Carrion Review

This game was a surprise, I only played it because apparently because it was "short" and was a metroidvania where you played as a horror movie monster and the concept was intriguing enough for me to check out.

It's not really much of a metroidvania, it kind of is but the levels are segmented rather than seemless and you have to find different levels in the hub world in order to progress through the game. The main thing it has in common with the genre are the powerups you get but that's about it even the backtracking itself isn't common, you will be doing it to get the level "exits" and then backtracking through the hub world to find new levels.

However since it isn't a metroidvania, it's esstentially an exploration based puzzle game. I am not big on puzzle games but puzzles in conjuction to exploration and action are the kind of games I am a fan of.

In Carrion, much of the game is spent going through levels in a hub world and you "contaminating" them in order to progress. Many of the individual levels have you contaminating certain parts of it at first in 3s and then later more in order to find the level exit and beat the level.

The puzzles for the most part do a good job at having the solution not be straight up told to you while also giving enough room for the player to have them figure out how to solve them. I did look up a walkthrough a few times but I am not sure if it's due to me being impatient or because they were obtuse.

The puzzles in Carrion is lots of switch pulling, going through vents, dropping into certain zones of water to drop or regain "biomass" in order to use different abilites in your different forms to progress. The game throws enough new at you like different generic fodder enemies, soldiers who have shields and use weapons like assault rifles and flamethrowers, giant mechs, security cameras that you need to deactivate, laser grids to use invisiblity power on to get past, different types of vents you need to destroy, playing as humans on occasions and and smaller robots that can tear your health bare quickly and have to be careful when attacking them. The game might be short but the game throws enough new and also recontextualizing old ideas to make it's short run time a memorable one.

One more positive is that the animations for the monster you play as is great and watching it tear apart enemies is really gratifying, just as much as seeing the Darkness tentacles in the titular game rip apart enemy hearts after you kill them.

Now the things I disliked and this is primarily the combat and while I don't think it is bad, it could've been better. My big issue with it is that I find it hard to tell if I have to engage with enemies directly or engage with them using "stealth". Enemies can tear your health into shreads if you aren't being careful, and at first I thought you had to sneak up on them and grabbing unaware enemies with your tentacles can be very satisfying but the problem with this is that the soldier enemies you fight are hyper aware and will a lot of the time anticipate your attacks but then there were times where this worked, it just wasn't consistent enough to be a viable tactic.

Then there were times where I just got a high biomass and spammed the ability on the right trigger and I ripped enemies to shreds with ease.

Another big issue with combat that it was hard to tell especially with the solider enemies if they were dead or if they were going to get up. There were times that I attacked them with full force and they still got up and tried attacked them while they were dowe and they seem to have invinciblity frames.

The grab attack was also super imprecise and this is going to be a fallback attack if enemies widdled down on your health bar and it was hard to aim with eventually I got used to it but it still never felt as direct as I wanted it to be.

These issues would've ruined the game for me, but there was one thing that saved it for me and that was the forigiving checkpoint and save system. Save points are always close by and your contamination points work as that and they generally always recover your health so a method I did was kill some enemies, run back to a save point, save then kill some more enemies, not a big fan of using built in "save scumming" as a tactic and it seems the devs knew that their combat wasn't that good, but I am glad this was in the game at all since I wouldn't get to the end without it.

I also disliked the hub world and I find the concept to be tedious in any game they are featured in. I would much rather just move from level to level instead of play a guessing game of which part of the hub will take me to the next part of the game.

Overall, Carrion is a good "horror" game where you play as a monster instead of running away from one. The ideas for the most part are excecuted well enough that I think anyone who thinks the idea sounds intriguing should give it a look.