CARRION

This would be an amazing Modern Metroidvania where you are the horror that lurks in the shadows picking off the humans one by one or exploding into a room in a dervish of teeth and claws. And a mild mix of puzzles and story telling. But it lacks some serious QoL necessities like a functional saving system. Or a Map so you can get back to the areas you missed due to not having the right abilities yet. If they update id love to come back with more stars.

Carrion appears to be an incredible game, but unfortunately, I encountered significant issues that prevented me from playing it (core dump error). I tried launching it on Linux, but it simply wouldn’t work, even with Wine and changing os just to play this game is not reasonable. I reached out to the developers on their Discord, sharing error logs and details, none of the devs seemed to care. So I’ve decided to refund the game. I hope these issues are resolved in the future so that I can consider purchasing the game again.

Carrion: The most fun you'll ever have playing as a Lovecraftian Horror. The Good: Intuitive controls which will make efficient work of terrorizing and consuming hapless human fleshbags . Superb audio and visual design; smooth graphical animations and retro 16-bit visuals accompanied by sci-fi horroresque sound effects, ambiance, and soundtrack. Seriously the most fun you'll ever have playing as a frightening thing from another world. Bad: Unfortunately for the player the terror comes to a quick end – even with %100 completion this game takes less than 10 hours to finish. Ugly: The creature you play probably isn't going to be winning any beauty contests... it's not pretty being The Thing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8faq5amdK30

"Out of the box" the controls both on keyboard/mouse and controller are very uncomfortable, and I am not going to spend time tweaking something that should have been perfected and what the standards are for the movement present. Other than that annoyance, TOO MANY loading screens/transitions between levels without doing absolutely anything, my screen going black again, again, again and again-- and when you finally encounter enemies, in the reverse horror controlling a mass of flesh and tentacles, it takes the NPCs a handgun to deplete your biomass, requiring an absurd degree of dexterity and caution in what should be a more relaxing, immersive experience, which was made that much worse by the awkward controls on both the controller, and the controller in particular, as well as keyboard/mouse. I didn't and I just don't see myself enjoying the title, already, ten minutes in, and I'm not giving it a second chance, or any game for that matter, not since Cyberpunk 2077, going against my own judgement and people's advise to steer clear of it like fire.

What a sheer disappointment. You played and enjoyed the demo? Well, it doesn't get any better than that. It starts off good. You creep around, eat some folks, get some new skills which eventually open new paths and all that is pretty damn good for the first half an hour or so. You might even start to think that it might have some fairly decent Metroidvania vibes. Then it begins to get boring. You realsize that there are almost no puzzles, there's almost no backtracking, even some considerable Metroidvania spirit is gone. You just follow the one straight path that's possible to go. Push a button here, open the next door for the next path and so on ad nauseam. You'll end up just rushing from one objective to the next. You'll just play further, waiting for the game to get good again, to be that great experience you hoped it would be, what the demo teased to make you think what kind of game this is going to be. But it won't get there. You'll reach the end of what the demo gave you and than just abandon you for another 2 hours clicking through your ways. Only real choice you make is in with order you'll go and clean the rooms. Sometimes you'll might have to push more than one button to get to the next area, but it's only a question of which room you'll take on first, you'll go to all of them anyways. Well to be fair, there are some "upgrades" you can get. But most of them are on your way anyways, and if not, well it's not that big deal to get them, most notably you won't need them or they'd make any big difference. Oh well and than it's just *poof* and you finished the game before it even started. Gameplay has nothing more to offer than you'll see in the demo. Might get one or to "heavier" enemies but that's it. I really really want to love this game. It is such a great idea. And it worked very well in the demo and it has this awesome retro looks! But in the end that is not enough to finally give you more than this few minutes the demo had.