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.
Carrion posits its player will relish an opportunity to play as a ruthless jumble of teeth, viscera, and carnage. In a medium lined with antiheroes and ambiguous morality, acting as a pure villain seems like a capable thesis. Carrion also hopes its player fully embodies the role of an obstinate monster, trading sophistication and ego for the wild intensity of the id. Your power is clear. What, exactly, to do with it is not. This proposition runs counter to Carrion’s objectives. The privilege of being a villain demands a lot of space to practice misconduct.
True to its obsession with undisguised horror, Carrion doesn’t require an overt narrative or piggybacked origin story. You play as a shambling mess of blood and guts with some tentacles. You kill things because you look like a Cronenbergian souvenir but, in motion, you move and feel like a delightful rascal. Floating through 2D, side-scrolling environments with pleasing magnetism, Carrion divides its time between murdering for sport and murdering to solve environmental puzzles. Throwing switches and adjusting water levels consumes as much time as efficiently clearing a room of AI drones and/or human soldiers.
The creature’s point of contact with the world is through its mess of tentacles. The right analog stick is used to extend a tentacle from the lumbering mass and affect objects inside the environment. If a tentacle touches a human being, it will slowly pull it toward its core and teeth will magically eat it alive. Eventually those humans will possess guns, shields, and flamethrowers. The player is then encouraged to attack indirectly, usually by taking one of the many alternate level paths to sneak up behind a group and then wreck shop. For the most part, Carrion’s combat is an opportunity to become death incarnate.
But there are exceptions. Thrashing multiple enemies in the same small space is a cumbersome process, and some are bound to stand back up and open fire. Chasing a trio of drones around a large open environment is often a task for which I felt woefully unequipped. I felt like I cheesed Carrion more than I beat Carrion. I could imagine it faring better if I were playing with a mouse and keyboard, as opposed to the analog stick of a Switch’s Pro Controller. Still, while trying to make precise hits on a big screen with a limited tentacle is clumsy, it’s not unmanageable.
Carrion flows like a modern metrioidvania. Distinct environments—Relith Science HQ, Botanical Labs, Military Bunker—demand Carrion add new tools with regularity. Among them are options for brief invisibility, a more powerful tentacle that can bust down walls, and the ability to mind control a human (living or dead!) and animate them to solve a puzzle. These also include upgrades to the creature’s imposing mass, creating an abominable-but-flexible thing dripping with gore and operating with menace. Sometimes it’s tough to make heads or tails of the creature, but it rarely matters unless you’re trying to avoid some nasty javelin bombs.
More often than not, Carrion reminded me room-based puzzle games like Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee more than obvious analogs to Hotline Miami or Ape Out. Developing the correct order of operations is like solving a Goldbergian contraption. Markers in the environment become shorthand; sliced cubes instead of doors mean I can pass by underwater, an electric panel means I’ll need to charge up my indivisibility or armor. A switch on the opposite side of the wall may require me to bust the creature down to its smallest form, as that’s the only one that can use a tentacle arm to throw that switch. Understanding Carrion’s grammar is key to creating progress.
There is an implicit beauty to Carrion’s assembly and operation. It’s essentially a bunch of connected puzzle rooms, but each additional room relies on lessons learned in the previous room. Carrion saves its most difficult tricks for one-off rooms with bonus upgrades (granting more tentacles, greater resistance to electricity, more health) but, when performing as designed, Carrion hums along for a smooth six or seven hours.
Carrion’s length may be inflated by its poor signposting and a weird insistence on refusing any degree of opacity. There is no map, and it didn’t occur to me that there was an overworld until I was very late in the game. I was just squeezing through holes and passing through levels. The back fifth of Carrion can feel incredibly obtuse, which, in my experience, resulted in exploring every last inch of conquered levels in search for where in the world I was supposed to go next. An echolocation mechanic is next to useless, there is very little direction, and the complete absence of a map is bizarre. I finished Carrion because that’s what you do when you review videogames, but I may have dropped it after roaming around old environments for hours in futility looking for something I may have missed.
Making sense of Carrion’s world can feel like being lost in the woods. Shared assets between levels like ladders and doors make it hard to separate where you’ve been from where you’re going. It’s frustrating in the moments but, once you find your way through, an enormous relief when you’re out. Thinking back on my time with Carrion, its lack of clarity is more of a passing frustration than a defining experience.
The enduring image of Carrion remains a hopeful paean to macabre horror. Shambling sound effects conjure the gross sensation of wet slithering and the agonizing sensation of bones crunching. It seems like there is an entire library of human screams. The music, injected sparingly, is rife with out of tune keys and screeching strings. The entire audio presentation all grants authenticity to Carrion’s brand of horror. It doesn’t waste time Explaining Shit. It thrives in the spaces between carnage and chaos. Maybe there is no map because it doesn’t make sense for this strange creature to have a map.
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.
