Even as accessibility becomes more mainstream in gaming, there remain holdouts—none more prominent than the Souls-like subgenre, a category of games built on the foundation of From Software’s catalog of persistently inaccessible games. In June, however, Seattle-based developer Aggro Crab announced a suite of accessibility options for its upcoming Souls-like, Another Crab’s Treasure, that highlights how games influenced by From Software are starting to leave the Elden Ring developer behind.
Aggro Crab’s announcement stands in sharp contrast to 2022’s Elden Ring, which represented a step back in From Software’s already meager consideration of accessibility. That same mindset has infected Souls-like games for years, as the industry embraced parries and dodge rolls as a staple of video game combat.
It’s an inaccessibility that Aggro Crab’s cofounders, Nick Kaman and Caelan Pollock, understand well.
“There are a lot of factors that contribute to Souls games feeling unapproachable,” they say in an email conversation with WIRED, “from the punishing difficulty to the lack of explicit direction to the cryptic narrative.”
“From Software prefers to create work that is exactly what it is out of the box, with minimal knobs to turn on the part of the user,” they continue. “Honestly, that’s a pretty cool vibe, but obviously it is always going to wind up restricting the player base to those who are comfortable playing that core product.”
