Inspired by Alien and The Thing, this new standalone release doesn’t make you the human hero but the creature itself.
Playing the bad boy is not an unusual idea for video games. Many game heroes are not exactly virtue paradigms and there are many things where you can play as antiheroes. And yet being chosen as a true monster from the movie is relatively rare. Aliens vs. The Predator games tried, and the Friday The 13th game lets you play like Jason Voorhees, but it’s even more common to run away from stalking horror than playing like him.
Carrion is not based on any specific creature, but is inspired by a series of horror movies from the 80s, most obviously The Thing by John Carpenter. The game begins without explanation, as you explode from a containment flask in an underground laboratory and immediately start devouring unfortunate scientists.
Its origins are unclear, and while it closely resembles the thing during the dog’s famous absorption sequence, complete with twisted tentacles and multiple mouths, it cannot transform into humans or other animals. Instead, you remain like a gross piece of meat that leaves a trail of snail blood wherever it goes and moves with a sip of liquid that is gloriously gross.
Eating humans increases in size, as it grows several mouths and becomes a creature many times larger than when it started. There is a maximum limit, but this can be increased as you go, as you come across other lab experiments that also give you the ability to do things like shoot straps or become invisible. However, you only have three skills (plus echolocation) open to you at any point and you have to increase or decrease their size to access the specific ones.
Despite what you may be imagining, Carrión is not primarily an action game. Instead, it’s a rotating-screen Metroidvania, and instead of humans with flamethrower robots and robot drones, the most persistent enemy in the game is the switches … lots of switches. We don’t know how you imagine playing how it would be, but we don’t imagine endless puzzles based on switches and closed doors, but that’s what Carrion is mainly about.
Combat is an important factor, but it almost always ends extremely quickly. Insignificant humans are fragile, but you are, too, surprisingly. That means the best tactic is to lurk in the shadows, ideally on the ceiling or under floors, and snatch unsuspecting humans when they’re not looking. This is a lot of fun and it’s where the game starts to look more like Alien, but it’s also a one-off note and it’s not really that difficult.
He soon realizes that it is not always advantageous to be as large as possible, especially since he is much slower and more difficult to move when he has a dozen growling mouths held together by a piece of blood. All of that is very interesting and unique, except that when you get big, the control system starts to fail, to the point where the game constantly misinterprets which part of your body you are trying to move and where you want to go.
However, the control system is quite complicated overall, and we suspect it would work much better with a mouse, as you target people and objects by moving a small cursor that quickly becomes impossible to distinguish when there is a lot of action. If you’re big enough at the time, it doesn’t really matter, because if you just move a little bit, you will surely hit something, but there is no sense of precision or purposeful action.
Triggering endless switches may not be what you expect from the game’s opening, but to be fair, many of the puzzles are very smart, especially when you have the ability to possess humans and use them to not only trigger switches but also fight using their weapons ( including a mech with a very percussive machine gun). However, the puzzles see very little evolution beyond that and the excitement of the exploration is constantly tempered by the fear of even more switches.
It does not help that the funds are so sad and similar. Obviously, you don’t want glitter and rainbows in a horror game, but since this is primarily a Metroidvania, with a fair amount of throwback, the game world needed many more memorable landmarks. Especially since, inexplicably, there is no map, although nothing else about the game’s difficulty is particularly extreme.
Carrion is the type of game that is always the most frustrating to review – a great idea that never takes place in its execution. Pixel art graphics are fantastic and the entire premise has great potential, but the reality can often be frustrating, confusing, and often quite boring.
We still enjoy it anyway, just because we like the movies it’s based on (the soundtrack is also full of nice tributes), but as a game it’s a sadly flawed experience. Spend too much time being a puzzle-based Metroidvania and not enough to be a monster simulator. It would have been much better to focus on one or the other, since while the monster in the movie can be more than one thing at a time, this struggles to perform the same trick as a video game.
Carrion Review Summary
Soon: Playing as an alien monstrosity is a great idea, and sometimes works well, but the complicated controls and awkward mix of gameplay ideas don’t mix well.
Pros: The creature is cool, with lots of cool abilities and some stunningly disgusting pixel art graphics. Great soundtrack too.
Cons: Controls can be frustratingly imprecise, especially as you get older. Switch-based puzzles quickly become a chore, especially given the confusing and repetitive map design.
Punctuation: 6/10
Formats: Nintendo Switch (revised), Xbox One and PC
Price: £ 17.99
Publisher: Devolver Digital
Developer: Phobia Studio
Release Date: July 23, 2020
Age Rating: 18
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