The Tokyo Game Show put a spotlight onto several of Japan’s fledging development teams. Most of the studios are just induvial or small teams often with less than ten members. Initially, judges looked over four hundred entries all from all over Japan. The Game Show showed off the eleven best entries that were submitted. The best five continued to go onto another final from which that best of all the amateur games were chosen.
The panel ended up choosing Overoiled Crabmeat that was developed by CRAB a team still in computer college. The team took home 500,000 yen along with the grand prize award. Overoiled Crabmeat is an action-puzzle game where the player takes control of a crab that has been captured by a witch. The player must use ingredients and blocks inside the bowl to climb out and save their life.
If the player lets the crab fall into the boiling oil, they will be cooked into tempura to be eaten by the witches later. Along with the crab to keep alive, the player needs to use a net to scoop up and move ingredients around that the crab can climb or float on the oil inches closer to the crab. The judges rated the game as intuitive to pick up, but they felt the time taken to develop and how deliberate each aspect was added and balanced.
CRAB will be planning on developing more games as they continue through their college life. As with most indie developed games, Overoiled Crabmeat was developed on PC but is not available to the greater public yet, as the game was submitted first to the Game Show before the team pushed it out to distribution platforms like Steam or Epic. The team as not made it public if they want to sell their game later on.