One of my favourite TV shows is The Deadliest Catch, so when I saw “Crabmeat” from developers Nicholas McDonnell and Mitchell Pasmans become available, I jumped on it straight away. What I didn’t realise was that this is a short point-and-click horror game from publisher “Searching Interactive”. Well, I have come this far, so let’s sail on in and see what Crabmeat the game has to offer.

Loading in, I am chained to a table and have a man with a blurred face talking to me about how I failed to pay my rent for a week, and my debt needs to be repaid. I am injected with a small explosive capsule in my neck, then forced to sign a contract stating I will work off my debt by harvesting 500kg of King Crab in the Southern Fisheries Penal Colony. In the event I cannot pay off the debt, the explosive will be activated in my neck, and my debt will be passed on to my next of kin.

It seems like good motivation. If you can successfully catch the quota, the Feudostate will release you back into society. You wake up in your government-issued crabbing vessel after this interaction and are entrusted with looking after it and repaying your debt at the same time. Overall, the ship is a nicely put-together model, with the upper deck featuring the bridge, charts, throttle, and anchor controls.

The mid deck is essentially your living quarters and a deck to operate the rear crane. Down the lower deck, you have the engine room, storage room and crab tank. The frustrating thing is navigating around all these decks. You click where you want to walk, and your character will walk there; turning is clunky at best. It’s quite frustrating when you have to interact with different stations, and you’re either too close or too far away.

I set sail into the crab grounds using the map with the big green circle showing where to set my pots. You have a few steps to complete before you can get the pots in the water. Open them, head over to the bait station, grab a bucket, fill it with bait, head back to the pot, fill it with bait, and then close it up. Now, up to the second deck, and use the crane to drop the pot into the ocean, rinse and repeat.

Time to maneuver the boat around to collect the pots, as it appears the crabs jump in instantaneously, but suddenly, my engine dies. Running down to the engine room, I find parasites all over the engine, which I have to remove and get repaired so it’s back up and running. Once I finally arrived back at the pots after a 360-degree turn, it was time to operate the harpoon to snag the pot, then use the second crane to bring it onboard. You empty the pot onto the sorting table, then begin sorting.

You have two doors on the sorting table: one for the crabs you want to keep, and one for sending the incorrect crabs, fish, or even bodies back to the ocean floor. A nice graphic on the crab table shows you what crab you are looking for. With only two pots to fish with, it takes a slow process to reach your quota, especially if you have some bumps along the way.​

Time to explore more of the icy fishing ground, then all of a sudden, a mutant crab comes smashing through the bridge door. Stuck, I had no access to the “Break in case of emergency” case with a shotgun inside on the middle deck and subsequently died. For some reason, the save game feature wouldn’t work either, so it was right back to the start. When you start your sentence, the game warns you to protect your ship and help clean up the seas, which includes stealing other convicts’ pots.

You have an 8-hour countdown screen in the bridge, so I assume you have eight hours to catch your grab and get back to the centre to unload and complete your sentence. The developers advise that you can complete the whole game in 2-3 hours.

The various engine failures and challenges along the way feel like they are on a timer rather than random events. Since I couldn’t save my progress, every time I started again, the same event occurred at the same time.

The graphics are actually not bad; there is some good detail in them, nothing outstanding, but solid. It is what you would expect from an Indie title from a two-man development team. The water textures are very basic, but the developers have added waves and splashes to the boat’s windows.

You have a TV on the bridge that shows you different cameras around the ship, and it genuinely feels like an old, rustic fishing vessel with the various props scattered around. Even being able to see the crabs you caught in the tanks is a nice little touch on the lower deck.

The sounds are all there too; you hear your footsteps walking on the metal gangways, the hum of the boat engine. Radar blips, metal cranes moving, waves splashing up on the boat. Even the sounds of numerous sea birds when you’re outside help you to feel like you are out in the middle of the ocean.

Overall, Crabmeat is a nice little game. It takes the realistic machines and processes from crab fishing and mixes them into a horror game. While this is an unusual mix, with the storyline, it actually works. If you’re after a little challenge and enjoy the fishing process, jump in and see if you have what it takes to clear your debt and head back to society; your family will thank you.

Written by: Mike Bridge