Crabmeat Review

Taylor Rioux
5 minutes ago
6 min read

Who, or what, are we without our work? In our modern capitalist societies, this question has become harder to answer for many. Capitalism, in its relentless pursuit of efficiency and growth, often demands more than just physical exertion; it requires the systematic commodification of the human spirit. Beyond even the toils of working in an office or the field, many are encouraged to monetize their own passions and hobbies. It is no longer enough to simply do something because you love it — it must be marketed and sold. This is no fault of those who pursue such avenues, but rather the natural progression of capitalism itself. Rising costs of living have long outpaced wages, and so we all do what we must to survive.

Compelled to strip away their intrinsic passions to make do, people more and more frequently find themselves ensnared in cycles of modern indentured servitude by the invisible tethers of systemic debt, spiraling costs of living, and the psychological exhaustion of a life spent chasing a stability that may never come into focus. The system transforms the self from a sovereign entity into a resource to be mined, leaving the individual trapped in a loop where they must surrender who they are simply to sustain their livelihood.

Publisher: Searching Interactive

Developer: Nicholas McDonnell, Mitchell Pasmans

Platform: Played on PC

Availability: Released March 10, 2026 for PC (Steam).

Crabmeat, the minimalist horror title by Nicholas McDonnell and Mitchell Pasmans takes place in such a world, though I am reticent to draw much of a distinction between this world and our own. You’re a prisoner forced to work on a crabbing vessel as punishment for overdrawing your bank account and failing to pay the overdraft fee within 48 hours. Poverty here is a crime, and so you have been sentenced to labor, very much like the debt and prison systems of the United States in the real world and their slave labor rings.

You must meet your quota of 500kg of King Crab per week, or you will be killed via toxin capsule in your neck. You will also die if you try to leave the area. In either case of death, your debt is passed on to your next of kin.

The basic loop of the game is really simple: drive the ship to designated areas for catching some crabs, bait and set your traps, harvest King Crab only, and move on to the next area. All of this must be done in the allotted time, which is shown on a digital display in several places throughout the ship, including at the navigation panel. There are also some other complications along the way.

First and foremost is the ever-present threat of big, evil crabs that come aboard your vessel and try to destroy your equipment or try to harm you personally. These guys are pretty easy to deal with — just a few swings of your axe, and you’ll be able to move on to repairing any damaged areas. Alone, they’re not much of a problem, as any damage to your person can be healed through the use of bandages, but in groups, they’re dangerous. It’s better to kite and face just one at a time where possible, or break out the shotgun in a real emergency. There’s also the threat of ramming your ship into debris, ice, or bait stations, which can cause serious hull integrity issues and force you to focus on repairs.

While not necessarily a problem to solve, there are several points of interest marked on the map with a “?”. These locations contain some sort of clue or item that helps you uncover more of the information needed to fully understand this world and the events that are transpiring around you. It’s a pretty slow burn, with each point revealing very little, but through progression, the picture becomes clearer. I wish I could speak to how it all comes together in the end, but I was never able to fully complete the game before my progress was eliminated due to a save bug.

Image credits: Searching Interactive

Normally, the game saves every two minutes, overwriting the previous save so that there is only a single save slot to draw from. However, on one of my return trips, I ended my session for the night to pick back up and finish the game the following morning. Unfortunately, my save file was nowhere to be found upon booting back up, meaning I had lost the hours of playtime and progress that I had.

Would finishing the game have changed how I felt about what I had already played? Could those final clues contextualize the tedium of crab fishing in a way that alters my experience in a meaningful way? It seems unlikely that this is the case, but it is an important caveat here. Though the existence of such a bug is also, in its own way, a part of Crabmeat’s story as well. It’s messy, it’s unpolished, and there are bound to be issues on any given run, but there were pockets of time where I was enjoying playing it.

I mostly like piloting the boat — it’s just fun to work on the ship. Using circular motions with the mouse to turn the steering wheel, pushing and pulling levers to engage the throttle, etc. — these tactile, diagetic actions are oddly relaxing; patterns of labor that become hypnotic amidst the creaks and groans of the ship. In fact, I liked these manual tasks quite a bit more than the other aspects of the game, as they were the most mechanically interesting and, thankfully, kept me away from having to engage with the crab battles and movement processes, which I despised. To engage in any task, you perform it step by step, rather than a single button doing the entire action for you. For example, to place a crab trap down at a designated location, you’ll have to move the crane in the right position, pick up the crab trap, move the crane arm again, and set the trap — pressing the appropriate buttons on the control panel to make these happen.

Using circular motions with the mouse to turn the steering wheel, pushing and pulling levers to engage the throttle, etc. — these tactile, diagetic actions are oddly relaxing; patterns of labor that become hypnotic amidst the creaks and groans of the ship.

Unfortunately, too much time is spent standing around waiting for your crab traps to fill up. I understand that this delay is intentional, as it drains your time and provides additional pressure on the player, but it really feels like a waste to just stand motionless on the ship with nothing to do. That is, until the aforementioned evil crabs come aboard. Ultimately, rather than feeling scary or tense, the crab boarding is simply an annoyance. It doesn’t provide any true threat most of the time, and it consistently distracts from the other things that I do like about playing Crabmeat.

My largest complaint is movement controls. Rather than your typical WASD keyboard movement, Crabmeat utilizes a point-and-click approach to navigating the 3D space. Using your mouse to look around is equally annoying, as rather than simply dragging your mouse to the screen edge, you must click an arrow on the screen edge to make your character turn. All of this is quite clunky in practice and makes trying to move to specific areas around the ship imprecise. The normal walk speed is also a bit slow, and while there is technically a “run” function (initiated by double-clicking a space), its activation does not seem consistent. There were many moments where I tried to click rapidly to have my character pick up the pace, only to be met with my regular stride.

Ultimately, while the seafaring aspect of Crabmeat has its own meditative qualities, I find it fails to live up to its inspirations and aspirations. The open nature of the sea and sky takes away from any sense of claustrophobia found in similar minimalist titles like Iron Lung, and without any real pressures or threats to be found (outside of a few notable exceptions), I mostly found myself hoping for a future where interesting things might happen — a hope that was so rarely realized.

I am always down to explore the ills of capitalism — to speak about the ways in which those systems and structures grind us down into nothing for a machine that cares not if we live or die — but having a message is not really the same thing as being meaningful. Perhaps the fault is my own. I, too, have been ground down by those very pressures, forced to work the days and nights away at the expense of my health and happiness. Seeing these realities vaguely gestured at just doesn't do enough to move me.