is that it can’t all be a repetitive task; there has to be an interesting subversion along the way that challenges you in ways that unnerve or disturb.
Crabmeat, a new first-person horror game from Nicholas McDonnell and Mitchell Pasmans, starts off well enough, but never really gets to that next-level subversion I was hoping for.
You play a prisoner, charged with the horrible crime of poverty, who has to survive on a government-issued crabbing vessel in the Antarctic to try to meet their crabbing quota to pay off their debt. If you can’t do it, the toxic capsule in your neck will kill you, and your debt will be passed to your next of kin. It’s a brutal opening that’s presented with a great style, featuring a blurred face on your captor and garbled speech with subtitles instead of actual spoken dialogue. After this, you’re dropped onto the small ship that you’ll spend the remainder of the game getting extremely acquainted with.
Crabmeat is a game about figuring out the process. The process of moving around. The process of setting up traps. The process of sorting crabs. Direction is sparse throughout the ship, with few signs explaining how to operate, but that’s part of the appeal, in theory. While it looks like a standard first-person game, you move around by clicking your mouse rather than traditional WASD keyboard movement. To get around the ship, you click on the ground where you want to go, and your character walks there. It takes a lot of getting used to at first, but eventually you get used to it, even if it remains purposefully clunky. I think it’s neat to try to do things differently, but I’m not entirely sure what’s gained by setting up the game this way, aside from making it harder to get around when dangerous things start happening on board.
The core loop of the game involves you heading up to the cabin, driving the ship around to places on the map with green circles, anchoring the boat, and catching crabs. Much like walking, steering the boat feels purposefully awkward. Spinning the wheel and adjusting the throttle are both done by clicking and dragging the mouse to move them, which feels oddly immersive, fully illustrating the challenge of navigating a boat that size. Most of the time, you’re navigating through pretty open spaces as you travel between marked crabbing sites, but occasionally, you’ll have to make some tricky maneuvers between rocky formations to get where you’re going.
The actual crabbing process is surprisingly involved, with lots of fiddly little steps that you have to repeat over and over. You need to fill the crab trap with bait, then drop the trap into the water using a crane. Once it’s in there for a bit, you need to retrieve it with a harpoon gun, but the catch is that the harpoon gun is on the other side of the ship, so you need to reposition in order to get at it. After dropping your haul into your boat, you need to sort everything to make sure you’re keeping the correct crabs and discarding the unwanted ones. The two places you sort them into are humorously labeled “patriotic” and “not patriotic,” which is one of the few instances of the game trying to represent the vibe of the world at large. All of these steps are pretty tedious, and it’s easy to forget which winch you have to operate at which point, but it’s easy enough to get used to the pattern.
The first time this rhythm of crabbing and moving around was broken, it was by a little beep. I turned around from the steering wheel and saw a red alarm that I hadn’t noticed before was going off, letting me know there was something on board. It was a great moment, making me nervous in the exact way I hoped this game could achieve. I found that the engine was the problem, caused by a massive crab attached to it. I took out my trusty ax and killed it, then fixed the damage with my welding torch. It wasn’t quite the horror moment I was hoping for, but it was a good first step in subverting my expectations.
Later on, I heard that same alarm going off and found a giant crab walking around on deck. It attacked me, prompting me to run to a glass case in the hallway containing a shotgun. I smashed the glass with my ax and blasted the horrible beast with my new weapon. It’s not super easy to wrangle the controls to get this done, but again, it was a nice way to shake up the monotony to keep me off balance. This was decidedly less effective when it repeated over and over again, with crabs either damaging equipment or showing up to try to kill me. What once felt novel became just another repeated action in the rhythm, becoming rote and uninteresting as the crabbing itself.
While you’re told to go to the marked areas for crabbing, there are also question marks on the map that enticed me. What mysteries could lie there? I was on a timer to get my quota, but surely these would still be worth checking out to satisfy my curiosity. Oftentimes, these just ended up being other crab traps that contained weirder things, like keys to lockers on the boat or, in one case, a dead body. The lockers did have some notes in them, but they never really delivered the narrative satisfaction that I was hoping for.
The game runs about three hours, but it feels like the game has shown you most of its tricks by the end of the first hour. It did provide a change in gameplay in the final moments of the game, which I’m not going to spoil, but I still found myself wishing that it took some sort of turn to keep me on my toes. I was waiting for a twist that subverted the premise and revealed something deeper to the situation or the world, but it never came. Even the ending was fairly expected, going in an obvious direction that left the game on a flat note.
The foundation is all here in Crabmeat, but it just feels like a setup that needs more ideas to keep it fresh throughout. Compared to something like Iron Lung, which finds clever ways to freak you out as you go about your routine, there’s just not much here once you’ve seen the few tricks it has. Everything you do feels like a task rather than a challenge, building up tedium instead of tension. While I did appreciate the climax of the game, it never quite reached the promise of the intriguing intro for me, with nothing more to take away from the game aside from the obvious ‘governments treat the poor like crap’ moral of the story. The game would have benefited from being shorter and punchier, or having more twists to keep it interesting the whole time.
Review code provided by publisher. Crabmeat is now available on Steam.
