Live your best marauding tentacle monster life

It was around three hours into Carrion, as my oozing, formless tentacle monster munched on a hapless scientist’s lower half, when I stopped, looked around, and thought: “Where the hell am I?”

Carrion is an exceptionally cool idea for a video game. You play as the escaped research specimen in a heavily locked down lab. The humans who work there want you dead or contained, and you want to get out in one piece while snacking on as many people as you can in the process.

Your avatar in this world is a wriggling mass of blood-red tentacles, toothy open mouths, and dark-rimmed eyes. It moves in a roiling, oozing dance, as long, spindly limbs fan out in whatever direction you choose, latching onto walls, floors, and ceilings as they pull the rest of your jumbled mass along. Those grasping tentacles whip through the air audibly, too, their “thwips” cutting through the dark orchestral score in a steady beat.

You feel like a menacing presence in Carrion. A 2D view of the world serves up each room as a cross-section, revealing ducts, water lines, and other secret paths for you to slither through. Adding to the sense of menace is the regular presence of whimpering and fleeing humans, fruitlessly searching for a place to hide – nowhere is safe.

When you do eventually burst out into the light of a busy room, chaos ensues. Lab-coated and hazmat-suited researchers run off screaming to cower in corners as guards send bullets and gouts of flames hurtling your way. None of it slows your advance, a violent churn of tentacles and snapping teeth.

All of which is to say: Carrion nails it on the feel front. Phobia Game Studio’s spin on a “reverse-horror” adventure, in its most gloriously, chaotically violent moments, captures the blood-soaked tension release moments of Hollywood classics like Alien and The Thing. 

I just wish it didn’t get in its own way quite so much.

For all the power you wield as an escaped research specimen-slash-tentacle monster, finding your way around is a constant struggle. It makes sense that there’s no in-game map you can call on, given what you’re playing as. But players hoping for some kind of visual guide to help them get around are out of luck.

Your monster can do this simple sonar trick when you pull your controller’s left trigger, with rippling lines at the edges of the screen giving you a sense of the where you’ll find nearby save points, which double in most cases as the key to unlocking new areas of the facility. But the sonar just as easily points you back to places you’ve already been, and you have no way of knowing which you’re heading toward until you get there (or recognize the path you’re taking).

There are also glowing green signs in each part of the facility that point toward exit doors leading to the next area. But they’re too sparse in number, tending to only appear once you’re close to said door. And since most exits don’t unlock until you find and access a series of nearby save points, those signs aren’t as helpful as they could be.

That means you’re relying most of the time on what you remember from each location. An easy enough feat early on, when the world you have access to is smaller. But after play sessions spread out over a period of days, it’s easy to lose the script on where you were, where you are, and where you’re headed, and Carrion doesn’t do enough to help you get situated.

Carrion is an exceptionally cool idea for a video game.

The research facility is built like a maze, with shortcuts and looping pathways that, over time, connect earlier areas with later ones in multiple spots. It’s easy to find yourself backtracking without even realizing it – at least not until you’re deep enough into the older area to have forgotten the way back.

Part of the problem, too, is that threats don’t respawn once you’ve dealt with them. And even worse than that: Many of the pathways and shortcuts through the facility are one-way trips. Too easily, you can wander a short distance from where you know you should be and suddenly end up in an earlier location with no clear route back. 

In my case, these factors all contributed to multiple frustrating stretches where I wandered around for tens of minutes – and multiple hours, at one point – in search of the next thing to do. It became especially aggravating when a path forward turned out to be hidden by the busy environments. 

Carrion is a beautiful game in all its lo-fi glory. It plays with lighting and color to set a mood, and it does so effectively. But the level of detail in each space doesn’t always play well with the chunky pixel art. So it’s easy to miss a pipe you need to slide through or underwater save point, especially with your writhing tentacle monster taking up so much of the screen. Finding those missed paths later are when Carrion falters the hardest, especially when it’s a spot you’ve circled past multiple times.

That sense of aggravation is more disappointing than anything because of how much Carrion still gets right. As I already said, the feel is spot-on. But it’s not just that. The action-puzzle mechanics at the heart of what Phobia built turn out to be the perfect platform for capturing the overall vibe.

Each section of the research facility serves up an escalating assortment of threats, from gun-toting humans to beefy mechs and remote-controlled drones. You deal with many of these threats by grabbing them with your tentacles and either eating them (for organic threats) or smashing them against walls until they’re broken.

As you proceed, however, you come across sealed containers that you can shatter to unlock new powers, like cloaking or the ability to forcefully shoot out a cluster of stabby tendrils. These unlocks make you more lethal, but beyond that they’re also essential for solving puzzles.

The early cloaking ability, for example, is necessary for bypassing a security system that closes and locks a door once you trip the laser wire it’s attached to. The stabby tendrils you get later, on the other hand, can rip out certain walls. Each item in your growing toolbox opens up more of the world, in one way or another.

Different abilities are also tied to your creature’s size. As you make progress (and feed on hapless scientists), your tentacle monster takes on new, larger forms. That cloaking ability is only for the smallest form, whereas the stabby tendrils are a feature of the medium-sized form. Your creature’s size dictates its health, and it shrinks as you take damage. But there are also special pools of goo where you can shed parts of yourself, and they’re usually situated near puzzles that depend on multiple abilities.

Being able to reduce your size is also helpful because of some control quirks that come up later on, after you’ve unlocked the largest form. Slipping into narrow openings and cutting sharp turns isn’t easy for an entity with no defined shape, and so the game doesn’t always interpret your thumbstick movements correctly. But you can get around that by dropping some pounds in a goo pool.

In the end, I found Carrion to be an enormously frustrating experience. The pieces are there for an amazing game. I had some incredible moments while playing, and would even go as far as recommending this as a worthwhile use of a more patient player’s time, despite the issues.

Those issues are real, though. The fearsome, menacing monster that is the star of Carrion depends on your sense of direction to get around. And too often, the game just doesn’t equip you to do that effectively. For all the control you’re given over the build-up of tension and its release into unrestrained chaos, the biggest struggle you’ll likely face again and again in Carrion is simply figuring out where the hell you are.

Carrion comes to PC, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox One on July 23.