Another Crab's Treasure
I really want to big up this game. It deserves way more attention than it seems to be getting. It's a souls-like game, but where you play as a cute little hermit crab.
The systems and world are impressively inventive (and thematically on-point for the aquatic world it creates), whilst also borrowing liberally from From and other games. There's a grapple like Sekiro, which gives some verticality to the world, you change weapons by sticking different things to the end of a fork (that you always have) to wield as a kind of hammer, and you find and wear different shells with different weights, armor values and abilities. There's also magic (umami), which gets pretty game-breakingly overpowered towards the end.
There's humour and cuteness and also moments of darkness and some challenging combat. Not Sekiro-level challenging, but I died to one boss eight times and another few bosses took me three or four attempts. It took me a little while to get the feel for the combat. Dodging feels like it has very different timing to Souls games, and the parrying mechanic is quite different too (you have to hide in your shell and time when to pop out). I was able to brute force the game with a heavy shell and umami build for the last third of it, which was fine by me to be honest.
Some of the platforming sections are pretty tough. As in, I died easily a dozen times, probably more, getting a special shell near the end and actually had my head in my hands at one point after nearly making it only to fall to my death yet again. I don' tusually like platforming in these kinds of games, but ACT pulls off the achievement of making it generally quite fun, again with elements that fit the world thematically quite nicely.
It's an indie game, so no super-polished flashy combat like Sekiro, but taking all the elements together it's really great and I had a cracking time with it. 9/10