After 2 hours playing this Spore-inspired roguelike, I've evolved into the best possible animal: a giant cow that grows apples on its bottom

What I have learned after two hours playing an early build of Everything is Crab is that you're all very lucky that the path of evolution is directed by the whims of genetic drift and natural selection rather than by me, a guy who thinks the peak of survival is standing in a field growing apples on your own backside.

This fascinating action roguelike feels like a modern spin-off of 2008 god game Spore. Starting as a cute little blob creature, your goal is to survive in an increasingly dangerous ecosystem. Initially you're easy prey, but as you eat food you level up, gaining new genetic traits and (hopefully) rising to the top of the food chain.

As I set out on my first few runs, what immediately impresses me is the sheer variety of different traits, particularly because a really large selection of them are reflected visually on my creature. I can cover them in scales, fur, or an exoskeleton; give them claws, poison spit, bull horns, or spines; make them huge and lumbering or quick and tiny; and much, much more. It all combines seamlessly, both visually and mechanically—whether I've built the ultimate predator, or (more often) one of God's mistakes.

Past the evolutionary theme, some of it boils down to familiar action-RPG concepts. Traits can grant new attacks, or boost stats like health regeneration, dodge chance, or damage—all useful when attacking other animals.

But this is an ecosystem, not a dungeon, and survival can take stranger forms. You can increase your feeding speed, and give yourself a bonus to eating prey you didn't kill yourself, becoming the perfect opportunistic scavenger. Or go for increased heat or cold resistance and better speed over terrain, allowing you to range into other biomes like the desert or the tundra. You can even abandon life on land altogether to swim or fly across the oceans instead.

My favourite run so far was one where I discovered I could go fully herbivorous. At first, that seems impossible. You can certainly subsist purely on plants, but at regular intervals, alpha predators enter the map to attack you, functioning like boss fights—killing them and eating their valuable remains seems to be the only answer. But in truth if you can simply outlast these attackers, they'll eventually leave, and still grant you a reward to boot, making more pacifistic runs possible.

I ended up combining increased size, ruminant stomachs, regenerative tissue, and armoured plating. The icing on the cake was the bizarre fungal growths adaptation, which allowed me to produce fruit on my own body. Don't ask me to explain the science, but the result was a hulking creature that barely needed to move to survive, let alone hunt, and could stubbornly lumber away from apex hunters rather than indulging them in a fight.

That really felt like finding an evolutionary niche, not just a strong build, and it's those kinds of discoveries that give Everything is Crab a totally different tone from any other roguelike I've played.

There's definitely some room for improvement before the game's release—planned for the summer next year. The pace of combat is the biggest sticking point for me right now. It's a pretty basic top-down affair, and as it stands attacks can feel very stiff. Dodging is the biggest issue, though—it's on a cooldown long enough that it can feel impossible to consistently stay out of the path of enemy attacks.

Alternative dodge types gained from traits suffer from that even more, their powerful effects balanced by even longer cooldowns. There's nothing fun about getting eaten because my new turtle shell or cheetah legs feel hopelessly ill-equipped to keep me safe from the next boss.

But perhaps that's just my warning to choose my evolutionary paths more carefully, and there's certainly plenty of time between now and release for some of the balance of fights to be tweaked. The important thing is that that feel of scrabbling for your place in a tumultuous ecosystem—and creating a weird little monster in the process—is already really strong. If developer Odd Dreams Digital can stick the landing, Everything is Crab could be the most interesting roguelike of 2026.