Carrion

With no real story to follow or info given on what the alien is or even what building it is trapped in, Carrion lives and dies by what happens in the moment. The focus on opening up new areas using the same ideas grows stale quick, and robs a fascinating premise of its true potential. I enjoyed playing as an enraged blob, but didn’t find much fun in the process of escaping the facility.

While I might disagree with the notion that Carrion is a truly great Metroidvania, a genre that has buckets of both older and modern classics, it is at very least a refreshing take on it. It controls like a dream with an analog stick, and there's a fluidity to the monster’s movements that I honestly feel like I will be searching for in other games for years. It just falls short of greatness, settling quickly into its comfort zone as a series of interconnected puzzles, and then failing to surprise me much after that.

Carrion is remarkably successful in so far that its visuals, sound design and interaction come together to create something truly horrifying, beautiful and engrossing, but its novelty wanes, and what you are left with is surprisingly superficial. It smoothly passes through your system the same way its goopy anti-protagonist passes through corridors, and if its sole intent was to let you play the monster in an otherwise familiar scenario, with little effort required to slither across the finish line, I am honestly unsure of what its lasting appeal was supposed to be.

Carrion sticks to its guns and nails the landing when it comes to its simple premise as a reverse horror game. It falls short on its lack of intuitive direction and inconsistencies with its puzzles. At times it can be tedious, but overall it is fun. If you need a smaller experience that has a unique perspective to the genre for an interesting experience then look no further to Phobia Game Studio's latest release.

Carrion is like a totally decompensated beat 'em up. Not because of its metroidvania-like level design, but because we advance destroying everything and everyone in this game. It is a power fantasy full of gore in which the protagonist can become a giant eater of men or a small and elusive mass. Simple and direct; the perfect entertainment for an afternoon.

Carrion nails the power fantasy of being a horror movie monster, but makes exploration a chore that pads the adventure.

Carrion has a refreshing — if consuming squirming helpless human lab rats can be called refreshing — and not often-enough explored premise but it’s not quite enough to elevate it to greatness.

When it's letting you live out its proposed reverse-horror fantasy, Carrion is at its best. It excels at making you feel empowered as an evolving lab experiment gone wrong, giving you ample opportunities to flex your death-dealing tentacles and tear enemies limb from limb. While giving you numerous tools to wreak havoc, it also uses them in smart ways to find a good balance between its gory combat and problem-solving. Carrion falters when it requires too much fine precision from you with a control scheme that doesn't allow for it, and is at its lowest when you're not playing as its headlining monster at all. These are disappointing distractions, but Carrion's main event is still a bloody great time.

Carrion abounds with the thrills of being the monster, then, but, less common and more cosy, with the kick of being in a monster movie—of slithering in celebration over the tropes of the genre. The good news is that, for a while, it works.

Carrion is, for the most part, a bloody good game. It’s a real treat for horror fans and one of the most original games I’ve come across. There were so many moments that left me with a grin a mile wide, from pulling a string of victims up into the ceiling to turning a soldier against their former friends. But if you choose to wreak your own brand of horror upon Carrion‘s hapless humans, just be prepared to step away when there’s no-one left to torment.

Carrion is an entertaining and visceral experience, with a lot more going for it than simply running around and killing things, like many of the game’s trailers led me to believe...A few questionable design decisions make me hesitate on calling this an excellent title, though. Tying parts of the creature’s moveset to its current health level is frustrating. The lack of any kind of world map, while not game breaking in the slightest, got annoying while navigating the hub area. The repetitive art design in the levels isn’t doing the game any favors either...However, frustrations aside, Carrion was still an entertaining playthrough.

Despite the short length and minor replayability factor, Phobia Game’s debut is still a cleverly-concentrated experience. One that wastes little time on padding, even if it means its more repetitive segments are more visible to spot. It may not be firing on all cylinders, but Carrion‘s frantic, do-or-die action mixed with pleasant strides in its aesthetic make for an odd yet entertaining few hours.

All the blood and gore and screaming and gnashing of teeth turn into an aggravating set of puzzles. The chaos grinds to a halt, waiting for you to parse some this-then-that-next puzzle logic. Do you even know where to go next? This tunnel looks like every other tunnel. There’s nothing left to eat. The roiling protoplasm is restless and impatient. It’s tempted to grow a foot just so it can tap it peevishly, but that would be too cheeky. It’s beneath a shoggoth’s dignity. So it waits while you lead it around and try to figure out how to open that door. Such an amazing monster, trapped in such a middling game.

As much as Carrion's moment-to-moment feel might benefit from the uniquely wobbly shape it gives you, the game as a whole wears its own amorphousness a little less elegantly. [Issue#349, p.98]

An impressive, creative, and inventive game on paper. In practice, it ends up being a rather middle-of-the-road experience, with unfulfilled promised of potential greatness. If you’re looking for an inventive new take on the Metroidvania genre, Carrion might be what you’re looking for –but don’t go into it expecting it to be Super Meat-troid.

Carrion is a great concept that becomes repetitive in practice. Taking control of a terrifying monster and mowing down a bunch of humans is fun at first, but it shows its hand far too quickly and gets stuck in a rut of giving the player the same tasks to perform over and over again. With simplistic movement and easy combat, Carrion is a straightforward Metroidvania game with few frills aside from its unique protagonist. With that being said, its climax does set it up for a sequel that could elaborate on what Phobia Game Studio has set up in its debut, so I’m still interested to see where this awful blob will go next.

Carrion starts strong with a solid premise but fails to fully capitalize on its ideas. The novelty of eating faceless humans wears thin as the sole motivation to escape isn’t expanded upon in any meaningful way. The environments fail to encourage rewarding exploration while the puzzles and combat encounters quickly become routine. It's hard to write Carrion off entirely because the novel concept has its charm, but without more depth and variety, it’s easy to lose your appetite for consuming flesh.