#CARRION PS4 MOVIE#
#CARRION PS4 PORTABLE#
#CARRION PS4 PC#

The trick is not to let them see you coming, with energy shields especially a real nuisance unless you can strike before they're triggered. This brittleness is an incentive to be cunning, holding up objects as shields or, later, possessing an unaware enemy with a stealthy tendril, but a lot of the time, you can make headway by erupting into view and thrashing around a bit. The monster isn't tough - it loses body mass rapidly when shot and is swiftly consumed by fire, obliging you to race back through the level to the nearest pool of water.

#CARRION PS4 PORTABLE#

In combat, its speed and shapelessness allow you to get the drop on soldiers armed with rifles, flamethrowers and portable energy shields, reaching down to grab them one by one or ramming into the group from an unguarded angle. It is unconcerned by things like stairs and ladders, though it's often inconvenienced by doors - many of the puzzles involve finding your way around to switches. It changes size to suit the space available, be it a multiple-floor warehouse or a sewer tunnel. It has the surreal agility of a computer cursor, tugging itself through the catacombs at terrible speed, latching automatically onto foreground and background. The monster is subject to real-time physics - after feeding, I tend to drape it across the geometry like a python digesting a herd of antelope - but it feels unnervingly weightless.

Perhaps in homage to this, Carrion's creators liken their pet to 'meatballs connected by some noodles', a stringy bundle of fanged orbs with canned sprite animations layered on top.

In Carpenter's movie, the creature effects consist partly of food: mayonnaise, creamed corn and microwaved bubble gum, washed down with a generous dollop of lube. But as games built around ability-gating go, Carrion is solidly wrought, and the monster is revolting enough to keep you locked-on when the puzzles threaten to bore. This straightforward campaign framework is the game's big letdown - it gives this avalanche of inchoate flesh a disappointingly human spine. Along the way you'll infest evenly spaced wall fissures to create spawn points, slowly corrupting the architecture till you can burst through a central door into another region. Unleashed upon an underground maze of ransacked temples, nuclear reactors, weapons factories and waste disposal sites, all of civilisation's sins packed into a single, winding ossuary, you must track down other vacuum tubes containing pieces of your flesh, gaining abilities with which to overcome hazards and obstacles in finest Metroidvania tradition. Any human you reel in is devoured in two writhing bites - unlike the Alien, the creature only has a jaw when it needs one - your body swelling and deforming as the victim's biomass becomes your own. Screams fill the air as you ricochet around the room, a squirming knot of tentacles snapping wetly in all directions, grabbing onto surfaces and bodies at random. A 2D pixelart game from the aptly titled Phobia Studio, it begins with you exploding from a vacuum tube deep in the bowels of a mysterious laboratory. It's to Carrion's great credit, then, that the monster it turns you into is so aggressively inhuman, though I'm not sure the game's wider design quite delivers on its abhorrence.

#CARRION PS4 PC#

Availability: Out today on Switch, PC and Xbox One.

You Are The Monster, goes the premise, but does that really mean anything beyond a squelchy skinjob, wrapped around the same old anthropocentric understanding of the world and what it means to act and thrive within it? Even the Alien, horror's apex killer, rarely seems that alien when you slip inside its head in Alien vs Predator, nimble and deadly yet reassuringly bipedal, a pack hunter with binocular vision and the usual appendages.

It's a pitfall many so-called 'reverse-horror' games tumble into.

#CARRION PS4 MOVIE#

A squirming body horror labyrinth whose mix of ability-gating and backtracking slightly cramps its matchless creature design.ĭiscussing the creature design in his gruesome 1982 adaptation of The Thing - a movie which, incidentally, opens with Kurt Russell losing his shit over a computer game - John Carpenter once observed that 'I didn't want to end up with a guy in a suit'.

Carrion ps4