Last month, a game called Shrimp Game: Krill Confirmed launched on Steam. It’s a self-contained demo for the upcoming shrimp game, Shrimp Game, and as a game about shrimp it has all the features you’d expect: You can pilot one of 11 weaponized combat shrimp-forms, imbue them with a cocktail of violent elemental powers, and equip them with dozens of armaments like shotguns, sniper rifles, and explosive cannon rounds.
I’ll admit I’m not a marine biologist, so there’s a chance that isn’t all standard shrimp behavior. But there’s zero chance that it doesn’t make for a surprisingly rad third-person shooter that we, as a culture, collectively failed to properly acknowledge for an entire month. It only has 126 Steam reviews, for God’s sake. We call ourselves a society?
Thankfully, nothing is stopping us from correcting this oversight except the brief amount of time it takes to download its less than 2 GB install size. I confirmed some krills of my own earlier today, and I was glad I did so.
After starting a game in Shrimp Game, I was tasked by a terrifying eldritch being to revivify a decaying seascape by purging a series of biomes of villainous sea life. To complete this horror-given duty, I had to choose between a selection of shrimp classes and sets of elemental abilities.
I could be a quick-dashing shrimp assassin who could fire shadow blades, or a sturdier shrimp frontliner who could produce eruptions of solar energy. Ultimately, I chose to become an ice krillemental: a shrimp with high mobility stats, a charge-up long-distance ice ray, and the ability to launch myself backwards while leaving a damaging cloud of frost. Again, I assume shrimp are doing this kind of thing all the time.
My inaugural mission proceeded smoothly: I tumbled my shrimp-shape through a den of undersea spires, hammering sea scorpions and squids with bubble shots and comparing the weapons they dropped in the carnage. I quickly grew attached to a loadout of a sniper pellet and a quick-firing spray gun, offering all-range solutions for my crustacean shootouts. It was enjoyable work, if a little straightforward; even as a novice shrimp pilot, dodging the incoming fire from other sea life didn’t demand much of my talents.
That changed once I crossed a critical threshold of sea-murder, which called a massive enemy eurypterid to the battlefield: one of the Late Silurian mixopterids, by the looks of it—a nightmare of spined claws and exoskeleton plating, its meter-long bulk dwarfing my shrimpish dimensions.
Where other enemy sea life fired lazy projectiles, the eurypterid launched walls of projectiles at once, forcing me to be more mindful with my dodges. And when the walls of projectiles stopped, it sent inverted meteors erupting from across the sea floor, driving me to jockey for safe firing positions. (The real eurypterids may have shared these abilities. But only their fossils remember, and they are reticent to share.)
Anyway, I learned how to fuse my ice magic with an enchanted rock and that let me summon a giant rectangular glacier that bisected that eurypterid freak for like two thousand damage. In return I earned a few hundred SP, which until I’m corrected I will continue to believe stands for “shrimp points.” I spent my winnings to turn my shrimp yellow. Victory is sweet.
Shrimp Game: Krill Confirmed is available on Steam now.
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