The King Is Watching devs are making The Crab is Walking, this journalist is writing
Hypnohead, developers of The King Is Watching, have announced their next project: The Crab Is Walking, a roguelite city-builder with an unusual premise. Players will arrange tetromino-shaped city districts on the back of a colossal crustacean, building a sprawling metropolis across the creature’s carapace.
The game blends city-building mechanics with tactical action, allowing players to dispatch armies of “Mad Maxalots” to battle wasteland insects while managing their crab-based civilization. The title playfully inverts its predecessor’s concept—where The King Is Watching required active player attention to prevent kingdom neglect through constant gaze-tracking, The Crab Is Walking abandons that surveillance mechanic, offering a more relaxed alternative that doesn’t demand such focused oversight.
The game deliberately embraces absurdist design philosophy, complete with creature-definition-blurring humor (one of the crabs in the game is actually a spider). The roguelite structure indicates players will experience multiple runs with procedurally varied challenges, combining city management under resource constraints with action sequences against wasteland fauna. The announcement comes from Rock Paper Shotgun and represents an intriguing departure from Hypnohead’s previous work into territory that merges urban planning with tactical combat.