Why I've been playing a joke game for nearly 3 years
Crab Game is a game made by YouTuber Dani as a parody of Netflix's show Squid Game, which was incredibly popular at the time (late 2021). About 4 months later, at the start of 2022, Dani abandoned the game due to stress.
Nowadays, when you join a public Crab Game lobby, you're most likely to find cheaters, racists, and... serious competitors? It might not immediately make sense but almost more often than the first two you will find someone who has more practice than this game deserves1.
Everyone has their own reasons for sticking with the game for so long, but probably the largest common factor for all of us is the movement system.
Crab Game is a buggy mess. In the best possible way. There are an unreasonable amount of unintentional mechanics that add depth to the game. Probably the best example of this is a mechanic called moonwalking, which bypasses the faulty speed cap by doing precise mouse movement2. It's maybe the most defining aspect of Crab Game's movement, similar to the acceleration bug in quake3 that found it's way into source games too, creating mechanics like air strafing and bunnyhopping.
The only issue really is that it's incredibly difficult to come up with a satisfying explanation for why movement systems like this are so captivating. I tried in a previous post4, but I think it just ended up as incomprehensible nonsense!
footnotes
you could say I'm one of those↩
this explanation doesn't really help you envision the mechanic, but if you're curious what it looks like, check the video linked in the first footnote. The parts where I have high speed and am doing a turning motion on the ground are what moonwalking looks like.↩
this explanation of the quake bug is really, really good.↩