A Polished Path-Making Puzzler
Crabwave sounds more like a genre of music than an Xbox game. Not a very big or popular genre of music, mind you.
Crabwave is, of course, a video game. A path-making brand of video game, where you place clear tracks to a clam (we presume the clam is its home, rather than a grisly death). Those tracks are all in the puzzle already: you’re just swapping straight ones and bendy ones, then rotating them to create a feasible path.
A bit like Pipemania, but with Extra Crabs
For regular players of budget games on the Xbox, this might be a genre that you recognise. We’ve had a few of them in recent months, like Hexa Chippy and Mole Cart Mining, most commonly from publisher Afil Games.
I quite like this tiniest of subgenres, for a few reasons. Afil Games have fine-tuned the machine that pumps these out. It’s almost impossible to get stuck because the tools you are given are so polished and helpful. You can Undo the puzzle to any number of steps, and there’s a Retry if you’ve properly borked it. There’s a Shuffle feature, which we only use for the achievements, and a Hint system. The Hint system is so astonishingly helpful, drawing a winding red line through the puzzle, that you can feel guilty for using it. I tell you, that guilt doesn’t last for long if you are well and truly stuck.
I also like how a Crabwave puzzle emerges slowly. You can look at a puzzle and feel thoroughly daunted. How on Earth are you going to work through the thousands of different permutations to wend yourself to a solution? But take it step by step and those permutations tumble down to a manageable number. There are locked pieces that have entrances and exits, so you can lock in pieces around them. Some routes can only house a particular piece: a corridor, for example, can only contain a straight path. Suddenly, you only have a few question-mark spots in the puzzle.
Plus, unlike some of the sokoban games from the Afil Games stable, things do actually change with each release. In Crabwave, there are rotating pieces – run over them and they rotate – which enable loops within the puzzle. That’s not wholly new, but Crabwave inserts all sorts of rotating pieces. There are the usual bridges, but also crossroads, bendy pieces and more.
Wait, Don’t Crabs only Move Sideways?
Crabwave also takes the number of crabs at once up to a lofty 5 (five). THAT must have been a challenge for the puzzle designer, not least because there isn’t that much space on screen to fit them all. The crabs cross each other’s paths, rotate bridges and ultimately try not to create a pile of crabsticks as they slam into each other. In a weird way, having five crabs onscreen is easier, as there are only so many ways that you can fit five distinct paths into a puzzle.
There are thirty puzzles in Crabwave, and – sticking a wet finger in the air – we would say that Crabwave is on the easier side for the genre. That’s down to the aforementioned number of crabs. Having more paths means that there are slightly fewer permutations, rather than more.
Crabwave may try new things, but I found it also invited some presentational issues. Take a look at a screenshot and you might see one of the problems. There’s actually very little visual difference between a movable piece and an immovable one. The walls of the puzzle are the same colour as the pieces, and that got frustrating on occasion. It’s not necessarily easy to look at a puzzle layout and immediately absorb where you start, what can be moved, and where you end.
A similar problem comes from the highlighting feedback. If you grab a piece to move or rotate it, Crabwave doesn’t do a fantastic job of highlighting it. This isn’t something we’ve noticed in the other Afil path-makers, so it feels unique to Crabwave. We wonder if the problem comes from the same source: almost everything in the game is a sandy yellow.
Coming at the Puzzles in a Pincer Movement
It is absolutely possible for these issues to wash over you like the tides. In the first half of our playthrough we were accidentally picking up (or not picking up) hexes, but that habit stopped in the second half. And we got our eye in: we could read the puzzle slightly more fluently as time wore on.
Which means that we came to the same conclusion as we have done for most of these games. Crabwave is not ground-breaking, not least because its own publisher produces one of these games roughly every month. It’s short, not hugely difficult, and has clearly been made from a template.
BUT we’re far from crabby having played Crabwave. The path-making template works, and there’s at least an attempt to fiddle with the format in terms of five paths and some cool rotating hexes. There are usability hiccups, but overall Crabwave is thirty-minutes of puzzling sunshine.
Important Links
Ride The Crabwave On Xbox, PlayStation & PC – https://www.thexboxhub.com/ride-the-crabwave-on-xbox-playstation-pc/
Buy, Optimised for Series X|S – https://www.xbox.com/en-US/games/store/Crabwave-Xbox-Series/9NHBBNJSXWJ8
Buy for Xbox One – https://www.xbox.com/en-us/games/store/crabwave-xbox-one/9ngnzfhh3682
There’s a PC version – https://www.xbox.com/en-us/games/store/crabwave-windows/9n1zzt86sm4x
