CARRION

The game is rather short, but is still nice.

It's a really cool concept. Play as an alien biomass and make your way through metroid-esque levels and grow into a super monster eventually. Moving around is fun, sound design and effects are great, and it feels fairly polished. Only thing I don't like is no map system to keep track of where you are and have been, some of the backtracking is annoying and some of the puzzles can be a bit headscratching which forced me to go to a walkthrough video. If you get stuck just use your roar to find out where to merge next and go in that general direction. Hope there is a sequel someday.

The linux version doesn't launch due to a requirement of an old libssl version to be installed on the OS that doesn't come with the game. That itself is already very disappointing and was the main reason I've refunded this game. I was able to play the windows version on linux through wine, and it was a really fun experience at the beginning. Solving the puzzles and unlocking new abilities along the playthrought gave it a nice sense of progression and variability in the first half of it. But on the final half, things got REALLY repetitive and boring, to the point that I just didn't want to play the game anymore, not even to find out what would happen in the end story-wise. Alongside it, the black loading screens between areas in the second half became PAINFULLY long. In this game, we have to move from one area to another a lot of times, so it became something like 10 or 15 seconds of waiting for 30 or 45 seconds of gameplay. This made the game stressful, mainly at the parts where I made a mistake on a puzzle or wasn't able to survive a battle and had to go through a hole bunch of areas, waiting at least 10 seconds between them just to get to the point where I already was. This game has a really innovative concept and mechanics, beautiful graphics, nice level design, good soundtrack and an interesting story background. But the lack of support, rapid gameplay core saturation and unpolished execution were the reasons that made me not be able to love it, very unfortunately.

Lost my save of about 2 hours. No cloud save, either. Luckily this game is short enough that I can easily come back to it, and it's a style of game I really like. Backtracking is a bit hampered by the lack of map, resulting in moments of aimless wandering. Combat is designed to really make you feel like a ruthless horror monster, but you can get killed as quickly as you kill if you're not careful when you need to be.

The entity you play as really doesn't face much oppossition for large swathes of the game, so your primary antagonist will be puzzles. This is not a problem, as the puzzles are based on the entity's skillset which changes based on how many helpless people it has consumed. Changing the size of your entity through eating and discarding bodymass switches up your skillset which means even small puzzles might mean threading the needle of when and where to use your abilities such as throwing spide webs and using harpoons. However, the game does pull a few punches, presumably to not be frustrating, and some puzzles feel a little simple when the mechanics seem to allow for much more. But they do make you feel clever when you complete them, and they are all stepping stones to later and more complicated challenges. Other than that the controls are very satisfying for the first half of the game. Your entity being small or medium, you can use a gamepad for comfortable navigation; or if you are using a mouse you can do some very subtle manipulation. I personally enjoyed rattling doors to lure in victims, then gently opening them and pulling the unfortunate soul into the maw. However once the game reaches its endgame your bodysize is simply so large and so drawn-out you can and will get stuck frequently between objects. A later mechanic of avoiding bombs can be very frustrating when your tail is still in danger but you can not see it because your head is a screen away. However, aside from this the game handles smooth and goes by at a quick pace. The final mission gives you multiple ways to approach the threats that prevent your ultimate victory, and this is quite frankly great. I wish there were more of these segments thrown in here and there to give the player some creative mayhem inbetween all the puzzles. A bit short, quite fun, atmospheric, and with a little 'The Thing' twist at the end to give you a frighten. Quite fun.