4/5 ★ – kariyanine's review of CARRION.

I love horror. I love the tension that builds up and the release from a jump scare, kill, or escape. It’s all a ton of fun for me. But horror is almost always exclusively told from the perspective of the victims. Rarely do we see how the killer or monster goes about creating that terror and with good reason, it’s the fear of the unknown that horror plays so well off of and knowing too much about the antagonist diminishes the tension. But what if we did get a horror story from the reverse side? Carrion attempts to do this and for the most part succeeds. In Carrion, you play as a deadly, bio-organism. You were captured and held in a secret lab, with all sorts of untold experiments being done to you until you break out and deliver your gory revenge on the puny humans as you attempt to escape the facility. On the surface, Carrion seems like a Metroid type exploration game due to its sprawling and interlocking map. But it’s not really a Metroid type game, instead each new area is more of a puzzle that needs to be completed to progress forward, backtracking can actually get you turned around quite badly. After all, you are a bio-organism made up of fleshy tentacles and sharp teeth so you don’t really have a pocket to store a map. The game actually has signposts that will tell you how to progress but if you don’t notice them early on, you could spend a good portion of the game stumbling around. Fortunately, even if you are stumbling around, controlling the monster feels good. It glides smoothly across surfaces and it is super satisfying to fling out your tentacles to grab your prey and bring them to your many mouths to feed. And you’ll feed a lot. Eating humans replenishes your health and as you come across the more aggressive enemies in the game (machine guns, flamethrowers, mechs), you’ll be chowing down on the defenseless scientists as you come across them. Progressing through the game, you’ll come across more of your body mass which can be added to make you into a giant killing machine. As you gain mass, you’ll also gain evolutions and new skills. However, you will also lose the skills of your smaller self. This sets up interesting areas where you can add (or subtract) from yourself as you figure out the environment puzzles to progress. And everything in the game is a puzzle to be solved. Combat will require you to find ways to approach enemies and surprise and disable them or strike quickly to do some damage from the shadows before retreating to a different section via an air duct or water passage. And the environment will require you to combine different skills to get in position to flip switches to open new areas. The game is excellent across the board. It looks great and sounds even better. There is just enough detail on everything that you can feel the horror you are inflicting as you grab a clerk from the bathroom stall and chomp down on his tender and tasty flesh. And the sound is fantastic as the humans will react to hearing you in the ducts or to your roar before you pounce (there is a dedicated roar button). And the ending, oh boy that ending is so good.