Post-Game Game Post: CARRION
Metroidvania is a kludgy term, the very deliberate portmanteau of Metroid and Castlevania to describe games where you’re:
Running around an environment to acquire upgrades and fight enemies. Sometimes, there are bosses.
Using those upgrades to backtrack to new paths (ex: a red door that requires a flaming shot to open, or a barricade that can only be destroyed by a heavy bash)
Hunting down each and every path to fill out a map, occasionally with a completion percentage that goes past 100%.
In the last few years, there’s been a new crop of streamlined, smaller Metroidvanias that distill a 20-40 hour experience down to a much more manageable six to twelve. Weirdly enough, most of them are also published by Devolver Digital.
CARRION is the newest addition to this list, putting you in the fleshy appendages of a horrific, otherworldly aberration and setting you loose on an underground research facility. It’s brisk, engaging, and just long enough to not overstay its welcome.
The setup is very straightforward: enter a room, slink around, and devour every last bit of humanity within. Utilizing air ducts, ceiling vents, and the sheer force of your increasingly-titanic frame to accomplish these goals, CARRION’s immediate triumph is in just how good its basic act of movement is. The lithe tentacles of the Beast glide through the air, adhering to walls and victims alike in mesmerizing fashion. The levels of the research facility get increasingly labyrinthine as time goes on, and it feels like CARRION really needed a map of some sort, but bounding across these chambers in seconds never gets old. It’s sincerely one of the best animated playable characters I’ve controlled in years.
Everything about the first two-thirds of CARRION feels tailor made to keep your momentum high. Combat with gun-toting security officers? Fly across the ceiling, shooting a prehensile tentacle through them before you consume them. Did you take some damage from said combat, reducing you to a tiny crimson morsel of terror? You can routinely be assured that a gaggle of terrified, unarmed scientists and laborers are around the corner, waiting to fall into your cavernous collection of maws. Not entirely sure where to go next? The world is dotted with smart iconography to get you back on the right track, with bright green exit signs leading you forward and gleaming diamonds on the walls denoting optional upgrades.
As you grow and acquire a suite of mandatory upgrades - separating into a cluster of worms underwater to bypass certain grates, or possessing hapless researchers to flip switches - CARRION manages to both open up and buckle a little under its own weight. The Beast has three different sizes it can swap between, each with a discrete pair of abilities: the smallest deals in stealth, with limited invisibility and a trap shot web to disable drones or trigger out-of-reach switches, while the larger forms are far more aggressive. Most of the puzzle-solving involves swapping sizes, doing one thing, and then regaining your biomass to move on. The busywork of this change is mitigated a bit by frequent pools of water that let you shrink at will, but at a certain point it felt like an unnecessary step.
While the biggest form is an absolute juggernaut, by far the heaviest expression of “power fantasy” CARRION has, it’s also…kind of annoying to control? Small Beast is effortless and joyous to fling from wall to wall like a hellish goo gremlin, and Medium is a sweet spot of mobility and strength, but the back third of the game features plenty of tight corners and spaces that don’t lend itself to the bulk of the Large Beast. Coupled with the relative imprecision of how the Large Beast moves around, and it began to feel like I never quite knew where the “front” and “back” of my murderous spaghetti was, limply noodling around the same pipe curve without being able to actually get past it. It’s a minor concern, one that doesn’t detract from my overall enjoyment of the game, but it presents enough of an annoyance at times that it bears mentioning.
There are a handful of design decisions that keep CARRION from establishing itself as one of the all-time greats, but the main thrust of wreaking havoc on the denizens of this world is engaging enough to warrant a recommendation. It’s a game that understand how much it has to offer, paced in such a way that I was comfortable with what I’d gotten through. Had it gone on any longer than its nine-levels-and-an-overworld structure, the minor frustrations presented by Large Beast’s sometimes-shaky controls and scouring every room for the last collectible without any sort of map would’ve been much harder to sidestep.
As it stands, CARRION is an enjoyable, streamlined approach to Metroidvania conventions. When the core act of traversal is as satisfying as the Beast makes it, it’s hard to be overly disappointed.
CARRION is available on Xbox One, Steam, Game Pass for Xbox and PC, and Nintendo Switch.
Reviewed with a copy acquired through Game Pass for PC.
