Carrion Review
I wish the absurd and awful actions either taken by or implicitly supported by the US Government would stop so I wouldn’t have to begin each of these reviews with the mostly bad, though sometimes good, news, but it’s important to me. I hope that, in some way, I’m helping the struggle against authoritarian violence by keeping it front of mind when a lot of other major media outlets have dialed back their coverage. With that same belligerent persistence, I am going to keep playing and reviewing video games because it helps keep me calm and hopefully helps you, my readers, by entertaining you, helping you spend your money better, or both. This week, I looked at Carrion, a story about an angry pile of meat.
In Carrion, players take the role of a voracious abomination composed entirely of tentacles, eyes, and mouths that I nicknamed The Wad. Though never outright stated, it’s heavily implied that The Wad was developed in a lab staffed by scientists and security personnel paid enough money to ignore their common sense and concerns for their own life. After breaking out of a glass tube everyone involved had way too much faith in, players lead The Wad on a rampage through the mysterious facility, devouring anything that’s edible and smashing anything that’s not. As The Wad proceeds further into the facility and ingests more staff members, it will grow and develop new abilities, allowing The Wad to access new areas with more succulent prey to consume for even greater powers. All the while, players will have to grasp at straws to try and figure out what is actually happening.
Carrion advertised itself as a “reverse horror game” which is actually a big mistake to me because the reason horror movie monsters are so scary is the fact that they are unstoppable until the end of the movie. The Xenomorph of Alien wasn’t scary because it was only barely more powerful than the crew of the Nostromo, it was scary because it dispatched the humans with preposterously deadly force in the blink of an eye, and Carrion takes this to heart. This means that, for about 85% of the game, there is no challenge because there is no genuine threat to The Wad. Because I rarely found any confrontation to be anything more than a minor inconvenience, I got bored very quickly. I’m as much of a fan of power fantasies as the next person, but at a certain point having no real opposition takes the fun out of the experience. However, thanks to flamethrower-wielding security specialists and unmanned drones with astonishingly sharp propellers, my boredom was occasionally replaced with staggeringly quick defeat. These particular foes were sparingly sprinkled through the game and they certainly provided a challenge, but it didn’t feel like a reasonable escalation. The introduction of these foes felt like an afternoon of mini golf but suddenly the ball becomes a timed explosive and the putter becomes a live snake. I liked having to stop and reevaluate, but these encounters came so rarely and killed me so quickly, I would have liked a medium step in-between to acclimatize myself.
Unfortunately, Carrion is also lacking in its story, if it can be called that. At the beginning of the game, the only information is that The Wad is held in a flimsy containment canister. As the game progresses, players will be fed some narrative scraps hinting at the origin of The Wad but nothing about the facility or its staff are ever explained. Over the course of the game, players will unlock incredibly complicated doors by creating nests of its own hideous flesh throughout the facility but why this action opens doors is never explained, and why The Wad should go through these doors isn’t clear, other than that there is more food on the other side. Maybe Carrion was made this way because the developers wanted players to feel like they were in the same mental space as The Wad, a confused creature with no desires beyond hunger and no way of interacting beyond destruction, but it just felt like they didn’t bother. I’m all for a monster movie being sparse on story, I’m a huge fan of the original Predator movie, but the expositional vacuum has to be filled with something and Carrion doesn’t have an answer for this.
If the explanation of why The Wad is moving through this facility is lacking, actually moving through the facility is a degree worse. Being a loose collection of furious flesh noodles and facial features, The Wad doesn’t move like many other video game characters do. The main method of mobility available to the player is using the collection of grasping tentacles decorating the repulsive protagonist to cling to and swing from walls and ceilings, like a much more objectionable Spider-Man, but the core mass of The Wad will shift noticeably, changing where the the tentacles come from and where the center of the creature is. This problem gets worse as The Wad eats more and grows in size, with its third and largest form being a genuine struggle to control in most areas. Worse, this game has no map and its only methods of directing the player are slowly scrolling LED screens displaying staff evacuation instructions and infrequently present green exit signs, so players have to sometimes wander around aimlessly as they try to find the next destination. On top of that, the facility has bizarre one-way pipes that will pull The Wad through them if it gets too close, meaning a careless mistake will have players doubling back or repeating pathways while trying to discover where to go next.
In all honesty, there’s nothing truly wrong with Carrion, I never had any bugs and everything worked the way it was supposed to, but the way it was supposed to work was just uninteresting and frustrating. I can’t find any evidence that developer Phobia Game Studio has made a game before this, so the lackluster design can likely be attributed to inexperience. Hopefully their next production will be better for the lessons they learned making Carrion. Keep an eye on them, but you’re fine to let this game pass you by.
Don’t buy this game
I hate to say it, but there’s nothing here worth spending your money on
