Carrion

You won’t understand just how much you need a pixelated tentacle monster in your life until you play Carrion. The smooth controls, stellar soundtrack, and slick graphics will provide several hours of top-notch entertainment.

Carrion often made me sit in disgust and reflection as I left behind a trail of guts, spines, and blood. It’s an incredibly atmospheric, satisfying Metroidvania that toys with expectations of the genre and just feels great to play. Its length is an advantage as the game doesn’t overstay its welcome. Even after the credits rolled, there were still a lot of optional power-ups to hunt down. Carrion feels familiar in its gameplay but unique in execution. The blood may still be freshly dripping from the wall, but Carrion is certainly one of the highlights in gaming from this year so far.

Carrion is a fascinating reversal of the typical Metroidvania. Playing as a hungry, tentacle abomination is fast, fluid and unnerving. My only complaint is that there is no mapping function, which can make progression a chore.

Carrion is a fun reverse Metroidvania, in the sense that you play as a villain, not the human/hero. In a universe full of anti-heroes and complicated moral choices, here, you just have fun destroying and devouring everything you see ahead.

Regardless of the few gripes I have with Carrion, the title is such an original idea that it’s very easy to recommend. Also, you grow in such a tightly designed manner that gameplay never gets stale and the experience is over in a satisfying length of time. Sure, it might take players a while to get used to swinging their tentacles to snatch up food, but after a few minutes, you’ll be ingesting screaming victims like a pro. And best of all, you get the ability to control humans by shoving your tentacles into their body, forcing them to shoot their comrades so you don’t have to get your hands dirty. Knowing that, how could you not want to play this right now?

Carrion is something different, and being able to play something that doesn’t feel like most games is genuinely exciting. If you’ve ever dreamt of being a human-eating monster, this is a great chance.

Carrion is an interesting metroidvania that starts from a different and interesting idea (you're the monster), that horror films lovers and metroidvania games fans will enjoy. Even with its wonderful pixel art, great ideas and wonderful progression, the final chunk of the game and some minor elements prevent the game from ending with a bang.

These minor niggles aside, Carrion is a title that I think is well worth checking out for the design of its monster alone, and the carnage you can cause together. It's been a rough year, and we all need to blow off some steam somehow. I just never quite expected that taking control of an otherworldly nightmare unit would be the cathartic experience i needed, but life comes at you fast. Much in the way that giant red tendrils can.

Carrion is not a particularly long game, but it does a lot with the time you’ll spend with it. It’s more involved than it initially appears, and its blank slate approach coupled with the confidence to begin and end as abruptly as it does is something others can learn from. A succinct and sometimes challenging diversion from the norm, it’s worth the experience to live it up as an amorphous, crafty monster.

The primal glee that comes from being cast, for a moment, as the Ur-hunter in a world of cringing prey barely diminishes during the course of the game, and it’s deeply pleasing to master the kind of dripping echoic domain which, in most film and fiction, must be merely survived.

Carrion is very entertaining and extremely unique. Making humans whimper in fear never gets old and killing them is even more fun. I wish some of the areas were more distinguishable from each other but that's a very small issue really. If you want to play something a bit different then you won't go far wrong with this one.

Carrion is a truly excellent game. It looks great, it’s an absolute blast to play and it manages to keep upping the ante at every step of the journey to create a fun and memorable gaming experience. The biggest criticism I have of Carrion is that it is fairly linear and rather thin on content – you can play through the whole thing in about four to five hours and there isn’t any motivation to go back through once you’re done. However, the fantastic pixel art and brutally satisfying gameplay more than make up for these shortcomings – do yourself a favour and pick up Carrion to unleash some of your built-up isolation frustrations on some hapless pixelated scientists.

Carrion is a special thing in many ways, but its actual meat and potatoes structure is as formulaic as the genre gets. Thankfully, its core gameplay of tearing room after room of people into wet chunks of corpse never, ever gets old, and sustains the experience throughout. It looks superb, sounds great and is plenty of fun to play, despite some minor issues which just hold Carrion back from the upper echelons of the Switch library.

Carrion lets you live out the creature fantasy you never knew you desired. A series of escape situations and tense standoffs with humans where you have the upper tentacle every time. A gruesome experience, but one well worth having.

Yes, the game lacks readability when there are too many enemies. Yes, its level design sometimes loses the player. But Carrion is a successful game that takes being a monster to the extreme.

Turning the horror game genre on its head, Carrion is a gory delight for you rip and tear your way through.

An interesting experiment that lets you play as a monster.

Carrion excels at creating realistic tentacle locomotion in the shape of a bloodthirsty nightmare. It falls behind when it requests precision from a monster only capable of blunt violence. As mad science grants sentience to raw brutality, articulation must be sacrificed for overwhelming power. It leaves Carrion as a mesmerizing concept overcommitted to its code.

As a horror aficionado, and someone who also likes the extreme ends of horror, I find Carrion to be fascinating. It's not the kind of game I generally like playing, but it's pitched at the easy edge of the Metroidvania "genre". The exploration and puzzles are fluid and in service of the game's main purpose, which is the most unapologetically visceral thing I've played in some time. Not everyone will be able to stomach Carrion's atmosphere and gleeful violence. But those that can will find an experience that is beautiful in being so grotesque.

I usually grow tired of Metroidvanias pretty quickly, but Carrion had me hooked. There’s something to be said for putting players in the metaphorical shoes of a literal bloodthirsty monster — and that something is: it’s super fun.

Carrion does many things right when it comes to creating a feel for becoming the monster. The cinematic soundtrack is fantastic too, setting the tone and putting the player in the mindset of the beast perfectly. The way the monster moves under control is excellent, and massacring a room full of scientists and soldiers rarely ever gets old. It’s just unfortunate that the overall structure that surrounds the novelty of the core gameplay mechanic is never quite as unique in comparison.

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

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.

The concept is imaginative and puts you in control of a rather cool monster. But leveldesign and monotonous gameplay are disappointing in the long run.

Carrion embraces its identity as a "reverse-horror" experience, offering some viscerally violent action that is not for the faint of heart. Presentation here is top-notch: this is a polished title that Phobia Game Studio has taken a lot of care in crafting. Sadly, it stumbles in its core gameplay. The combat is poorly balanced and navigation can be a frustrating chore, but when Carrion does transcend these trappings, it does so with a sadistic glee that makes it unmistakable amongst its peers.

Playing as an alien monstrosity is a great idea, and at times works well, but the fiddly controls and awkward mix of gameplay ideas doesn’t gel together well.