Carrion, Or, the Sheer Delight of Consuming Everything
Screenshot from playthrough by Indie JamesSome genius must have been watching John Carpenter’s The Thing and, in a moment of sheer brilliance befitting their intellect thought, “I wonder what it would be like if the story was reversed and we watched the movie from the Thing’s point of view.” I suspect then their equally brilliant friend who was sitting on the couch beside them and totally hogging the popcorn followed this thought with, “Nah bro, what if you could PLAY as the Thing.” Whoever these geniuses were, their ideas likely died with them because somebody else already had the thought and produced the videogame Carrion.
And in case anyone was curious, the guy hogging the popcorn was me.
It was cheddar corn, and I apologize for nothing.
As of this writing I have, for the first time in my life, completed building a personal computer(PC) and I’ve already become obsessed with it. This is partly just satisfaction with having assembled the beautiful machine myself (with a LOT of guidance from my friend Daniel who helped me find the right parts (Thanks again man!)) and watching a lot of videos on YouTube, specifically Gamer’s Nexus(You f*@#$%g rock Steve). I know from firsthand testimony and months of internet research that building PC’s has become dramatically easier than it was 15 to 20 years ago when building a computer involved soldering chips to motherboards. Nowadays building a computer is akin to assembling a very large and expensive Lego set.
Also, there’s a LOT of options for RGB lighting.
I’m proud of myself for following my own initiative and actually accomplishing this task. And as much as that satisfaction explains my obsession, it makes sense to point out that the reason I assembled the machine in the first place was to play videogames. I’ve rediscovered the joy of possessing a Steam account, and one of the best parts is simply looking through the store and looking at all the potential games to play. Much like perusing the VHS tapes at my hometown’s Hastings before the company filed chapter 11, scrolling through Steam's sales and categories section is like grocery shopping: it’s a pleasant activity that allows me to see what I could consume and enjoy before making a purchase.
Though there’s a lot more pornography, excuse me, visual novels, to sift through than I remember.
Carrion looked like a lot of other low budget indie horror games from afar. That’s not a strike against it for the record. I love horror videogames, and I love the renaissance of indie creators who have embraced the 32-bit, pixel aesthetic. I’m just trying to say that there’s a large number of them, so large in fact that it’s easy to become inured to their sheer volume. Honestly, I was prepared to skip past it and see if Little Nightmares II had gone on sale yet. Curiosity got the better of me and after watching the video trailer for the game I bought it, laughing at the sheer visual absurdity. And when I played it a few nights later while my girlfriend sat in my office with me, I regularly interrupted her doom scrolling to show her my monster eating one scientist after another.
On the note of eating, let’s talk about verbs.
Carrion is a game with multiple verbs, the main ones being: explore, fight, and eat. There are almost certainly a few others I’m leaving out, but the main gameplay encompasses these three.
The game is set in some sort of scientific research facility where a group of scientists have discovered and subsequently experimented on a creature that is, simply put, alien. The protagonist of Carrion is an unnamed alien creature that is the embodiment of a xeno-creature, some organism that is completely different from a human organism; it’s a red blob of tentacles and multiple mouths lined with sharp teeth. When the player first begins the alien is just a minuscule blob that escapes a glass containment unit and must explore the base through tunnels, pipes, drainways, and doors. After a few seconds they will encounter the first human being, who is unarmed, and they then have the choice to either find a way around them, or else grab them and pull them into the creature’s hungry mouth.
Thus far, I always chose the latter option.
Technically it is possible to navigate the various corridors, hallways, laboratories, and open areas without killing the humans occupying these spaces, at least in the early areas of the game. And that choice does allow the player to play it as a role playing game (rpg). Players who think or believe that their alien is simply a confused and frightened monster have the choice to hide and explore the levels, content to let these scientists be. This leads to the verb “explore,” and Carrion provides plenty of options for that.
Carrion’s levels are beautiful, which is another lovely reminder that pixelated graphics can still provide excellent gaming experiences and have plenty of potential for aspiring videogame designers. Even levels that are nothing but rooms of rusted metal and decaying brick allow the player to get lost in the world of Carrion, and hiding in small vents and sneaking past npcs can be fun.
Eventually, however, the player will encounter humans armed with guns, electric shields, flame-throwers, and even mech-suits armed with chain guns.
And this is where the verb “to eat” comes into play.
From the second I booted up Carrion I assumed the rpg position of The Thing, which is to say, I adopted the playstyle that I was a creature dedicated to finding any and all living organisms and eating them. I chose this path because that was what the trailer suggested, and also because it made the most sense. My position was, I’m a lovecraftian “other” that’s been experimented on by a group of scientists (who clearly never watched science fiction movies) so let’s eat everything and everyone I can find.
And I wanna make this clear, I have enjoyed every second of this playthrough.
Screenshot from playthrough by Indie JamesBursting through doorways like a mass of possessed spaghetti and grabbing any and all screaming humans before flinging them into one of my creature’s many mouths is a fluid masterstroke of physics. Players don’t just grab enemy npcs (or the various levers scattered throughout the research facility), they have to aim a tentacle in their direction and then release the potential energy. It’s no small thing to say that Carrion’s control mechanics feel like navigating a fleshy, ravenous slinky that wants to devour everything. Once an npc is grabbed, I shift the joystick back towards my alien avatar and they are not slowly dragged back to me, rather, they are whipped back at a violent speed that dances between horrific and, dare I say, vaudevillian. Jettisoning enemies across a room, or slamming them up and down against the walls of the facility is a way to quickly gain control of a space, as well as engage in a little casual sadism. The point is, there’s a tactile pleasure to grabbing objects in Carrion, and this only increases when they encounter their first armed opponent.
Some human npcs will be armed with guns and flamethrowers, and it’s here that the verb “to eat” becomes second to the verb “to hide.”
If Carrion was simply relegated to crawling through vents and eating scientists the game would become boring quickly, but the developers at Phobia Game Studio understood that the ferocity of their protagonist should be met with some sort of actual defense. At some point, as the tentacled mass of red spaghetti reaches a new room, it will encounter a human holding a small gray rectangular mass of pixels in its hand, and the first pop will announce that it is no longer in complete control. Sometimes these enemies will also have shields that will shock me allowing them to fire off more rounds while my biomass begins to melt with each blast. Some of these enemies will have machine guns, or flamethrowers, and at some point they will even be protected by mech suits. In rooms like these there will always be vents or secondary chambers where I can escape battle, hide, and reconfigure how best to make it through this space.
This would be the end of the movie, typically, but this isn’t a movie.
This is a videogame. And I came to play.
Screenshot from playthrough by Indie JamesThe hiding, and by implication sneaking section of Carrion offer players more than just an rpg element, they also become real-time-strategy(rts) sections where I the player have to assess the situation, determine what my strengths and weaknesses are in the fight of this particular room, and ultimately make a decision on how to proceed. Having spent much of my late puberty playing Assassin’s Creed games, I was familiar enough with hiding until I saw a perfect opportunity to strike, but I will admit, sometimes it’s just fun charging an enemy and overcoming them through sheer power.
Fighting enemies, or, really, sneaking around enemies to gain an advantage prevents the game from becoming monotonous, and it only further enhances the narrative of the game, and, most important, it makes the act of eating them feel like the triumph that it eventually is.
Killing enemies, or at least human enemies since there are various drones in the facility, is as much a visual spectacle as it is ludic one. Carrion is a horror game and devouring enemy npcs is varied since some are armored and others are just scientists who, at the time the alien’s escape, were doing their job and most likely debating what to eat for dinner that night unaware that they’ll never get a chance to eat that bowl of leftover macaroni and cheese. Grabbing a normal npc and dragging them to the creature’s toothy maw is a gory spectacle complete with audio of the flesh ripping and tearing (until it’s done).
Looking at the list of verbs I’ve assembled thus far I have: to eat, to fight, to hide, to strategize, and to explore. This last verb forces me to pause and consider what Carrion actually is as a videogame.
Carrion is a horror videogame.
It’s a role-playing videogame.
It’s a real-time-strategy videogame.
It’s a survival videogame.
And, finally, it’s a Metroidvania.
Screenshot from playthrough by Indie JamesI recognise my regular reader already knows what this term is, or else they followed the hyperlink to Wikipedia and read a more than satisfactory explanation for what that term is. But to quote the owner of my local comic-book shop, “Every comic book is somebody’s first comic book,” and every essay is somebody’s first essay.
So let’s talk about Metroidvanias and how they work.
Researching for this essay I was able to find an article published on the website VentureBeat published in 2010 by a writer referred to as bitmob. The essay is titled, Metroidvania: Super Metroid and the Definition of a Genre, and while it was written primarily about the videogame Super Metroid for SNES, the focus of the essay was to deconstruct the genre of Metroidvania videogames. In a later portion of the essay bitmob writes:
But how do you define the genre? Being nonlinear can’t be all that's to it. For this, we can look to Super Metroid. The game is nonlinear at a glance, but once you're finished playing it, you realize that the developer really intends for you to take a specific line through the game. You can explore everywhere you can, but if you don't have certain abilities yet, some areas are locked off. The word “locked” is apt, as initially impassible areas act as locked doors that require keys. Think Doom and its cardkeys but built into the environment. The difference is that the abilities that act as keys are a whole lot more interesting that actual keys in that they impart a new gameplay mechanic, which means interesting level design that expands ever outward. The key abilities mark the waypoints
If this was all there was to it, though, it wouldn’t feel very open. What makes you buy into the nonlinear hype is how it encourages you to explore. Namely, it hides secrets both along the main path and in divergent paths. Some of these secrets are even hidden behind the “environmental doors”, forcing you to use your abilities in new ways. You can’t help but explore every nook and cranny as you progress. This is the basic idea behind a good Metroidvania: The focus of a linear game with the exploration of a nonlinear one.
There are numerous obstacles in Carrion that are not just “some dude with a gun.” In many locations throughout the research facility there are out of reach switches, access points, and locked doors that cannot be passed simply by flinging the creature's weight or tentacles against it. At some point the ever escalating biomass of the alien is irrelevant when trying to sneak past motion-sensor lasers or swim through tight spots. Any seasoned player of videogames immediately recognises this obstacle and concludes, “Oh, I need a thing for this.” What that “thing” will be, in the case of Carrion, are genes which have been spliced out of the original host’s DNA and collected in various tanks scattered throughout the facility. After breaking these open, and ingesting these genes, the creature has gained new abilities. Where before I could only slink about, now I can shoot webs, now I can turn into a host of worms in water, now I can turn invisible to get past lasers.
This also makes it easier to kill and eat people.
Carrion’s Metroidvania is effective because acquiring these mutations isn’t just so that playing the game is easier. Each gene builds the body of this creature back to its original strength, and also allows the player a chance to learn more and more about the scientists who discovered it, and how they’ve gone about trying to control and study this creature. It’s up to the player to decide then, as they reacquire the portions of their body back whether these people deserve sympathy, or whether they’re destined for the toothy maw.
All of this is an overly, and unnecessarily, long way of saying that Carrion is one of the best videogames I’ve ever played.
The game just rocks dude.
Screenshot from playthrough by Indie JamesIt knows what it is, and what it’s about, and playing it was a novel experience because, having played enough triple-A games I know that had this game been released by a major videogame production company there would have been more to the game, but none of it towards the elements I’ve already described in full. Carrion’s simplicity is arguably its greatest asset because the player doesn’t need cinematics, dramatic soundtracks, extensive backstory, or exposition about the scientists and who they are. Phobia Game Studio tapped into that beautiful principle that can be felt in games like Pac-Man, Doom, Super Mario, Minecraft, and Civilization. And if I may repeat that oft quoted, legendary, and quasi-mythic statement made by the designer of that last videogame, “A game should be a series of interesting choices.”
Playing Carrion is a series of interesting choices because each decision leads to a dramatic reaction that leads to another interesting choice, and even when these decisions have led to my alien dying in a hail of gunfire, there’s pure joy knowing that I get to try again and see if I can make a better choice.
And that choice will almost certainly involve eating something, or someone.
Joshua “Jammer” Smith
8.19.2024
All the photos apart from the cover art were taken as screenshots from the published YouTube play through by the YouTuber Indie James. Please go to their Chanel and give them a like and follow because their channel rules and they deserve it.
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