CARRION Review

Designing a game where the player is all powerful is challenging. The player needs to feel suitably destructive but be countered with appropriate resistance so that the game isn’t a cake-walk. With reverse-horror game CARRION, Phobia Game Studio has found that delicate balance, both empowering the player as a behemoth of chaos, and generating just enough friction to pose a challenge.

In CARRION, players assume a grotesque mass of flesh, teeth, and tentacles. Breaching their containment unit, players stalk a cavernous science facility populated with civilians and soldiers. Players will wreak havoc as they attempt to escape the facility, rending people in two and feasting on their corpses to gain strength. The behemoth is enormous but graceful in its movements. Traversal is smooth and responsive, tentacles thwipping intuitively to walls and ceilings as the monster glides with ease. The simplicity of movement makes you feel in control of your new domain, and its denizens your hapless victims.

The level design does a good job of directing players despite its labyrinthine structure. I got lost only a couple of times, which I find to be a commendable achievement for a game that has no map. Corpses will remain where you left them, a bloody trail in your wake, which also helpfully reminds you of where you’ve been. As you progress through the game, you evolve ever more powerful means of devastation, and tools for solving the metroidvania-style puzzles. Most of the puzzles are dead simple, but I would argue that puzzles don’t need to be particularly hard, just challenging enough to make you feel satisfied. You're an intelligent life-form, after all.

Many of the people residing in the game carry pistols or assault rifles, and only a few shots are necessary to take you down. But you are a beast of raw strength, and encounters are primarily playgrounds of destruction, setpieces of mayhem, specifically designed to empower your fantasy. You’ll burst through doors, barreling into puny scientists, flinging them against the walls, ripping them apart and feasting on their bones. You’ll tear scientists from walkways and drag them into murky depths, their hellish screams echoing off the cavern walls. You’ll find air ducts clearly constructed for the simple pleasure of assaulting soldiers from behind, or perhaps you’ll parasitically possess one to lay waste to his friends.

Unfortunately, the grab mechanic can be finicky and tempers your feeling of unbridled power. You can aim your tentacles to snare humans and objects, but sometimes you’ll flail about clumsily and wiff, feeling impotent. You’ll occasionally wish that latching onto victims was less nuanced.

CARRION is a joy and, in my experience, gets better and better as it progresses. Clocking in at four hours, it’s also the perfect length, ending just before it becomes tedious. CARRION was developed by only a handful of individuals, but it’s an impressive feat for any size team. They’ve managed to fulfill a dream of playing a berserking monster, and we whole-heartedly recommend it.