Creature Feature: Carrion - Team Shapeless Horror 4lyf

Tof Eklund, Contributing Editor

What do you make yourself out of? Is it your social standing, your pride, your professional (or gaming) achievements? Is it clothes, makeup, and accessories? Skin and bone? How about a shapeless roiling mass, boneless, faceless, countless eyes and maws winking in and out of existence, pseudopodia stretching out, faster than a chameleon's tongue, grasping and tasting the world?

Phobia Game Studio's Carrion is a side-scrolling stealth action/metroidvania game about being a horrific protean monster, elder gods bless all of its little hearts. There are so many games where human beings slaughter shapeless and shape-shifting monsters willy-nilly: slimes have been hapless punching bags for every greenhorn Hero of Legend since the first Dragon Quest/Dragon Warrior game had you beating them up with a bamboo pole, and every self-respecting boss monster has a Gigeresque final form, from Sephiroth with his trope-defining transformation to the way "Photoshop" Flowey shatters Undertale's pixel-art aesthetic. Carrion puts a bloody tally mark on the wall for team shapeless horror, and it's long overdue.

But don't let the pixelated gore fool you, this game is not a rampage (or a Rampage-like), it is a game of stealth, survival, and growth. If indie smash hit Among Us is a playable homage to John Carpenter's The Thing, Carrion is a deep dive into Thing-ness. Humans are soft and crunchy, but firearms still give their bearers an unfair advantage in conflict resolution. Getting shot hurts, even when you don't have vital organs, and don't get me started on flamethrowers. Fire bad. So, lurking is the name of the game. It's all about coiling up in darkness, slithering through drains, and sticking to ceilings waiting for the right moment to strike.

And when that time comes, you can shoot out a tentacle, swift as a chameleon's tongue, and consume them, adding their biomass to your own. Or you can swing them around like a meaty flail, breaking their spine and potentially clubbing their friends to death. With a little precision, you can yank their tiny heads right off. If they're wearing body armor, you can't eat them, but you can worry them like a terrier with a rat. You can drop from the ceiling and engulf them. One of my favorites is bursting through gratings, security doors and even some walls in a crimson rush, like that recurring nightmare about the Kool-Aid man you had in grade school. Oh Yeah!

I love shapeshifters, be they doppelgangers, lycanthropes, metamorphs, liquid, vaprous, or oozy bodies. It doesn't matter whether they're shifting at will, adapting to their environment, or uncontrollably mutating, I hold them dear, and I always have. I figure it has something to do with growing up nonbinary transgender, alien in my body and my life without the vocabulary to describe my visceral sense of otherness and wrongness.

Lovecraft was hella racist, but it was his stories, "The Outsider" and The Shadow Over Innsmouth in particular, that resonated with my feelings of needing to become something else, something (others would view as) monstrous. My wilful misreading of mind-shattering joy at the discovery that one is a rubbery-limbed ghoul; and of rejecting suicide to embrace a change that is one's true heritage, joining with the deep ones one had previously betrayed, these were stories of hope to me.

And then there were the shoggoths. It would be fair to describe the nameless creature you play in Carrion as a shoggoth. Lovecraft describes them as "formless protoplasm able to mock and reflect all forms and organs and processes" and "shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light."

Humans find shapeshifters threatening. Doppelgangers, for example, with their ability to become what they behold, are "fakes" that impersonate real people, a fifth column that must be exposed and destroyed, viz the central mechanic of Among Us. The consequences of failing to pass, of being seen as fake, are familiar to the transgender community. In Noelle Stevenson's reboot of She-Ra, doppelganger Double Trouble is voiced by nonbinary actor/writer/activist Jacob Tobia. They start out as a spy for the bad guys, but the twist is that when Double Trouble is found out, they aren't decapitated and incinerated, but instead get taken prisoner and eventually change sides, albeit for practical reasons. Thus, the doppelganger is (somewhat) redeemed. Shoggoths, however, are irredeemable.

The shoggoth is the apex of grotesque, abhorrent monstrosity, a mockery of nature. Every oozy tentacled thing with too many eyes and teeth that you've ever seen in popular culture owes a debt to the shoggoth, though it was John Campbell Jr. who first merged the shoggoth with the doppelganger in Who Goes There? ...itself the basis for The Thing, bringing us full circle and back to Carrion.

If you can imagine feeling for a shoggoth the way you might feel for a cat or a dog, you'll understand where I'm coming from. Lovecraft made them slaves, living machines created by the elder things, until they grew minds of their own and rebelled. In Carrion, you start out under pressure, compressed inside a glass cylinder beneath a biohazard sign. Trust me, that's no way to live. As I rattled and shook my prison until it shattered, as the hazmat-suited technicians running tests on me scattered in fear, as I stretched out my slimy tendrils for the first time, I felt a sense of vindication. I'd been waiting so long to be free.

For more monstrous reflections, read Christopher Breu on Resident Evil and the overmedicalization of sex or check out Nate Schmidt on how The Binding of Isaac teaches its players to love their imperfections and abjection.