Roguelikes with strong visual progression have always appealed to me, but Everything is Crab takes the concept to another level entirely.
Perfectly summed up by its lengthy title, Everything is Crab is a Spore-inspired animal evolution roguelite that sees you transform from a small blue blob into a horrifying alpha predator over the course of its 20-minute runs.
The game first caught my attention during February’s Steam Next Fest, where it became the 11th most downloaded demo, and I’ve had a great time over the past week playing god and creating some truly unholy specimens.
What is Everything is Crab?
You begin each run as a squishy blue blob before traversing the map, consuming fruit and hunting other creatures to gain food and level up. Your goal is to survive until the end, slowly mutating into an unstoppable killing machine and defeating multiple bosses along the way.
Surviving your first run is fairly straightforward, but replayability is extended through multiple pressure levels and standalone challenges. These test your skills in different ways, with each pressure tier gradually increasing the difficulty of enemies and bosses.
The challenges are where things become more interesting, introducing unique restrictions that force you to adapt your approach and play more creatively. The Dry Age challenge, for example, takes place entirely in a desert environment, forcing you to scramble for upgrades that improve your heat resistance. The Amnesia challenge mixes things up further by preventing you from seeing what each evolution actually does, adding an extra layer of uncertainty to your choices.
Becoming the monster
The most enjoyable and highly replayable aspect of the game comes from its 125+ evolution-based abilities. As you level up, you’ll select upgrades from different skill trees that drastically alter both your appearance and playstyle. Before long, your creature mutates into an absolute monstrosity, and the game even lets you export and share GIFs of your wonderfully messed-up creations.
The different upgrade paths enhance specific abilities while also transforming your appearance in weird and wonderful ways. Selecting a poisonous stinger attack or growing fur to improve cold resistance visibly alters your creature to reflect those mutations. Some evolution paths even lock you out of others, forcing you to think carefully about the long-term direction of your build.
The evolutions range from active and passive abilities and they come with their own rarity tiers. You can re-roll your selection or increase the rarerity of the pool presented by collecting materials dropped by bosses and alpha enemies. These higher rarity versions come with higher stat upgrades and additional secondary effects.
A living ecosystem
Something I loved about Everything is Crab is how it makes you feel like just one small part of a living, breathing ecosystem. Other creatures will hunt and chase each other across the map, while some attempt to deceive you by disguising themselves as fruit. There are also points of interest to uncover that offer useful upgrades, alongside larger and more dangerous alpha variants of enemies that reward you more generously for taking them down.
The game also features a day-and-night cycle alongside a variety of biomes to explore, including deserts and frozen tundras. At night, visibility is drastically reduced and predators become far more aggressive. Different environments can also damage you over time unless you’ve invested in the right upgrades, adding another layer of strategy to how you shape your build.
One criticism I had was that the bosses remain largely unchanged throughout. While the order you face them is often remixed, I quickly learned their attack patterns and found them fairly predictable to defeat. Perhaps this is remedied in later stages, but for the earlier stages of the game at least, I found myself craving more variety.
The Verdict
Minor complaints aside, I found Everything is Crab to be a highly addictive roguelite that kept me hooked with its unique creature evolution mechanics.
There’s a staggering amount of build variety here, and I came away from each run having experimented with something new while creating a completely different monstrous creature every time.
With more content already planned through 2027 and beyond, Everything is Crab feels like a roguelite that’s only going to become even more wonderfully unhinged over time.
Everything is Crab is out now on PC, and I played via access kindly provided by the publisher and friends.
