Last week you might recall that I broke my streak of endless explormers on this feature by playing Tangle Tower, a delightful whodunnit adventure game, so I want to assure all those unsettled by this recent development that we are fully back into exploring big maps for traversal abilities with this week's game Carrion from Phobia Game Studio. I know, it was a scary and uncertain time on Indie Explormer of the Week but now the healing can finally start. Carrion's a bit unusual as far as this genre is concerned. Most of that is due to being an enormous amorphous blob of tendrils and teeth that very much has a bone to pick with humanity and will express that displeasure by picking their bones of all their tasty flesh. Its other idiosyncrasies are of course tangentially related to the above, in as far as what your immediate goals are and how you traverse the underground laboratory complex that you woke up in.

Carrion feels like an evolution of that old DrinkBox Studios game Tales from Space: Mutant Blobs Attack, with a similar pitch (albeit in a somewhat more somber tone) of an unstoppable B-movie monster run amok on our suddenly quite vulnerable-seeming species, in that the game regularly takes advantage of your flexible form to enter any sort of vent or small passageway your meaty form can squeeze into like an octopus. Enemies will quickly open fire on you if they spot you and despite having a dozen eyes, mouths, and presumably vital organs it doesn't take much punishment for them to be rid of you, if only temporarily (you leave "deposits of biomass" at every save point, so really you're just regrouping after dying in a more literal sense), so stealth and using the environment is usually key to winning fights. A typical encounter with one or more of the armored goons you can't eat (spoilsports) might involve making a ruckus on one side of the room only to emerge and grab them from the other, slamming them into the ceiling and floor until they stop twitching. Others might involve a classic xenomorph move of pulling them through a vent and dumping their bodies somewhere inconspicuous either for fastidious reasons or because they'll be easier to recover for some later snacking. Foes will continue to get harder to deal with, between employing flamethrowers and armored exosuits (wow, so it really is like Aliens), but most enemy types have some sort of weakness or blind spot to exploit if your powers alone aren't sufficient.

Speaking of powers, it wouldn't be an explormer if you didn't regularly acquire new abilities and they run the gamut between being able to brute force certain barriers or use short bursts of invisibility to escape laser tripwires and human detection. The powers are linked to your current size: as you gain abilities you increase in mass, but there are certain soupy pools (I didn't ask) where you can temporarily leave behind big chunks of yourself in a monster gumbo in order to access skills only your smallest form has access to and then return to bulk back up later. Most of Carrion's flow spends about an equal amount of time between the stealthy combat encounters and environmental puzzle-solving exploration. Despite not really being a game about dialogue and communication—you aren't interested in either, because you're a big scary monster—there's enough contextual business to get some idea of what's going down, including a trio of flashbacks as a group of humans explore a recently discovered anachronistic ruin, possibly waking you up in the progress, and there's signs everywhere that indicate where you are and how much "progress" you've made in breaching each area of this science facility built on top of said ancient ruin full of cool stuff. The progress, in this case, indicates how much of the facility you've breached, how many of the abilities you've absorbed from specimen tanks, and the optional containment units which more often than not will require you to come back later with more upgrades to access them.

Given the subject matter, you might not be surprised to learn that this is a very gooey and violent game that's very not suited for children unless they're really cool. Humans exist only as minor irritants and protein for the most part and nary a sojourn through this facility's innards is complete without pulling apart a bunch of hapless employees whose only sins were wanting to expand humanity's scientific understanding of the universe and also being too delicious. Everywhere His Royal Blobness goes he leaves behind viscera, painting the walls in pink goop as a handy telltale sign to show where you've been, and the game is fond of dropping you into creepy low-light conditions (you can bust many of the lightbulbs yourself, if you decide you prefer the murk) with a certain cold, gray grimness permeating both the human structures and the natural cave complex they sit upon and within. Lot of cool sound design, especially if you like terrified screaming and who doesn't, and it leans very hard on its monster movie aesthetic. Conversely, it's a bit of a one-trick pony as a result, but the regular influx of new upgrades serve to improve the combat as well as the traversal more often than not and with a relatively svelte run time of about six or seven hours the resulting combination means it's a game that won't lose your attention for long. It can maybe be a little obtuse at times about where to go next, but that's a criticism you could level towards the entire genre (and, in many cases, explormer fans tend to prefer feeling things out themselves rather than have a big handy arrow). The lack of a map is a pain for backtracking purposes, but the optional containers do usually at least have a diamond-shaped icon somewhere in the near vicinity to point you the right way.

I quite liked Carrion, though that's coming from someone who appreciates an explormer with a bit of novelty to its premise and presents something atypical when it comes to either combat (wrenching dudes through vents never gets old) or platforming (this game technically has none, since you can pull yourself through any passage as long as there's a wall or ceiling to crawl on). I liked those Mutant Blob Attack games, Carpenter's The Thing, and Radical Entertainment's Prototype series (in decreasing order of interest) and this game definitely scratches a similar itch as those. That is to say specifically, the itchiness produced by this worrisome-looking rash I received when I accidentally brushed up against that glowing meteorite while on an evening mountain hike. Meh, it's probably nothing.

Rating: 4 out of 5.