Oh, humans. You’re so cute with your little guns and your flailing legs and your soft, squishy bodies that can easily be torn apart and devoured while you scream.
It’s nothing personal, humans, I’m just hungry and you’re simply in my way. It’s eat or be eaten, and frankly, I’ve got a bigger appetite and way more mouths than you do.
Carrion is a horror game, but unlike most horror games I get to play as the horror, a squirming, multitentacled blood monster that can slither and slide and climb through underground labs and catacombs while munching messily on guards and scientists. And tearing through labs, smashing through walls, and turning people into grisly snacks is what I need right now. It feels great to be a monster.
We’ll have a full review of Carrion soon, but in the meantime you can find some gory gifs below of my first enjoyable hour of play. Starting as a rather small monster, I quickly began to grow as I consumed the hapless humans, and I became more fearsome the bigger and more wriggly I got.
And eating isn’t the only thing I can do! There are some spots in the lab where I can crack open sealed biohazard containers, squeeze my squishy body inside, and become imbued with new powers.
First up was a special new appendage, a long, sticky web-coated tentacle I can fire from my body and use it to snare the delicious humans. Very useful because their guns, while small, do hurt pretty badly and take away from my biomass with each shot. So having my own ranged attack is helpful.
But you’re not just a killing machine, you’re a smart monster. Remember in Aliens when Hudson says “How could they cut the power, man? They’re animals!”
Assuming that terrifying, ravenous creatures aren’t also intelligent is always a mistake. I can use the same sticky web tentacle to reach through grates and pull levers and get myself into new areas. Yeah, I do puzzles.
But when I’m not being clever I’m being an absolute killing machine. Once I gained the power to smash through wooden walls, there wasn’t always a need to stick to the floorplan. Bursting into a chamber through a cloud of splinters, my tentacles reaching and grasping and pulling me along, I can utterly destroy a room full of armed dudes in just a few seconds. And then eat them.
Growing bigger and more powerful isn’t always the path to success, however. There are spots in Carrion where you’ll deliberately shed some of your biomass and return to a smaller form. That sticky tentacle can’t be used once I’m big enough to smash through walls, so sometimes I need to cocoon some of my body and leave it behind. I can then use my smaller form and my special tentacle to solve a puzzle, then return to the mass I shed and squish it back into myself to get big again.
And don’t forget to simply have fun and enjoy your monster body in other ways. It’s pleasant to just squeeze yourself into a tight spot for no real reason and just lurk there, dripping red goo. Monster lyfe.
So far it feels great to be a monster in Carrion. Go ahead and embrace the horror—it’s easy to do, what with all those extra arms.
Heck, even the main menu is awesome: