Carrion PC, Switch, Xbox One
We don’t know about you, but with the year we’ve been having, there’s something cathartic about a game that lets us be the monster. Perhaps it’s just nice to be the one dismantling civilisation for once, rather than forces out of our control, viral, governmental or otherwise. This might, in a strange way, be the right moment for Carrion – but most of the credit has to go to the game itself, and specifically how good it feels to steer its unlikely hero.
As an amorphous glob of teeth, tendrils and bubbling surplus DNA, you don’t navigate spaces so much as flow through them. Squeeze into a tight gap and your entire mass will compress to fit, chunks of meat held together by a line of intestinal rope. Push up against a closed door and it’ll concertina, pooling in one corner until you pull the door off its hinges. In open spaces, supportive tentacles shoot out to walls and ceiling, letting you bob along freely – think Spider-Man villain Carnage if he really let himself go. The upshot is that verticality and gravity aren’t a concern the way they would be in most side-on 2D games. Just point the cursor or thumbstick and there you’ll be. Or most of you, anyway: sometimes if you move too fast, bits get left behind, eventually dissipating.
It’s undeniable just how much wet, oozing life Carrion manages to squeeze out of its meagre pixel count. Despite pitching itself as a ‘reverse horror’ game, as this time around you get to be the thing going bump in the night, there’s still plenty here to make you squirm. Not so much the dismemberment of your human victims – they quickly start to seem like fair game – but in the shape you take on, especially as it evolves over the course of the game.
You start out as a relatively innocuous gobbet of viscera, trapped inside a lab canister. But ingesting your oppressors will cause your mass to grow, and by finding more canisters you’ll gradually unlock new abilities and forms. Before you know it, you’re a giant, roiling ball of spaghetti, able to shield yourself with a spiny keratin shell and extend a probing tentacle that, once it’s pierced the back of the skull, lets you control humans’ minds.
There are – eventually – three distinct sizes of blob to move between, each with its own complete powerset. Every haircut-wearing morsel you munch on will push you up the size rankings; every hit you take will shrink you back down. Bigger, though, isn’t always better. Any part of you, even the most extended tip, can take damage, meaning size can be a liability. And you’ll occasionally want – or need – the abilities of your smaller, more nimble form, which range from temporary invisibility to a sort of web shooter, firing out a line of offal to smother victims or grab far-off switches.
This size-shifting is the basis of most of Carrion’s puzzles, with obstacle courses that require you to shed and gain body mass like Christian Bale prepping for roles in the early noughties. You don’t always have to put yourself in the line of fire in order to change size, thankfully – most levels contain pools where you can deposit a pound of flesh, then come back to collect it later – but when you do, it’s amazing how quickly your mass can get whittled away by a few bullets.
Carrion’s two-legged inhabitants are far from helpless. There’s the occasional unarmed victim who exists to provide you with nutrition (and the thrill of being scary) but the ones with guns are all monsterhunting machines, able to track your movements with an accuracy that suggests some kind of cybernetic enhancement, with weapons that never seem to need reloading. You might be the monster here, but it’s the humans who pull the old slasher-movie trick of rising from the apparent grave to launch one last unexpected attack. And that’s before they start deploying the flamethrowers and mech suits. We’d never expected to feel a pang of sympathy for the Xenomorph before, but
Carrion demonstrates being one’s a tough job.
And thankfully so, because the combat here is best when you feel on the back foot – or tentacle, as the case may be. Scuttling for the nearest vent, sloughing off bits of flesh with each attack. Reaching safety just in time, but with a single blob of mass to your name. Planning out your comeback, pulling aside a grate and grabbing your first victim. These moments are fun not just because of the usual final hit-point tension, but because they’re easy to imagine from a standard horror-movie perspective: a retreat lit by the strobe of muzzle flashes, the humans thinking they’re finally safe, before one of their number is pulled, legs-first, into the darkness.
This atmosphere plasters over a lot of cracks in
Carrion’s design. Slightly loose controls; levels made up of interlinking crossroads where it’s hard to get your bearings; the decision not to include a map to help you make sense of them: these can be forgiven, just about, as ways of putting you in the mindset of a hurt creature.
‘Handing in your brain at the door’ might be a cliché, but Carrion does seem to want you to shut yours off, at least partly to get into character. That works well enough in action – there’s a thrill to playing on sheer instinct – but in time, it begins to wear. It can be hard to tell where you are in the arc of the game, or in the sprawling overworld that links together its levels – so much so that, an hour before the credits, we’re left wandering its looping hallways, wondering if we’ve finished already. There are times, too, where we want to take up the invitation to explore old levels with new abilities, Metroidvania-style, but simply can’t find our way back to them. As much as Carrion’s moment-tomoment feel might benefit from the uniquely wobbly shape it gives you, the game as whole wears its own amorphousness a little less elegantly.
The combat here is best when you feel on the back foot – or tentacle, as the case may be