Developer: Phobia Game Studio
Publisher: Devolver Digital
Reviewed on: Xbox One X
Purchased.
Carrion flips the script on the typical horror set up by putting you in the tentacles of a flesh eating bio weapon. Upon escaping your containment cell, you set out on a blood-soaked quest through a research facility in an attempt to escape. Along the way you’ll eat tons of people, grow more powerful, solve some puzzles, and avoid fire fights whenever possible.
Slithering your way through vent shafts to burst through doors on unsuspecting scientists is definitely Carrion’s best feature. The monster’s movement is just the right amount of sticky precision and unwieldy chaos. As you grow bigger it starts to lean more towards the unwieldy side of things, but at this point you’re powerful enough to worry less about precision. It was always satisfying to creep my tentacle around a corner to pick off a guard that just turned his back on me. Then watch his friends cower in fear as I ate him alive.
You’re very fragile, so it’s always a good idea to avoid open conflict, but you do have a variety of abilities to dispatch foes and obstacles in your way. Each size or level of your monster’s growth comes with a different arsenal of attacks and abilities. Your smallest form has an invisibility cloak and a sticky web, think like Spider-Man, you can use to pull out of reach levers and trap enemies. As you grow you get a slam ability, a shield, as well as other bits and bobs.
The only problem with them, however, is that you have to be the right size to use the ability you want. So if you are a tier three meat monster, you cannot use the invisibility and web attack the tier one monster has. In order to use them you must deposit your biomass into special liquid pools located around levels, go solve the puzzle that you need a particular ability for, then circle back around to collect your biomass. A vast majority of the puzzles are built around this shrink and grow mechanic and it honestly gets old after you do it the first couple of times. Then you realize you have to do it over and over and over again for several hours, and the shallowness of the level design becomes clear.
The most challenging moments of the game for me were a few combat rooms which require a level of patience and precision. You die quickly when being shot and even faster when being blasted with a flamethrower, so caution is required when dealing with multiple enemies. This makes the late game mind control ability even more rewarding as you turn the machine guns, mechs, and flamethrowers on your enemies. It’s just too bad these white knuckle moments are sometimes marred by imprecise controls and then followed up by more of the weak puzzle solving.
Carrion does do a good job of building intrigue, however. It tells a somewhat compelling story through odd flashback sequences, foreshadowing some of the events to come. As much as the monster appears to be a mindless killing machine, it’s clear you have a goal to achieve. And the way the game loops back on itself at the end made the whole thing worth the trip.
I think the idea of Carrion is better than the execution. The premise and “monster feel” is mostly spot on. The audio visual presentation is also top notch. However, the puzzle mechanics wear thin fast, a lot of the levels look the same, and by the end I was just pushing through to see the end. Not a great look for a four hour game. Much like meat, Carrion does not age well, but it is worth a look if the premise has you intrigued. It’s not often you get to play a giant tentacle monster with a dozen mouths. At least that’s what they tell me.
