Developer Phobia Game Studio
Publisher Devolver Digital
Format PC (tested), Switch, Xbox One
Release Out nowCarrion
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 monster-
hunting 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-to-
moment feel might benefit from the uniquely wobbly
shape it gives you, the game as whole wears its
own amorphousness a little less elegantly.W
e 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
PLAY
The combat here
is best when
you feel on theback foot – or
tentacle, as the
case may be
6
CREATURE FEATURE
The best B-movies are always
slender things, and Carrion is no
exception. Expect about six
hours of play – a couple more if
you’re willing to search every
corner to find the optional
containment units. These boost
your abilities, adding extra
tentacles or growing your energy
supplies. Finding them generally
involves revisiting a level once
you’ve unlocked the relevant
ability. The problem here, apart
from having to navigate that
messy overworld, is that the
levels don’t repopulate. Leave
this exploration late, as we do,
and there’s no one left to test
your new powers on. It’s rare we
find ourselves looking for a New
Game+ option, but starting over
with all the unlocked abilities
seems like it’d suit Carrion
perfectly. If this is something that
ends up being added post-
launch, you can mentally add a
point to our score.