If, like me, you are a horror fanatic who really loves The thing and The drop (then probably many of you), Carrion It seems like a custom video game experience. Imagine being able to play as a growing mass of tissue and tentacles, tearing apart unfortunate humans while trying to escape freedom from the outside world? That’s Carrion In one word.
Being the ‘monster’ is a novelty that has re-emerged a bit this year with Man eater channeling the chompy mayhem of Jaws untiedand next Destroy all humans remaster that allows us to enslave humanity as a brain-sucking alien. In the case of Man eater, it seemed that the novelty outweighed the focus on how the game was played. With CarrionWe have a pretty slick Metroidvania that tends to be a creepy joy to play most of the time.
Carrion It starts off quite serene, as the monstrosity of the meat sack brings its relatively nimble dough out of captivity, and begins its search for food and freedom. The game guides you through the basics of ripping the grilles and hinged doors before presenting you with a few sample snacks to feast on. By pressing the left stick in the required direction and pressing the action button, the blob shoots one of its tentacles and grabs its victim, releasing the stick draws them in, and from there, the toothy jaws engulf them in a rain blood and limbs
Carrion he delights in the butchery caused by his pulsing, fibrous meat-eating sack of meat. The creature itself becomes quite a sight to behold as it grows larger, leaning back and forth, several mouths snapping and growling as its nervous tendrils flap. He is also fast and agile, making his attacks even more brutal as he attacks another group of soldiers and deftly kills them with brutal yet elegant aggression. Despite its shapeless bulk, the creature is surprising, but credibly agile and wildly athletic.
Soon, Carrion he makes effective and exciting use of his blood-spattered violence. Not only is it there for having blood and guts, it has a purpose on multiple levels. The creature itself is the living embodiment of blood and violence. It is not just killing out of hunger or anger, killing out of fear, destroying because you have the overriding desire to do so, killing because you can and, like the player, enjoying the results. The most important thing is that he does this because he wants to be free, and everything the monster does is at the service of this objective.
One would think that the tiny 2D sprites would have a hard time transmitting such gore and gore, but all the credit to developer Phobia Game Studio, it has managed to capture the grim essence in a simple but effective way. CarrionViolence suggests much more than it actually shows, but it still shows enough to make you feel like you’re fatter than you are.
It’s not just about eating and killing, of course. The bubble must escape its underground confines, and to do that, it has to use its brain as much as its increasing muscle strength. At first, that just means pressing the weird switch and sneaking away from the soldiers you’re not ready to face yet, but as you explore the facility, you discover radioactive tanks that the bubble can crawl into and acquire new abilities.
These abilities open up new ways to overcome previously impenetrable areas and easier ways to deal with the growing threat of human firepower. These powers include a stringy shot that comes through gaps to hit switches, protective spikes to roll through occupied rooms full of enemies, impale anything in their way, and finally the ability to control humans through a tendril.
By adding a cape to the use of these powers, the blob’s mass directly affects which abilities it can and cannot use. Some are still usable at any size, but in most cases, you’ll need to either deposit some of the meaty beast’s mass into a convenient pool, or rebuild the mass by reabsorbing that excess mass (or eat some unsuspecting scientists) to use them. . This often means a lot of setbacks, which is at least a little annoying at first, but once you’ve started to get familiar with the layout of the facility and the general ‘rules’ of what you can and can’t do, everything flows a little better.
That, unfortunately, leads me to my biggest complaint with Carrion. The game makes you rely mainly on memory to influence your environment as there is no map. The beast may let out a guttural growl that echoes the fleshy infected areas on the map where you can save your game if they’re nearby, so that it at least gives you a vague idea of where you are, just like the practical ones, but subtle exit signs that point it to the pipes that allow the bubble to move between areas.
It is the movement between areas that causes most problems. New skills may mean that you need to revisit previous areas to find ways to progress into new ones, and there are a lot of lazy people wandering around these moments as you try to orient yourself. It drowns out the flow of the game, and fills in the surprisingly large runtime unnecessarily.
Carrion It is a deceptively long game. There is a resolution to a story that occurs after an hour or two and led me to believe that we were probably nearing the end, but Carrion not only … ahem … it continued, it got better and better as the game found its rhythm and skill selection continually updated the formula.
The dirty environment and the menacing low growl of a musical score play an important role in maintaining the right mood. There is a feeling of the relentlessly oppressive for this world and its sounds that are driven crazy by the fact that you are predominantly the cause of that. This is the only reason it could come on board with the whole ‘reverse horror’ label, because otherwise it could also be called what it is, horror that turns out to be from the monster’s perspective. Sure, you’re spreading violence against humans, and by default, that makes you ‘bad’ because you’re ‘different’, but you wouldn’t call Dead in the daylight reverse horror for putting you in the bad mood of a serial killer, right?
That little objection aside, Carrion I did what very few horror games have done for me this year – it exceeded my expectations. It ends up being much more than the sum of its fleshy parts thanks to a strong commitment to its sadistic vision of slimy violence.
Carrion PC review code provided by publisher.
Carrion is now available on Xbox One, PC, and Nintendo Switch.
