Carrion is a Stealth-based Puzzle game in where you play as an incomprehensible monster that has escaped containment. The starting zone that you find yourself in has the humans safely behind thick glass, but as you breach that area and into other sections of that massive research complex, you’ll soon be on the hunt for flesh. One of the first immediately noticeable things is simply how satisfying it is to move around. Your fleshy and relatively formless self slithers around the environments using a considerable number of tentacles that you can use to cling on to any surface. With your speed, you can easily zoom past gunfire and make good use of the environments you find yourself in. It is so fluid that it wasn’t until near the end that I realized it doesn’t even have a jump button.
The story is near nonexistent. You simply start breaking out of your containment and work your way into breaching other areas without much in the way of plot. Starting off will see you as a tiny flesh-like creature, yet the more humans you consume, the larger you grow. Taking damage will see you lose mass once more. This effectively makes humans walking health-kits if you think you can take them down, as not all will just cower and let themselves be eaten. For as unnerving as your appearances may be, you are far from a powerful monster. Someone unloading even a pistol into you will quickly have you on death’s door. You are meant to make the best of the environment and sneak up on your foes. Rushing them head-on is likely to end badly for our slimy creature.
Our first ability is to grab things with our tentacles. You can use it to slam objects into people or to violently slam people themselves all over the room. A good bit of scenery in office areas are destructible, enemies gib in a satisfying fashion, and it feels impactful. One flaw massively degrades it, however. The fact that it is pretty difficult to tell if a foe is dead or not, especially with the solider type enemies that can not be gibbed. You can toss them all over the place and you are never quite certain if they are dead or not. This leads to cases where you fling them away only for them to get back up and fire into your back. With how little damage you can take, that can quickly prove frustrating. I found it best just to pull them in so your creature automatically bites. That is far less satisfying and grows dull quickly. Simply making the enemy sprites darker when they die would have gone a long way.
As you feast and progress through the game you will gain new abilities, as well as other forms. There are three forms overall, ranging from the small creature you started off as, all the way to a massive wall of flesh. Each of those forms have their own unique abilities, making it so you don’t just stick to being a behemoth all throughout. Most of your abilities are mainly for use in puzzles than anything to do with combat. Your go-to tactic will likely remain to grab and bite, minus using one skill that allows you to take control over a human. Combat in Carrion is sub-par at the best of times, but body-snatching a human and unloading your rifle as their comrades unwittingly turn their backs is all kinds of satisfying. It is a far safer option than appearing in your true form, though keep in mind that taking control of a non-combatant human causes you to teleport to their location when you relinquish control.
Carrion has all kinds of weird design decisions that at times feel like they are just there to pad the game. Chief among these are the separate abilities in your three size forms. An example being that your first form has an ability to “shoot” a tentacle and pull a lever. The third has one where you can shoot multiple tentacles, which also works to pull larger objects, but won’t work on levers for some reason. Another example is that the second form has a charging attack to move obstacles that is often used alongside the third form’s pulling tentacles. It adds nothing to the gameplay. All it does is force you to needlessly head to a different room with a red pool of water so you can lose mass, go back to use an arbitrary ability, and then come back to regain your mass again. Rarely did it ever serve to improve a puzzle or make you feel like you solved something. It merely invokes the sensation of annoyance when seeing a lever there for the sole purpose of padding.
A few of the abilities feel less contrived and better fit this idea of having three size forms. Key among these is that in your smallest form, you can briefly turn invisible. It makes much more sense and I wish more of them felt that way, instead of how they handled most. One thing I’ve failed to mention as of yet is that there are only five buttons you can use at any one time. Three of these will remain the same regardless of form. Those are Body-Snatching, grabbing, and the Sonar ability. That means that in total, only two actions are different in each form. With the reasoning of no longer being able to use some skills feeling contrived, like no charging attack on your third form, this whole mechanic just feels needless. At the very least they could have allowed us to change mass without the need of backtracking to a pool of red water.
Alongside puzzle-solving, exploration is another key factor to this title. You are never told where to go and are let loose in this semi-open world. There is no map or direction markers to guide your way. Your ultimate objective is always to find a couple of potential infection zones around an area and create a fleshy checkpoint for yourself. It also serves as a save point. Dying will set you back to the last one you made and reset any progress you have gained. They are usually plentiful, so it likely won’t be long before you are back to where you met your untimely death. Finding and infecting all potential infection zones is mandatory, you will need all of them to open a locked vault leading to a new area. Once you slither your way inside, you will find yourself in a new location ready to repeat that process once more.
Interestingly enough, all locations are interconnected. Since entering a vault teleports you somewhere else, it is difficult to get a feel for the land, but they all exist in the same space. The level design is really quite good. As maze-like as it is and with the lack of hand-holding, I never found myself feeling lost. It is neat finding yourself in old areas again and making use of your new abilities to pass through into a previously inaccessible room or location. Re-exploring an area for the sake of it can also lead to valuable things, such as DNA that permanently boosts your Energy to further make use of invisibility and other powers. There are no respawning enemies, making for a far more peaceful time once again poking your head into places without the threat of being met with a machine-gun burst to the face. It never ceases to be mesmerizing watching your creature slither about, and the pixel art is just as nice to look at. This would nearly be relaxing if it wasn’t for those wet slapping noises of you moving around and the background hum of the somber soundtrack reminding us of how this place got to be so silent in the first place.
While most of the puzzles are kind of shallow, I still enjoyed them. It was the combat where things started to fall apart. Stealth is a big part of it, but with how zoomed in the camera is, it can be all too easy to be spotted by foes you didn’t even know were there. This is easy enough to deal with at first, yet by the time you unlock the third form, it becomes much more difficult. That is thanks to the controls becoming really confused when you are that size. It mostly occurs when you find yourself in tight areas. Due to the lack of a head on your creature or central point for movement, controlling that massive near water-like creature will occasionally have you going in an unintended direction or accidentally seeping through a pipe into a different area. You’ll also find parts of your body peeking out and wide open to gunfire. The tight controls become clunky on your third and final form. This is hardly game ruining, but it does further highlight their perfect aim and lack of any hesitation or fear when facing the unspeakable horror that is the creature we are controlling.
The main thing that makes you feel vulnerable is not how much damage enemies dish out, it is the fact that soldiers carry impenetrable shields. This allows them to be invulnerable and be able to attack at the same time. Even in your third form, it is suicide to face them directly. Having them briefly drop their shield when they attack could have lead to more fun possibilities, like being able to throw an object or comrade at them before retreating back into the shadows. Unfortunately, this title has a very specific way it wants you to play, and the same goes for puzzles. There is only one solution to them, even if you try to get creative like attempting to turn invisible as you pass some explosive harpoons turret that can still see you somehow.
In total, Carrion lasted me around four hours and a half. Given the 20 US Dollar price point, I’ve seen quite a few people question its value. I did feel this experience was worth that, and also believe that it is the perfect length. It was already starting to drag-on by the end, padding it out more would have been a mistake, in my opinion. The Steam version has Workshop support for user-made maps and mods, however, so that should provide much more playtime. As is, there is no new game plus or any real reason to continue after the story is concluded aside from wanting to find more DNA. Enemies don’t respawn, making it kind of pointless gathering it if you are not hunting for achievements. At the end of the day, Carrion’s strength is its very unique and appealing theme. Its store page with lines such as “tear down this prison and acquire more and more devastating abilities on the path to retribution.”, as well as “spread fear and panic” are kind of misleading. From the first soldier you encounter to the last, they are as fearless and robotic as ever, and what they consider your devastating abilities are is beyond me. Combat is a far third in terms of this title’s focus. This is mainly a decent Puzzle Exploration game dragged down by the amount of shallow stealth gameplay.
As harsh as all that surely sounds, I actually enjoyed my time with it. It just felt bizarrely restricting in all of its gameplay aspects for such a unique premise to base a game off, and it never really took off past what it introduces in the first hour. You’ll always be searching for new infection zones to unlock the next location, always using stealth even while being larger than a school bus in the end, and there is little in the way of surprises. It disappointingly plays it far too safe to be entirely carried by its awesome art direction and theme, which is where it excels at. The world they created is really quite something. Seeing the sun after spending so much time in dark, dingy underground bunkers. Catching a glimpse of the cityscape from inside the heavily fortified lab, of which you are struggling so much to get free from. It certainly has its moments. Exploring these environments was a real treat and solving a puzzle to see more of it was irresistible. If Carrion’s theme is what attracted you to it in the first place, there is much visual and atmospheric flair to like here, you’ll just have to weigh back your expectations when it comes to gameplay or puzzles.
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