Kieran called Everything is Crab “wildly unhinged” in his review – and you should know enough about us by now, Dear Reader, to take that for the compliment it is. This great little creature creation roguelite knows it’s weird – in fact, that’s the point.
But it’s not just us. The people, crabs, and weird-duck-kangaroo-thingies have spoken; Everything is Crab is flying off the shelves.
As the team at Odd Dreams Digital celebrate a cool 250,000 sales, we catch up with director and lead designer Denis Asensio, and find out what’s next in the evolution of one of the breakout hits of 2026…
RL: For those who aren’t already familiar, can you tell us what Everything is Crab is all about? The title manages to tell you quite a lot – but also not very much at all!
DA: Of course! The pitch from day one was: Everything is Crab is an animal evolution roguelite about (maybe?) not becoming a crab. It combines the spirit of Spore with the replayability of modern roguelikes, where you get to craft a different animal chimaera every run.
RL: Everything is Crab mixes systems in a pretty unusual way. How did you land on that combination? When did it click that this idea could actually work – when did you find the fun?
DA: To be honest, the core loop was achieved very intuitively, and we had a fun experience during the prototype already. We believe the combination of proven roguelike systems with the few innovation areas we introduced is what sparked the magic (for example, having a living ecosystem free-roaming world instead of a player-centric bullet-hell or room-based structure; or being able to play as prey, nomadic or social animals avoiding conflict), and the potential was quite clear from the first months already. After that, it was about building towards the sparks of magic, keeping the fantasy clear while we created systems to increase replayability and depth around those pillars.
RL: The roguelite gameplay loop is always changing as players find new synergies. How do you find a good balance when evolving the player’s experience over the course of their time with the game? Put another way: can you give us a fun example of some weird shit you might see after several hours in the game that you just would not get early on?
DA: For sure! For good and for bad, Everything is Crab is full of examples of slightly hidden to deeply hidden depth, synergies, and interactions. The balance is tricky to achieve, but our philosophy so far has been incentivising the player to discover those synergies via experimentation and toying with the systems. We do so with a combination of meta-progression unlocks, gated behind trying new things, and key evolutions that are aimed at tickling the player’s brain into the many possibilities they offer.
A very good example of the pros and cons of this approach is the perceived Meta vs the true power of each archetype. Here we see the easier-to-access and more intuitive builds often regarded as the most effective, while other, subtler builds actually have better win-rates. To become a master crab, adaptation is paramount, so we built the game in a way so that identifying when the world and the RNG are opening a door into a specific archetype is a key skill to have for the later difficulty levels.
As for specific examples, a build that I love seeing players pick up is the mushroom archetype, since there are degrees to it with compounding benefits. At first, it looks like just grabbing some Herbivore levels and Senses is a great strategy for a good progress source. After that, Snout and Poison Resistance come into the picture, optimising the progress-per-minute and decreasing the risk. And the next level is learning that if you follow that build and mix it up with a poison-based strategy, you can gobble up poisonous mushrooms to increase your poison damage multiplier (thanks to Toxic Sequestration), creating the build with the maximum DPS ceiling in the game (especially useful for endless).
Another very interesting example is Antlers, an attack evolution that is usually despised by new players due to its self-damage quirk, and that has a very low pick ratio as a result. Later on, players start warming up to it when they realise the many synergies that the self-damage mechanic provides, from high-damage builds thanks to Revenge, to social hybrids thanks to Whining, to poison hybrids with Poisonous Spores, and many others.
RL: You have included a feature that lets you share your unique creatures. Have you been surprised by what the community has delivered so far?
DA: It has been amazing to see the impact of such a feature, since for relatively low development effort, it has allowed thousands of people to share those quirky, beautiful, or outright calamitous creations with everyone else. We see this in our own Discord, where we have a run-showcase channel where people go to brag or just revel in the weirdness of their little chimaeras.
RL: Everything is Crab passed 250,000 sales recently, shortly after launch. Congratulations! How has the response compared to what the team expected?
DA: It has been a blast and certainly even better than what we expected! While the team was cautiously optimistic after reaching such great traction (wishlists, median demo play time and other indicators), in this industry there is always the possibility that it does not convert properly, that the game is flawed in ways that were not apparent during the demo, or that your game gets buried by many of the other factors or popular games coming almost every week. So, when we saw that we reached almost 100k in the first 24h and such high CCU numbers, it was like a 10ton stone was lifted from our shoulders.
Right now we are doing better than we had ever projected, and we’re constantly breaking new sales barriers, which is crazy to think about since we released just 3 weeks ago. And while we always planned on supporting the game nonetheless, we are now in a much better position financially to be able to keep improving the game and making new content comfortably.
RL: Has the success changed your post-launch plans at all, and what can you tell us about those plans?
DA: As I touched on in the question above, the main change is the security that we will be able to support the game moving forward without the need to look for alternate sources of funding, and this is the biggest relief of them all. Otherwise, the plan has not changed, and we are currently looking into a variety of ways to support the game, which we can see summarised in our Roadmap.
Our biggest priorities for our following free updates are: finding ways to improve the run variety, visual variety, adding extra content to keep the game fresh, and introducing many of the most community-requested QOL features. Regarding our long-term plans, we have very interesting ideas on how to expand Everything is Crab to take it somewhere new and exciting while ensuring that each update we do helps keep the game feeling fresh and fun for both new and returning players.
RL: Finally: can we expect the game to scuttle onto more platforms soon?
DA: We can’t confirm anything yet, but we’re definitely looking into how we can evolve Everything is Crab into a multi-platform game!! Stay tuned and feel free to join our socials for more info about it soon™ 🙂
Thanks, Denis – and congratulations again to the team at Odd Dreams Digital. Everything is Crab has certainly evolved into a firm fan favourite. We can’t wait to see what happens next.
