Carrion ★★★☆☆

The moment-to-moment feeling of being the thing feels wonderful on a twin-stick controller. The movement at once feels fluid, deft and heavy, especially as you amass flesh, and grabbing and flinging victims, obstacles and improvised weapons with your tentacles is great and allows for encounters that are both comedic and satisfying and it looks great.

But the larger structure of the game feels half-baked. It doesn’t, in the end, have that many tools in its toolbox, with puzzles and combat encounters remixing the same elements many times over. It seems like a Metroidvania at first but progression is almost entirely linear, with no meaningful navigation to be done. There are some optional upgrades to backtrack for, and which offer some of the game’s more detailed puzzles, but the rewards are all fairly uninteresting stat increases and I only ended up getting them because when the game world really opens up at the end I quickly got lost and didn’t know where to go to get to the actual endgame area, the linear path of the game not really having helped build up any sense of direction or understanding of the layout of the world.

Still, it’s quite fun and well-paced, with new abilities doled out at regular intervals over the couple of hours it takes to play to keep things interesting.