Carrion’s Body Horror Is a Bloody Good Time

There are certain monsters in popular culture that are frightening in that they can’t be reasoned with or their motives understood. The titular creature in John Carpenter’s The Thing isn’t weighing the morality of toying with the Antarctic researchers. The Xenomorphs in the Alien movies aren’t sending an emissary to discuss terms. They just want to kill. Such a monster has a starring role in the “reverse horror” game Carrion, developed by (appropriately named) indie studio Phobia Game Studio, all about terrorizing a base full of humans.

Carrion is without a doubt an unsettling game—some enemies scream and flee at the sight of you, leaving you to hunt them down. Simply moving will leave a trail of blood, while pulling an enemy close will eat them or shake them around like an old chew toy, dynamically splattering the environment in blood, leaving some rooms soaked by the time you’re done. The monster itself is some serious body horror, an amorphous creature of tentacles, teeth, and eyes, all rendered in impressive 2D pixel art.

Courtesy of Devolver Digital

Movement is smooth for the most part, with tentacles lashing out to grasp every surface as you move about the environment. However, as you progress through the game you accrue mass, and especially in small spaces the game can have a difficult time deciding where the “head” of the monster is, flip-flopping the movement cursor back and forth, making you looking less like a menacing beast and more someone who just missed their exit on the freeway. I played on PC, but it’s definitely a game you’ll want to play with a controller if that’s an option.

A much more prominent flaw, however, comes out when grasping objects. Grabbing an enemy to smash them against the walls, or simply reeling in a corpse to regain health by eating it, is not always precise. In the end game there are arena-style combat sections with groups of hostile enemies that turn into chaos—perhaps trying to grab that enemy armed with a flamethrower but instead getting ahold of a piece of debris, which leads to a swift death. Some things could have been better explained—at one point you gain the ability to snake out a tentacle and take control of an enemy. I was under the impression it was only possible on living enemies, and after killing everyone in a room but needing someone to solve a puzzle, stabbed a body out of frustration only to find I could control corpses, saving me from reloading a checkpoint.

When the movement and combat works, it works. Bursting through a grate, smashing humans with your body weight, flinging debris as blunt-force weapons. Or taking the alternate approach, stalking a room via the vents, abducting a heavily armored soldier back into the darkness before ripping him apart. It happens fast, and it feels like it’s straight out of a horror movie.

Courtesy of Devolver Digital

The game itself is a Metroidvania—you’ll get new upgrades that will unlock previous paths that were once untraversable. There’s no map, so if you’ve set the game aside for a day or two it can take some time to remember where you’ve been and where you’re going. Carrion can be finished in about five hours—it’s brief, but it feels about right; given the gameplay it’s not the sort that needs a 12-hour epic. It also doesn’t have much in the way of replayability—the price might be a tall order, though I might mention it’s available on the Xbox Game Pass as of writing.

Carrion isn’t the most scholarly or thought-provoking game out there, but sometimes it’s nice to just be a monster doing monster stuff. It’s a neat take on the genre somewhat hampered by the controls but given its quick play time should be on the list of any horror or monster-movie fan.

Carrion is available on PC, macOS, Linux, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch.