Written Review
Carrion is a game I had an interest in as soon as I saw it when it was first shown. I’m a big fan of the Metroidvania Genre and making you the creature is a simple but effective flip to the format that has come before.
The game starts with you breaking free from the container you were kept in everyone is freaking out and puts the place in lockdown, you work your way through a few rooms and bam you start to grab, rip, tear and eat the civilians and scientists around you.
The game is typical of the Metroidvania genre in that you have to explore where you can to gain new abilities to make progress elsewhere in the game or areas you have previously visited. The difference here is you start off as a tiny little blob or wriggling red things and then you need to find containment areas than have not just abilities for you but they also help you to become a much bigger creature. With the growth in size, different abilities become available. For example when you have increased your size once you get more health and you can get the ability to dash which can smash glass and wood that blocks your path. when smaller you can use an ability to cloak yourself, the good thing is there are small bodies of water that allow you to leave a part of your mass in, that way you can use the abilities of the small monster and go back to regain your mass later.
The areas are mainly indoors so there isn’t a massive amount of variety to the locations, it’s mainly interiors of a building or cave-like areas, there are some outdoor areas and they make a nice change from the norm, but I think the small environments suit the game as it gels well with the more horror aspect of there being a monster of the loose in a closed off area.
The game has a lovely Pixel art look that again really suits the more grim aspect of the game, with the areas of the building that look minimal and the caves looking dark and dingey it all fits so well together. and the music does the exact same thing it brings an atmosphere of creepiness as if there’s a presence of something evil about that that wants to kill, which there is it just so happens to be you.
The levels are nicely laid out and getting to new areas requires you to open specific doors, these require you to find areas that you infect with your sext gore worms and it leaves behind a mouth and loads of gross bits of the creature, I had an issue late in the game, literally a minute or two before the end where I got lost and well,, I missed a simple thing to break. I mention this as there is no map, the game flows nicely where I didn’t need a map right up until that point, though it was more me not realising I could break something even though I had broken many of before.
If you are in the mood for a Metroidvania game that is a little different and rather damn interesting then Carrion is definitely one you should check out. I’m giving this 8 Pugsley’s out of 10