It’s a dream come true, Carrion is what we gamers have wanted for years. As you may see quite a bit in the industry are games that center on human defeating aliens and monsters. But recently it’s been the other way round with players taking on the role of the antagonistic force to be reckoned with and doing as much damage as possible.
Carrion is made by a select few who worked on the bloody and carnage inducing The Butcher, another game where you take on the role of the bad guy to wipe out humanity. A demo is out now for Carrion on Steam and I wanted to give my thoughts one of my highly anticipated games of 2020.
Being the monster has never been so much fun!
Carrion gives players the chance to live out their darkest dreams of being a vile creature that’s brutalizing the inhabitants of a giant space ship. The main goal here is to grow, adapt, consume human beings and finally take over the ship to ensure your ultimate goal (of landing on Earth and taking over I assume) is met. You start living in a secure (well not so secure actually) container before you awaken and free yourself into the confines of the ship.
Using the air ducts and crawl spaces lining the ship, you traverse, stalk, hunt and observe the humans before completing a number of objectives. The demo has the player tackling a simple enough task of opening a heavily secure door that leads into the next section of the ship. As you move through the ship in order to find three components that will open the door, you will eat, grow and learn new abilities that come in handy later.
Flesh your eyes on this!
The animation is extremely impressive and an upgrade to The Butcher. The movement of the creature is fluent, looking extremely creepy as it attaches its tentacles to various surfaces and moves about like a giant parasite. The detailed gore system and destruction allow you to see the aftermath of the carnage you spread and it looks really good.
The environment itself is a little dull as it’s just an industrial-style space ship with plenty of tones of black, grey and white. But there seem to be other environments with an eco-inspired section that will represent a greenhouse being one of them. I’m sure there will be more, like the classic med-bay, engine section and maybe even fancy bridge area that has more advanced defenses. Something that gamers would expect in a game like this, similar titles such as Dead Space and Alien Isolation.
Beastly!
I will say this is a tough game in regards to combat. The basics are you have to get up close and personal with your potential meal and consume them rapidly before they flee. There’s a good mix of unarmed, those with pistols and others with more advanced tech.
You have a chomping attack which speaks for itself, a means to shoot out a tentacle to blast enemies onto hard surfaces and disabling them and ability you gain midway through the demo that allows you to dash. Dashing is good for attacks but also to unlock new areas.
So there’s an aspect of Metroidvania games here as you can backtrack and explore new areas by obtaining different abilities. This is a neat idea but as mentioned before, there have to be more interesting areas to explore and rewards. There wasn’t a clear indication of what potential rewards will be (I hope there will be) but I imagine health upgrades being quite vital for later stages in the game.
Overall thoughts
I like Carrion quite a bit and could see it being a hit with the horror crowd. The monster design is creepy, well everything about it is just disturbing and intriguing. The art style is nice, nothing special in regards to what we’ve seen before with pixel art games. Yet the developers have gone great things with the gore.
The creature looks amazing and the world has a certain sci-fi charm I admire. I like to see the rest of the ship or maybe even another environment altogether. But as long as the ship has enough environments to explore and play with the gameplay mechanics then this will be fine. Looking forward to seeing Carrion in full in 2020.