Heard of Squid Game? Of course you have, everyone on the planet is talking about the Netflix show. But have you heard of Crab Game? No? Well, let me introduce you. Think of the TV series, but make it a strange rip-off you can get for free on Steam. Oh, and it has possibly the worst and best trailer for a game I’ve ever seen.
Crab Game is growing in popularity on Twitch and YouTube as a fun game for content creators to work with. It’s obvious in many ways that the developer, Dani, has taken inspiration from the Netflix series - but there are additional challenges to flesh the game's content out. Sometimes you’re holding a bomb about to go off, sometimes you’re trying to survive deadly lava… things we didn’t see in the show, but are high stakes all the same.
Squid Game has also appeared in other games, like Roblox...
Oh, and there is that trailer I talked about. Buckle up, because you’re in for a ride. Before you watch the trailer below, I urge you to turn your volume down; and if you’re used to high-quality shiny trailers from the likes of Ubisoft, EA, or Bethesda, lower your expectations. And then lower them once again. And then maybe do it a third time too, because you've never seen anything like this before.
Wasn’t that great? Well, I enjoyed it at least. Having such a humorous trailer next to a game that’s a bit of a rip-off at least sets a lighthearted tone. Even the description on Steam is appropriately flippant: “Crab Game is a First-Person Multiplayer game where you fight for the ultimate cash price (sic) in different minigames based on children's games until only one player is left to claim it all. Definitely not based on any online streaming pop culture Korean tv shows, as that would get me in legal trouble, so we're certainly not doing that.”
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Well hats off to Dani for the quick turnaround on Crab Game, it’s already a hit - at the time of writing, it's at 33 on Steam Charts, ahead of the likes of Stardew Valley and The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. Its peak concurrents is pretty impressive too, at 40,859 players - that's higher than DayZ and Left 4 Dead 2 have achieved. It’s not making any money from sales so hopefully Netflix doesn’t come after the creators, but who knows how long this game will be up for. Best download it now, then - better safe than, IDK, stuck scraping away at honeycomb as a clock ticks down, and down, and down, and dead.
Featured Image Credit: Netflix / Dani