Glory and gore go hand in hand as you take up the mantle of a tentacled biomass in the recently released Carrion. It is a self-described ‘reverse horror’ game, and  it’s your job, as the monster, to slime and slap your way through every area in-game in a fresh, bloody take on the metroidvania genre. You get to eat people! You get to fling them around at the end of a tentacle, slap them off walls, and eat them!

I love it. C’mon. How could I not love it? I was chomping at the bit to play this one, and I think that by and large, it absolutely lived up to the hype. Well, hype is a bit of an odd word. I tend to avoid public hype around most things in general unless it’s something that my wild and free ADHD brain wants to focus on to the exclusion of all else. I had hyped Carrion up only for myself. 

The idea of playing as the beast for once was refreshing. With so many video games that let you rampage as a murderous human, getting to turn the tables back on them was exactly what I needed. I was excited to play it, and honestly, the game actually exceeded my expectations in terms of mechanics, puzzles and depth.

Developed by Phobia Game Studio and released by Devolver Digital, the premise of the game is a delightfully simple one. You’re a creature held captive in a containment unit deep within a network of labs. You break out. You wreak havoc. The story doesn’t need to be any deeper than this, but Carrion does treat you to flashback sequences that cleverly double (sometimes) as a way of learning certain tricks and mechanics. These flashbacks make it abundantly clear that the humans aren’t really the good guys.

You aren’t the good guy, either. You just didn’t deserve to be locked up in a laboratory. It’s a simple story of how humans should know better than to mess with every single thing they ever come across. As the monster, you are the lesson they learn, teaching it to them brutally as you rip through the maze of tunnels, labs, rooms, and caves.

The art style is rich but not grotesquely detailed and helps save the game from getting too grim about its subject matter. It’s hard to feel too grossed out by severed limbs or bisected bodies  when they’re sparse pixels, when the blood spray is just little red dots. Granted, these limbs and bodies are of your own making, that’s your snack and your right as a big gross tentacle monster after all. It lends the game a kind of charm that stops it from coming over edgy instead of gross and fun.

Colors are often surprisingly vibrant. I expected (for the most part) the entire setting to be a little drab except for the blood. Indeed, the blood is bloody, and as the monster, you’re a lurid, writhing mass of tentacles. You are detailed in shades of red, yellow, and flashes of white teeth. Yet the rest of the environment works hard for your attention, too. Checkpoints are crevices in the wall where you can squeeze in, and they’re a police-siren red and blue. 

Water areas where you can deposit your biomass (we’ll get to that) are an off-putting, unnatural color. Light streams through cave sections, with detailed plants and moss growing off the walls. Lab sections are sharp, bright and steely. Underwater tunnels lie at strange angles and are rich, bubbling blues. I was so surprised by the way I fell in love with the environments as much as I fell in love with the gameplay and the concept behind it all. I don’t always love games with contemporary settings, and find that a lot of sci-fi games (especially horror sci-fi games) tend to feel uninspired or homogenous in terms of design.

The great environments made certain aspects of the game easier to deal with, namely, there’s no map. If the environments had been drab and uninteresting, having to meander back and forth without a map would have driven me nuts. In lieu of a map, you can use echolocation to find the nearest check point. Later on, you can also use it to find the nearest edible body. 

Otherwise, it’s intuition, going back and forth to figure out where to go next. Of course, this includes having to backtrack after unlocking a new ability that will allow you to get past that one obstacle you couldn’t figure out before. I have the nagging feeling that I may have missed things as a result of not knowing if I’ve explored everywhere. It is an incentive to replay the game, perhaps. 

The checkpoints serve as exactly that, but they’re also a functional part of the gameplay. As each crevice is found and squirmed into, you also spread your biomass. Your tendrils multiply, sprawl and weave through to pry open part of a doorway elsewhere. If you do this enough times, a whole new area becomes available to you.

The check points are also one of two ways you can regain health. You can restore your health in its entirety at checkpoints, and the other way is by eating people. Consuming humans restores small amounts of health. It makes sense. People are basically snacks. Your health is also tied to your size. At first, you’re a pretty small monster, and fast too. You sling and slop around the levels at speed, rolling and clinging to different surfaces such as walls, ceilings, and floors.

As the game progresses, you find more powers. There’s a good number of them, but the catch is that they’re tied to your size: small, medium, large. This makes for an incredibly interesting mechanic that I haven’t personally seen before. Carrion prevents you entirely from simply stealth-ing or brute-forcing your way through the whole game. Instead it demands that you puzzle out the best approach to any given scenario.

Need to turn invisible? Shed some of your biomass in the handily dotted-around pools. Biomass will congregate in the water there and can be picked back up the next time you swing by the pool, if you need it. Need to slam your way through an area with high health and offensive powers? You’ll need to be the large version of the creature.

As I mentioned, when you’re small, you’re fast. The inverse is true, too. Playing as the larger version of the creature, you’re awkward, hulking and slow. Your strength makes up for the sheer wet horror of your mass. Each form serves a different purpose. Each is terrifying in its own wonderful way. That’s a thing, actually; the game isn’t really scary. Instead, it’s a power trip.

I wanna circle back to the phrase “sheer wet horror” for a sec, because you know what? I think that nicely summarizes the sound design. It’s there, it’s present, it’s screeching and atmospheric, which is my favorite kind of music in games that aren’t trying to like, make you cry. Mostly, the music is just an underlying thing to the wet slap as you writhe across the screen. It accompanies the tearing of metal as you pull apart doors and punch through grating. It accentuates the thud of bodies as you fling them around. 

My personal favorite, however, is the sound of all my victims screaming and cowering. It’s just great. I mean it when I say this game is an absolute giddy power trip. Also, it is a very useful outlet for stress, if you will. Bad day at work? Eat a bunch of mostly defenseless humans in Carrion; it’s a guaranteed pick-me-up. The game gives you all of the power in the way that most other games don’t. As realistically as possible, it demonstrates the absolute power a monstrous alien would have against humanity.

I’ve been combing over my notes thinking I should probably come up with something mean to say about the game to balance out how much I absolutely loved it. You know what, I do have one complaint: the actual controls were kind of awkward. I roleplayed myself out of getting annoyed with this, convincing myself that I’m a sloppy alien closer to sentient intestines than anything else, so it doesn’t matter if the controls are a bit iffy. 

Realistically, though, it was actually a bit of a problem. I found there was just simply a lack of particular finesse in the controls, and often found myself frustrated by overshooting my goal. Some minor aiming mechanics felt haphazard, although this could be just the nature of the aiming sticks on the Switch. I’d be interested to hear if the same issue persists on another platform, ideally another platform where a controller is in use. Overall, I think the concept of Carrion – an inverse of so many games where humans slaughter or colonize alien species – is one that could be pushed further, although it’s certainly not a requirement. I say that in only the most complimentary sense. Carrion is great, and it’s only given me a hunger for more. 

CARRION

$19.99 USD

9.5

Score

9.5/10

Pros

• Gorgeous level design and art
• Power Fantasy
• Beautiful use of Colors

Cons

• Meandering maze
• Awkward controls
• No Map

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