Video Game / Everything Is Crab

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Everything is Crab is an action roguelite developed by Odd Dreams Digital and was released on 8 of May, 2026.

The game is built around shaping a creature named Darwin through feeding, fighting, scavenging, and mutation. Instead of locking you into an archetype, it asks you to adapt your body plan as the run becomes more dangerous.

Everything is Trope:

• Bandit Mook: Most wild creatures can eat or steal the food drops left behind on the ground. Pilferrets in particular love to scoop up the most valuable piece of fruit and run away with it.
• Bee Afraid: Beewares are a cross between dogs and bees. They appear in groups and are often one of the first hostile threats you will face. They are also the game's primary Airborne Mook, with their flight making them unhindered by terrain, like water.
• Beware the Nice Ones: While they're generally quite relaxed, an enraged Crabbybara is a surprisingly quick, very durable threat.
• Blob Monster: Darwin's default form is a blue blob. He can eventually evolve limbs.
• Body Horror: Much like other roguelites, the more upgrades Darwin collects, the more he becomes a horrific mishmash of body parts.
• Boring, but Practical: One of the potential builds in the game is small but with high stats in Dodge. While this means you might not be fighting all that much, it decreases the chances of enemies hurting you (whenever or not they can actually touch your hit box and then get past the Dodge stat) and allows you to wait out encounters.
• Cast from Hit Points: The Antler's attack will hurt Darwin a bit.
• Centipede's Dilemma: One of the notes for Spiderfrog+++ says that they spend most of their energy deciding which leg comes after which.
• Chest Monster: Spineapples are small predators that disguise themselves as fruit when not attacking.
• Chill Capybara: Crabbybaras are content to be left alone, but if you or any other animals provoke them, they become a raging beast that only stops when they're dead.
• Collateral Damage: Because all attacks have a damage area, it's fairly common for opponents who attack in packs to end up biting each other because they blundered into each others' attacks.
• Crippling Overspecialisation: The Vegan upgrade. You'll level up at quite a clip thanks to it being a significant Experience Booster for plant food. Unlike its more moderate cousin Herbivore, which still allows opportunistic scavenging, you can't eat non-plant food at all, leaving you entirely dependent on the generosity of the environment to progress. This rules out, for example, healing up after a big fight by eating health-restoring meat drops from the swarm of Beewares you just finished off.
• Experience Booster: Several of the upgrades will increase the XP benefits of various types of food: Carnivore for meat, Piscivore for fish, Herbivore for fruit (with Vegan as essentially Herbivore on steroids) and Scavenger for food killed by other animals.
• Fish People: The most humanoid creatures start as fish that evolve arms and legs, which they eventually use to hold spears.
• Game-Over Man: If Darwin gets killed and goes extinct, the results screen will show a portrait of the creature (or environmental effect) that killed him.
• Gentle Giant:
  • A non-enraged Crabbybara is so friendly it can even provide shelter from environment effects.
  • Turtoids are generally fairly chunky designs, and while it's possible that one will be annoyed with you or get caught within the attack radius while you fend off a different opponent, they tend not to be very aggressive.
• Giant Enemy Crab: Several of the bosses, like the Crabtaur, the Shellephant, and the Krabken, have crablike characteristics. Also, you can become one if you select enough carcinisation options while evolving.
• Giant Spider: Clawdia is part spider, part crab, all bigger than you.
• Healing Factor: The Regeneration stat allows you to heal a set amount of HP every 10 seconds, with a few Upgrades that help make it better.
• Hyperactive Metabolism: Whenever Darwin is near suitable food, he will eat it to gain experience points, with certain foods also healing him in the process.
• Kung Fu-Proof Mook: Turtoids are naturally shielded from attacks and only let their guard down when they attack.
• Large and in Charge: The "Alpha" Upgrade not only increases Darwin's size but also his Social stat, which affects how well and how many creatures he can charm.
• Luck-Based Mission: Over and above the usual role of randomness in roguelites, the challenges Amnesia, Odd Mutations and especially Unintelligent Design reduce your ability to form a coherent build by limiting your control over your mutations - the former requires you to guess what mutations are based on their affinities and star totals, and the latter two replace either half or all of your level-up choices with a single randomised outcome, potentially leading to anti-synergistic combinations like Body Slam and Smol.
• Magikarp Power:
  • You start out as a relatively inoffensive blue blob creature whose only attack is a headbutt and, if the run goes well, gradually develop into something that can go toe-to-toe with the hulking Krabken, during a meteor shower, and win.
  • Dodge upgrades start out as pretty minor advantages, but by the time you reach the cap at 75% chance, you're almost insufferably hard to hit.
  • Charm effects have the advantage that they not only scale based on your abilities, but also those of the AI creatures around you. A swarm of charmed tier 3 Beewares will make you an absolute nightmare.
  • The Scavenger upgrade starts out as a neat incidental where you can claw a little extra XP by stealing from predator animals, but becomes much more useful in the late game. Because higher-level enemies tend to give out more and better quality meat, and there are more of them who are perfectly willing to fight each other, ordinary exploration towards the end of a run can have you stumble on the aftermath of some giant fight between Spineapples and Beewares with scavengeable meat as far as the eye can see.
• Meaningful Name: The creature you evolve over the course of the game is named for the father of evolutionary theory, Charles Darwin.
• The Minionmaster: The "Social" stat is focused on charming enemies into fighting for you, with a higher stat allowing you to charm more enemies. With a high enough stat, you will effectively command an army to leave a wave of devastation. Notably, doing this as your only source of damage won't break a Pacifist Run, as you do not directly harm enemies.
• Mix-and-Match Critter: Darwin can acquire various traits from different animals, meaning that he can have antlers like a deer, pincers like a crab, and wings like a butterfly. The various enemies themselves are also a bizarre combination of critter parts. In fact, most of the animals, from the lowest prey animals to the alpha bosses, are some mishmash of creatures (and crabs).
• Mook Maker: Clawdia lays eggs during the fight, which spawn minions for her. They'll hang around for a bit after her defeat and can pose a threat.
• Mutually Exclusive Power-Ups: Picking certain evolutions will have others banned for the run. For example, picking Jaws will keep you from picking Beak and vice/versa.
• My Defense Need Not Protect Me Forever: You can invoke this with the Final Boss fight with the right build by simply dodging their attacks and letting the Cataclysm defeat them for you.
• Natural Weapon: Gaining new attacks involves growing new body parts such as claws, jaws, beaks, or horns. With arms, you gain even more options, including pincers and even Toe Beans, which can charm enemies into fighting for you.
• Pacifist Run: The Vegan upgrade is unlocked by completing a run without personally dealing damage at all - although allowing charmed creatures to fight for you doesn't count. Expect to do a lot of scavenging, eating fruit, and running like hell.
• Predators Are Mean: Predator enemies, like Beeware, are hostile towards others that aren't their kind.
• Prehensile Tail: One of the upgrades, once you grow a tail, is this very trope, which extends the range that you can eat food.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Pantthers at low HP will tend to disappear into the distance and never come back.
• Shout-Out:
  • One of the notes for Blobfish++ says it "Tastes like burning."
  • The note for Turtoid+ says "Harder, better, definitely not much faster, stronger."
• Suicidal Overconfidence: The AI basically just doesn't do threat assessment with some enemies. Lone Beewares will look at a hulking tier 3 Alpha Turtoid, a towering boss monster, or a version of Darwin who is about halfway to becoming Cthulhu himself, and think, "Yeah, I can take it."
• Super-Persistent Predator: One quirk of the AI is that once it locks onto you, it can be quite hard to get it to leave you alone, as any player who's been chased across five biomes by irritable Beewares will attest.
• Super Spit: One of the attacks that Darwin can gain is the ability to spit at his enemies. While it's relatively weak, it's also one of the few ranged attacks in the game, and it can be upgraded to poison enemies.
• Zerg Rush: Sometimes AI creatures group up into packs, particularly Spineapples. These can be pretty rough encounters, especially if several take an interest in you at once.