Carrion Preview

Centering around a giant tentacle monster, Carrion puts you into the shoes of the enemy, who’s job it is to break out of the science facility we humans imprisoned him in and back into his natural habitat … whereever. Actually, it’s just our desire to kill as many of those pesky humans and take revenge on them.

To do so, Carrion aimed for a metroidvania design scheme with a few twists. Many puzzles and areas require the monster to either shrink or grow in size, done by either “storing” or extracting mass from special clusters. So, if a vent is too tiny, it’s necessary to look around for said clusters to shrink in sizes, with around 3 truly different ones playing a role in these sections. It’s a unqiue idea I certainly enjoyed.

Another big part is combat and the special abilities as well as interaction puzzles. A critical mechanic is the ability to grab things and people with one tentacle and either pull, push or drag them into your mouth. Obviously this is essential to eat other armed lifeformes and assert your dominance over them by simply crushing their bones and devouring them. It’s somewhere between challenging in a tactical way, as you have to stay calm yet have surprisingly limited life, and quite overcrowded as the Carrion monster has dozens of tentacles and only one, that slightly lights up, is actually controllable on button press, which confused me quite a few times.

Visually too, Carrion is a feast for the eyes, mainly because of its amazingly well animated monster. Consisting of mainly tentacles it moves by automaticaly hooking its tentacles onto walls and other structures to pull itself forward, like every good nightmare thing. The way all of them move, hook and actually manage to find the best spot to hook onto is a huge part of why this monster feels so unbelievably real, scary and frightening, yet effortless to control. It’s an enchanting animation cycle, on top of the great pixel art and other animations as well as truly gory soundtrack and sounds.

Carrion will release 2020 for PC and consoles