The Haunted Hoard: Carrion (Xbox One)
Carrion bills itself as a reverse horror game, wherein rather than being the heroes who hunt down a rampaging murderous monster, you find yourself in the shoes of the roiling red mass of teeth, eyes, and tentacles. This certainly isn’t a new video game concept, we’ve been able to play the role of the killer since horror games were just taking their first steps with things like Texas Chainsaw Massacre for Atari 2600, but Carrion certainly wants you to feel like you’re the creature crawling through the vents, picking off people one by one as your victims struggle to concoct some way to close the power gap.
Carrion begins with hardly any lead-in, the player immediately bursting out of containment as the fleshy creature with a murderous instinct. Using the left control stick to move your amorphous form of bloody tendrils, you can reach out with a limb with the right stick to grab and snag the scientists who contained you. You can fling the person around as you please while holding them, but if your mass has diminished from any sort of damage or you’re later in the game where you can achieve different sizes, consuming caught prey will help you increase your mass. As such, damage can bring you down, and at your lowest health you do truly feel pathetic as you’re barely a step above your prey in size.
The science complex you find yourself in is filled with employees working in different domains. The research wing you spring from is simple in its purpose, but you’ll soon find yourself in a military headquarters and industrialized areas filled with water. However, there are also some naturalistic areas to be found, many of these still teeming with the electronic equipment of the humans you seek revenge on for containing you but featuring more natural areas too like lush jungle areas and rocky cliffs. The goal in finding a new area is usually to pick up the new power local to the area and then integrate with the walls at key points to break off the seal to the next area. There is no direct story told over the course of your rampage, but a few moments let you view the memories of a human who is involved in kicking off the events leading to the rampage of the nameless red beast.
The progress in Carrion is steady if a bit unexciting. New abilities seem like a good way of injecting more killer potential into your beast or opening up new puzzle opportunities as you have to figure out your way forward, but the additions don’t feel substantial enough to really change the flow of the game. Most of the action does come down to reaching out with your tendril to either grab humans before they can attack you or catch them by surprise, and while the game does set up situations where you can be stealthy about it to truly get engrossed in the fantasy of being this murderous creature, such immersion is hard to maintain when it’s easy to just grab the people and fling them around unpunished. You can unlock more tendrils along your adventure to make this process even easier, and while the enemies start to get new tricks, they don’t ask much more than retreating briefly and trying again if your effort to snag them fails. Some abilities you get like a charge attack and covering your body in spikes do add new attacks to your arsenal, but it also puts your body in jeopardy more than just snagging foes and fleeing. You really have to want to prioritize the feel of the action over the practicality of it to choose these attack options, and when enemies start using flamethrowers, forcefields, and drones, the safe way becomes more important and the interesting ways become too situational to help.
Some abilities are definitely concerned more with their use in puzzle solving though, such as a webbed tendril you can shoot out to pull switches or the power to infect a human briefly and puppet them. The problem with these is just how often the interaction itself is the whole substance of the puzzle. You see a lever only your webbed tendril can reach and use it, and the lock-and-key style puzzle is complete. If there’s a lever you can’t reach, infect a human and walk them over to it. It definitely doesn’t remain as entirely straightforward as that, but the complications sprinkled on top of these interactions never really feel like it’s demanding much in the way of cleverness since the complications are just things like moving an elevator out of your way or making sure you don’t trip a laser.
What’s worse though is that many important abilities are mutually exclusive to different size tiers of the carrion beast. You can’t turn invisible or do the charge at certain sizes, and the game’s way of managing this issue is to have there be pools of red water you can dump mass into so you can achieve smaller sizes. You can return and pick it back up after a puzzle is complete, but the dry process of backtracking to dump some mass and then go solve a puzzle is already bad enough without the return trip for your old mass, and there are legitimately points in the game where the substance of a puzzle is to just perform a size-specific ability to remove a blocker, go dump the mass, perform a different ability to remove the next blocker, and then go reclaim the mass for the final blocker. While certainly the most egregious problem with the system, it still feels like it’s less a part of the puzzle design and more a form of padding in a game that probably goes on a little longer than it should have, it seemingly running out of ideas on what to do with its core concept.
Unfortunately, once you do achieve what should be the satisfying top tier of monster size, you start to become unwieldy, it being hard to locate the center of your moving form. It’s easy to accidentally throw a hunk of yourself into the line of fire as you can’t find the piece of you that you’re truly controlling while everything else comes along for the ride, and where your tendrils extend out from also becomes easy to lose track of at your maximum mass. Couple this with some moments where it’s not totally clear where you’re meant to go while lacking an in-game map and Carrion can be frustrating to navigate even when the controls are on your side. A roar can tell you the general area you need to go for the major goals, but it can still feel like you’re navigating around an area too big for its own good while also not challenging you enough with the enemies and puzzles in your way, and without any big moments to prove yourself besides rooms containing a few tough enemies, the gameplay side of Carrion really comes up short.
Carrion is clearly meant to be about the atmosphere and idea, and the pixel art used to display the action is gorgeous and grotesque in equal measure. Finding the parts of the facility where nature still thrives really allows the game to show off its attention to small details, but the mechanical nature of the industrialized areas, the putrid feeling of the toxic landfill, and of course the unnatural organic nature of our monstrous lead all come across wonderfully thanks to the art team. The beast moves with a wonderful grace to it that makes it fearsome to imagine coming towards you, and appropriately enough, the humans you target display their fear quite well. The nervous inspections of armed soldiers and the cowering people fleeing to wherever might be safe are a good fit for the fantasy of being on the other side of a sci-fi horror story. It also helps put into perspective why we aren’t usually in the killer’s boots, because if the creature isn’t limited by the narrative, its apparently quite easy for its carnage to become rote and any attempt to test it beyond its killer capabilities fails to put up much of a fight.
THE VERDICT: Carrion is all concept and not much follow-through. It wants to indulge the fantasy of monstrous carnage as a mass of murderous limbs and teeth, but after it’s set up all the visual elements and prey to pull off the idea, it struggles to provide the proper level of resistance to keep things interesting. Puzzles are simplistic and rarely ask much of the player and the fights aren’t that different, even the better equipped foes overcome with the same tricks that work in most fights. New abilities don’t serve to shake up the gameplay much, and it seems too much attention was put to setting up scenarios for you to be stealthy and indulge in an immersive attack without actually making that a requirement or rewarding such an approach. Carrion has a few control issues and backtracking problems, but most of its problem lies in the fact it gave you an amazing monster in an atmospheric world and can’t seem to challenge you in any meaningful way.
And so, I give Carrion for Xbox One…
A BAD rating. The art team for Carrion deserves high marks for giving this game everything it needs to succeed, but even if you only want to experience the visceral power of the playable monstrosity, the atmosphere can’t carry the experience on its back. By the time you’ve made it through the opening section you can have your fill of Carrion’s promise of a reverse horror fantasy, the game never really evolving the abilities, setpieces, or combat enough to keep the action thrilling. Carrion starts to become about bland puzzles, familiar fights, and backtracking that could have been easily removed. Offloading mass is done with such little grace that it feels like the team couldn’t make anything more fluid work, even though being able to freely tear yourself apart to shrink down as necessary would work fine enough without a red pool’s involvement. It’s contribution to puzzle and map design doesn’t feel like it justifies the method chosen and there are probably much better puzzles to be made from offloading it that wouldn’t need red pools or immediate downsizing access. The biggest problem would still remain though as you aren’t challenged enough either as a destructive beast or as a thinking organism, but it is at least a problem of imagination rather than engaging in too many things that feel outright bad to interact with.
Carrion’s artistic value comes from its visuals, animation, and of course the strong monster design that comes from an excellent execution of a near formless organic mass in motion. Varied backgrounds and reactive human prey can’t sustain the game for the many hours it lasts though, Carrion ending up too big to carry a concept it didn’t put enough concrete thought into. Reverse horror is not an idea that is fundamentally flawed, but Carrion shows its failings as it can’t conjure up proper resistance for something that is designed to always have the upper hand over its weaker opposition.