Carrion Got Me Thinking about being the bad guy.

Everyone likes to be the hero, to overpower the all-powerful with the power of hope and virtuous grit. To rescue the princess. To save the day. Sure, you might have to murder heaps upon heaps of conscript mercenaries on the path to saving said day, but it’s all in the name of morality . . . right? Right. See, when we’re talking about video games, it’s not very fun to stew on the deeper psychological implications of a main character’s killing spree. Just take out the bad guys, they deserve it. But what if your targets objectively don’t deserve it? What if the justification of saving the day was no longer a factor, and every “enemy” expunged from the face of the earth could make a great case for their right to live? Would you still be willing to mow them down, embracing a monstrous power-fantasy?

We don’t often get put into the shoes of the villain. It’s difficult to market such a thing, just like delivering an unhappy ending is usually a big no-no in Hollywood. Villains like Handsome Jack may steal the show, garnering ironic love from fans, though a caveat is usually included. The same caveat. The heroes always win. It doesn’t matter if they’re fractionally as interesting as their adversaries, so long as they’re the good guys!

I’m sure in most of our Infamous canons, Cole McGrath shoots blue lightning, even though firing crimson bolts from his corrupted hands, fingers bent like the legs of an electrical arachnid, made for devilish good fun. But at one point or another, there comes the crash. The weight of the guilt on our shoulders becomes too much to bear and we must purify ourselves with a good-guy playthrough. Well, you can forget about that possibility in Carrion.

Carrion is a 2020, 2D subversion of survival horror developed by Phobia Game Studio, a small dev team with a passion for old school sci-fi, heavy on the gore. Who’s the protagonist of their game? I was hoping you’d ask! In Carrion, you play as a ball of soggy spaghetti that your aunt thawed out from the freezer. You’ll be in trouble if you don’t eat it. Or maybe it’s more like a series of mouths that can stretch their gums out like spiderwebs and stick to the walls. Yeah, that’s it. Technically speaking, you’re an alien lifeform breaking free from captivity, capable of infesting whole space colonies with the oozing stain of your strange existence. Well, you could also be a demon, or even an entirely artificial, albeit repulsive, form of synthetic life. The jury is still out on that. Know what else is out? You. The monster, whatever you are. A sopping wet mound of mashing teeth the consistency of ground beef that your aunt thawed out from the freezer. Seriously, we can’t eat this again.

The story of Carrion is told via its gameplay, including a few brief flashback sequences. I mostly made up my own story, inspired by the game’s grotesque lead. I imagined that this was the creature from John Carpenter’s The Thing, captured sometime after the incinerated camp was discovered with its cadaverous crew, frozen stiff amid the icy fallout. I directed my own sequel, letting this thing from another world run, or sloppily slide and roll, all throughout the research lab it’s been contained within, earning an opportunity for sanguine revenge on the relentless performers of endless experimentation.

In that case, I gave the creature a sympathetic edge. No one wants to be a prisoner. I’d be pissed too . . . but there is no evidence that this creature wasn’t deliberately vile, imperial, immediately harmful, or merciless towards our own species first. And considering the panicked shrieks of retreating humans who are torn to shreds and combed over for the best bites, this creature does appear quite cruel. At one point, I killed a man who was seated on the toilet, doing and minding his own business. That’s pure evil.

Being the bad guy has its perks. A sludgy, writhing wig for a cannibal clown could never be marketed as the hero. In Carrion, the outwardly ugly nature of the villain contributes directly to the game’s excellent controls. Being a big fat, bloody ball of goop allows for an inventive way to get around. Red tendons of blood tissue cling to the cold steel walls of the lab as the creature moves, allowing for swift traversal in all directions. It can take only seconds to clear large parts of the map as probing tentacles latch onto their every chance of creating momentum. It was refreshing to do away with the typical 2D platform-to-platform progression in favor of seamlessly slinking and skulking from the walls to the ceiling, darting in and out of harm’s way by automatically shrinking into tight spaces and spreading back out for fast retreats or blitzes.

Players are also given direct control over a primary limb that lies dormant as another fold in the creature’s beanbag body when it’s not being used. If it is being used, then you’re probably stuck behind a metal door that needs to be ripped from its hinges. Or maybe you’re trying to tug on a switch that’ll unlock the door up ahead. The only other thing I can think of is that you just might be yanking researchers and security guards by their ankles and then smashing their skeletal frames to fragments with repeated slams against the grated floor. . .

Yes, it’s fun to carry on forcing innocent laboratory employees to make the last tragic choice they ever will: to scream or not? Most do. I confess that I may have chuckled a bit on the couch when some of those screams were cut short by slamming a poor schmuck into the ground, but that’s where much of Carrion’s entertainment is found. The creature is a force to be reckoned with, a living nightmare that happens to be very hungry for human flesh. When’s the last time you got to barge into a room full of people and eat them all as they scramble for some way out, some means of retaliation that rarely compares to your malevolent might? Come on, live a little. Bask in the screams. Pop these supercilious scientists into one of your many mouths like chicken nuggets.

Carrion is more than just a savagery simulator. The creature must pull off quite the operation to exit captivity. A hub world includes entrances to several different sections of the lab, where new upgrades and abilities can be unlocked. In metroidvania fashion, these areas can be later revisited to access previously cordoned rooms containing improvements to the mushy mutant’s abilities. As you navigate through each area of the vast, semi-subterranean lab, you’ll encounter laughably poor defenses in the form of peashooter pistols wielded by minimally trained researchers who don’t know whether to fire or run into the bathroom stall (that won’t save them). However, your victims’ defense tactics grow sharper as guards equipped with assault rifles and supercharged shields threaten to melt your health, as well as mechs mounted with blistering cannons. 

Health melted is biomass lost, meaning as the creature takes damage, it also loses its size. There are three color-coordinated tiers to the creature’s biomass. You’ll begin only with a green bar consisting of five nodes, indicating how close the creature is to either dying or upgrading itself to the yellow bar (once it’s unlocked), which also includes another five nodes to fill (by eating people) before reaching the red bar. The available health and functionality of the creature will change accordingly. Some abilities are strictly relegated to a certain amount of mass, such as a swift charge attack that can clear an entire level of enemies in one bloody blur (yellow), or a multi-limb grab-attack that can tear mechs apart with brute force (red). Each ability offers unique approaches to combat while also maintaining practical utility for navigational roadblocks.

If you’ve become inflated to a mountain of meat for the purpose of unwedging a large metal cork out of the rockface with your aforementioned grab ability, then entered the next one where less mass is required to reach a switch, you won’t have to subject yourself to a barrage of bullets in order to shrink back down to the appropriate size. Instead, the creature can leave chunks of its biomass floating in shallow deposits of water found throughout each map. These blood buoys split from your body like multiplying cells, bobbing below the surface and waiting to be reclaimed when the obstacle is cleared. Yes, you essentially eat yourself in this game. While I’ve never seen a health system intertwined with action gameplay in such a way, the neat concept can become somewhat tedious when the rather obvious solutions to challenged progression result in plopping back and forth to shed and consume your own biomass in turn, though the fantastically smooth 2D movement remains a pacifier against any major annoyances.

Phobia Game Studio chose to deliver all the way through on the promise of becoming the unstoppable beast that you’d typically be tasked with fighting against, like Dutch versus the Predator or, to match my own head-canon, MacReady versus The Thing. The developers never severely neuter the creature for the sake of a difficulty spike. Sure, you’ll encounter a few tricky layouts that force you to think quick on your, um, beefy ripples(?), but nothing that flips the fear fully back around. This is a good thing. That kind of inversion may serve as a big payoff in, say, Aliens, when Ripley has finally had enough of the queen’s BS and scorches her eggs in a long running act of vengeance against the perfect organisms, but that’s because Ripley is the main character, a vessel for viewers to place themselves within. Her pushback is our pushback. Her cathartic pull of the trigger, our cathartic pull of the trigger. In Carrion, there are no heroes who can eventually stand up to their slimy stalker, which allows spreading devastating carnage to feel so liberatingly delightful. There is no Trish to give Cole a lump in his throat after he’s made a particularly selfish or negligent decision in Empire City. There are no innocent-looking little girls who express their pain as we painstakingly draw out as much of their ADAM as we can, making us question just how greedy we’ve become in the shadows of Rapture. Sure, there are always the terrified yelps of the scientists being killed, but the creature in Carrion is so unbothered and brutal throughout that the whole experience retains an edge of dark humor.

While playing Carrion, I found myself more captured by the oddity of my experience than I anticipated. I spent a few days clearing one or two zones, then eagerly coming back the next day to do it again, grinning as I dashed bodies against the walls like a Pitbull violently shaking their tug-o-war rope. The game only took about 6 hours to fully complete, but I don’t regret one minute of that time (except maybe when I got lost at the very end for, like, 15 minutes). Carrion is a prime example of how embodying the bad guy once in a blue moon can serve as a sort of cheat day for us typical heroes. In other words, it’s fun to kill hundreds of people as a giant monster without any added incentives. I mean, you can’t blame a monster doing monster things, it’s only natural. What else is there to do? Settle down and get married? Aw, maybe all our little carrion creature needed was a carrion companion. . .

This is a quick side note to the post. I’ve been writing this blog for a couple of years now, flying way under the radar with the simple objective of sharing my opinions about the video games I love to play and discover (and the occasional titles I loathe). I have no need to pursue sponsors or any social media presence. Not because it makes me cool to say that, but because I mostly write this blog to keep myself happy by continuing to engage with the fun side of life, amid all the craziness. However, I do have a few subscribers, and I also receive a few views here and there. So, to anyone reading, I’d like to mention how awesome I think it is that you’re willing to dip into my brain and celebrate games on this site. Thank you to everyone and anyone who stops by, even for a quick look. Despite  not ever expecting very much attention, it still means a lot whenever I get a new notification, letting me know someone enjoyed the material. Life is becoming busier and busier. My posts are spacing out. But I will do my best to keep things running around here, even if I have to pull a few highly irresponsible all-nighters in the process. Again, thank you and I hope I can provide some quality entertainment and/or insight to someone’s day. Never stop gaming!  – Jayemg.