Carrion

 

Release 2020

Developer: Phobia Game Studio

Publisher: Devolver Digital

Gameplay Stats: 6 hours, 21/21 achievements, game complete

A bite sized Metroidvania where you get to play as a monster from a horror movie.

Aesthetics: I was a little bummed when I found out about this game that it was done all in pixel art. But After playing it I think that was the right choice. In horror movies you don't often get a good look at the monster and that amplifies the fear. I think this kind of plays into the same theming. You get to control the monster, so you can take as much time as you like looking at it, but by keeping the monster rendered with such low detail it doesn't really become a known quantity so it retains being grotesque. At least to me. The music was a surprisingly big, bombastic horror movie score which really nailed the feel. I think it might have gotten old if the game was much longer, but for a small game it felt great! Really set the scene.

Plot: You are the monster in a horror movie! Moving throughout a military compound eating and destroying things as you go. The humans think they've locked you out of many areas until you find little cracks to squeeze into to get in there anyway. I won't spoil it, but it was cool to see a distinct skyline towards the end of the game so you knew where you were located. The game story is told without words and I think that was a good way to tell this kind of story. There were a couple of flashback sequences that did a good job of giving the monster a backstory, again without use of words. The only language in the game was some slight tutorializing which I liked. You get a new power and get a one sentence explanation as to what it does.

Gameplay: Man, I am not certain how I feel about some of this. I can start off with a positive. Since you are a multi-tentacled monster you can move freely in the maps which would be considered a side scroller for the humans. It was like I was playing a top-down isometric game and they were side scrolling which was interesting. Controlling the monster when you get big towards the end was a bit cumbersome though. It wasn't clear much of the time which part of the long monster would move when I tried to maneuver a particular way. Many of the later levels are more open which helped with the confusion but didn't entirely solve the problem. I will say I also liked how the different size categories of monster had different powers (even if it doesn't really make sense) meaning that sometimes you needed to voluntarily make yourself smaller and weaker in order to solve a small puzzle. There were frequently small little puzzles like that needed to progress. I wish they were harder though, I didn't see the solution immediately towards the end of the game a couple times, I would've liked some head scratchers if you know what I mean.

Overall this game was good to play, but I think it was really more interesting than it was fun. This seems like the kind of game that is going to grow in my memory until I think of it often with fondness in retrospect. I'd recommend this game because of how interesting it was, but I don't know that it has wide appeal because of the framing of the gameplay. Which is interesting! I'll recommend this one to friends, but I don't really expect them to take me up on it.