Before the credits roll, you will be able to take over the bodies of soldiers, harden your exterior against explosives, and send out a hail of spiked tendrils to eviscerate everything in your way. The Carrion Beast starts off as a little meatball that can use its tendrils to snatch up humans with more powers unlocking along the way, helping you to combat the increasingly beleaguered and desperate forces the shadowy organisation you’re facing throws at you. No monster is complete without at least a few powers, of course. You will likely relish stalking from the shadows the more horrifying a beast you become. There might be a slight pang of guilt early on as you ragdoll scientists around and chuck their legs at their mates, but that subsides pretty quickly. While games like Dead By Daylight have you playing as the bad guy, few have you causing as much chaos as Carrion - and even fewer are this fun. The Carrion Beast isn’t your average video game protagonist, that’s for sure. Playing as a red mass of death that grows even more grotesque following every bite of hapless human, your job is to help it escape, one torn limb and shrieking scientist at a time. I might even go so far as to say I would’ve enjoyed the game more if it was more focused on just eating people and ambushing them in their offices, listening to them scream and beg for their lives like pathetic little insects before I throw them into the wall over and over and over again with my powerful tentacles…Anyway.I don’t think I’ll ever be able to look at mince in the same way ever again after chomping my way through Carrion, the reverse horror game developed by Phobia Game Studio and published by Devolver Digital. That being said, the variety of upgrades makes an already visceral and engaging combat system even better. Some players might not have as much of an issue with this, but personally I’ve never been great at backtracking by pure memory in these Metroidvania type games. While I do enjoy this idea, the game’s lack of a minimap does hinder this a bit after you put some hours in, since the maps get larger and there’s more and more you have to remember. You’ll occasionally have to forfeit your larger body and its upgrades in order to reach a switch or punch through a wall. Carrion insists that you use them all to solve all the puzzles that unlock new areas, but you can only have a certain level of upgrades at a time. Upgrades are interesting in Carrion, because unlike in many action games, you don’t just forget your old abilities once you gain stronger, better ones. Well, you can eat the humans, (which is also really satisfying, I promise I’m not a psychopath) but as you progress they’ll arm themselves with pistols, rifles and energy shields, which requires you to approach with either stealth or at least some sort of plan. Seeing the monster’s tentacles sticking to the walls and ceilings in time with your motion is incredibly satisfying for some reason, and while I’m sure this feels even better with mouse and keyboard controls, the PlayStation 4 version of the game is able to deliver that same sense of fluidity as you slither through the corridors of the research facility.Įnemies halt your escape from the lab mostly in the form of human characters and drones, and while the monster is powerful on its own, you won’t be able to just plough through and eat everything. The first thing you’ll notice about the game when you take control is how good it feels just to move around. Rather than tossing a bunch of half-baked ideas into the game, Carrion instead takes what it’s good at and perfects it, resulting in a blood-soaked masterclass in building core gameplay mechanics. Phobia Game Studio’s reverse-horror game published by Devolver Digital places you in control of a sinister ball of noodles with teeth, and then leaves you to your own devices as you gradually grow in physical size and develop a respectable amount of new ways to kill people by taking a quick bath in toxic waste. Most of the time the phrase “ less is more” isn’t used hand-in-hand with “ over the top,” but Carrion is a rare exception.
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