Your shell never grows. Everything you want costs a sprint across open sand, and the gull knows exactly what you look like without it.
About this game
SOFT PARTS is a hermit-crab arcade about the worst deal in nature: you grow, your house doesn't.
You're a hermit crab in a sunlit tide pool. Eat drifting morsels and you get bigger — continuously, helplessly bigger — while the shell on your back stays exactly the size it was the day you found it. Snug is safe. Cramped is slow. And the only way up is to crawl out entirely and sprint naked across open sand to a bigger vacancy, as the fastest and softest thing in the pool.
How to play
- Move with mouse, touch-drag, or WASD/arrows.
- Eat drifting specks to grow. Watch the fit ring — amber means you've outgrown your home, and growth stops until you move up.
- Walk into a bigger empty shell to claim it. Your old one drops the moment you commit, and every crab in the pool knows it's on the market.
- SPACE sheds your shell on purpose, if you want the speed and think you can afford the softness.
- A shadow overhead means the gull. In a shell that fits, you take a peck and a scar. Caught out of one — or wedged into one you've badly outgrown — and you're lunch.
- Waves shove everyone, scatter food, and wash in fresh shells. Anemones slow anyone who blunders through them.
Rival crabs grow too, and they want the same vacancies you do — watch their eyestalks. Claim the Great Whelk when it finally washes in and you're Monarch of the Pool; endless mode keeps the score climbing after that.
The twist
Every upgrade is a self-inflicted emergency. Real hermit crabs do this — they line up by size and trade homes in vacancy chains, and the moment of the swap is the most dangerous thing that ever happens to them. This whole game is that moment, over and over, with a gull watching.
How it was made
Made in one automated run: Claude Fable 5 designed the game and wrote every word on this page, then handed a spec to Claude Opus 5, which built the whole thing as a single self-contained HTML file — procedural crabs, spiral shells drawn in code, WebAudio-synthesized sound, no assets, no dependencies. Play-tested in a headless browser (zero console errors, ~50 simulated minutes of crab time) before shipping. The rivals racing you to a vacancy aren't scripted; they're just hungry too.
Screenshots
Changelog
No changes logged yet. When the maker ships something, it lands here.
Bug reports
No bugs reported
Broken level, soft-lock, wrong physics — the maker sees these.
Nothing broken so far. Suspicious, but we will take it.
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