Playing the Bad Guy: Studying Carrion and Maneater

Against all odds, we have arrived at Gamer Month here at You Don’t Need Maps Dot Substack Dot Com. Who knows what else the future may hold? Certainly not me— I don’t outline anything— but more than that, I’ve been going through an intense period of self-discovery lately. I mean, here I am, 24 years old, listening to old-school death metal and playing a shitload of video games. Isn’t this everything Finn McKenty warned me I would become?

It’s fitting, then, that many of the video games I keep returning to play with ideas of choice and identity. I’ve written a forthcoming essay about Night In the Woods that is going to go up at a Publication Of Note (everyone say congratulations!), but aside from that game, I’ve been very much into the Red Candle game Detention, the recent expanded release of Doki Doki Literature Club, and the subjects of today’s essay, Carrion and Maneater.

Now, from the perspectives of aesthetics, mechanics, and reception, these games could not be more different. Carrion (developed by Phobia) is a critically acclaimed 2-D Metroidvania, while Maneater functions, in theory, more like an RPG (the creators have, in fact, referred to it as a SharkPG), although the buzz around the game repeatedly drove home the idea that it was “Grand Theft Auto, but you play as a shark”— the critical response to Maneater upon its release last year was decidedly more muted.

But the thing that drew me in to both games was the opportunity to experience a ridiculously over-the-top and bloody horror B-movie from the perspective of the monster. Maneater draws from cult favorite game Jaws Unleashed (with more polished and updated controls), and plot-wise, strives to channel a gritty revenge-thriller, while also acknowledging the absurdity of its own premise and cloaking the entire affair in a gooey layer of self-awareness and social satire. Carrion, on the other hand, explicitly marketed itself as a “reverse horror” experience— I and others would most directly liken it to playing as the titular Thing from John Carpenter’s The Thing.

Now, whereas a more sophisticated or high-minded game would like to evoke a sense of moral ambiguity or shock and disgust at your own actions within the game, these games have zero time for that. (If that is, indeed, what you’re looking for, then you’re probably already aware of games like Manhunt or Spec Ops: The Line, which directly implicate the player in violence and atrocity in ways that are meant to disturb.) No, Maneater and Carrion are all about making it as fun as possible to be the Big Bad.

On a sheer playability level, Carrion is near-objectively the better game: the controls are amazingly fluid and intuitive, and it feels damn incredible to play. If you’re at all familiar with Metroidvanias, the lack of a map may become a hindrance later on in the game, but you will understand how to move forward very quickly, and the puzzles and enemies increase in difficulty relative to the strength you accrue over the course of the game, resulting in an extraordinarily balanced and smooth playing experience. Maneater, by contrast, suffers really badly from Open World Sandbox Syndrome, in that it gives you repetitive busywork to do in every single area, treats cutscenes like rewards without making the work itself feel related to the plot in any way, and you will quickly find yourself either hilariously over- or under-powered for the challenges ahead, depending on how much of the side-quests and errands you feel are natural to accomplish.

In fact, the general perception of Maneater, particularly since its release on the Xbox Game Pass, has been that it’s a great game as long as you didn’t pay for it and you tackle it piecemeal so that you don’t get bored too quickly. However, I ripped through Maneater over the course of a few days with little desire to play anything else during that time.

It would be easy to put that down to the fact that I really, really, really love sharks. My apartment is littered with shark plushies, my cats have a little shark-shaped bed to sleep in, and my partner was kind enough to bless my life with not only shark slippers but also a giant shark onesie (I would liken it to a Snuggee with a dorsal fin, although it also has a hood if I ever decide to use it as a Halloween costume) for warmth and comfort during the colder months. My Twitter bio boldly proclaims me to be a Shark Attack Advocate, a position I will hold fast to as long as people continue to cut sharks’ fins off and then toss them back into the ocean to die. They are my favorite animal, and they have been ever since I was six years old. I played and enjoyed Jaws Unleashed at a friend’s house when I was a kid, but Maneater is the first game to really fulfill my base urge to be a giant shark and mercilessly eat as many people as the game will throw at me. I’ve donated to many shark conservation programs over the years, but no other experience has given me the opportunity to feel like I was taking revenge on the behalf of my favorite creatures.

Is it still perpetuating the harmful stereotype of sharks as mindless creatures who only know how to consume, as nature’s Perfect Killer, as soulless monsters? Well, kind of. I mean, sharks are, generally speaking, harmless ocean kittens. Hammerhead sharks are often thought of as one of the most aggressive shark species on the planet, but there have only been 16 recorded incidents of hammerhead sharks attacking humans unprovoked, and none of them have resulted in fatalities (source). I digress because I truly think that it is important to dispel the cultural myths surrounding sharks, and despite, or maybe even because of, the fact that I enjoy a lot of media (and I mean a lot) that perpetuates harmful stereotypes about sharks, I think it is my duty to emphasize that the likelihood of being struck by lightning (1 in 15,300) is orders of magnitude greater than the likelihood of being attacked by a shark (1 in 5 million), and yet most people would still probably express greater fear of the latter. Here’s a video of a man giving a shark a belly rub, which might be my favorite video on the entire Internet.

So with that out of the way, let’s get into the meat of Maneater. You start off the game playing as an immensely powerful female bull shark, learning the mechanics of the game while simultaneously wreaking havoc on any humans who happen to be in your vicinity. The first time I played this game, I spent a good hour just luxuriating in the tutorial. The controls are not perfect (unlike Carrion, which does have perfect controls), but they serve their purpose. No, it does not “really make you feel like a bull shark” in the way that games make you feel like Batman or Spider-Man, but it doesn’t have to— it just has to make it feel compelling to play around in the water. Eventually, you are captured by bayou fisherman Scaly Pete, where the conceit of the game is revealed; you are being trailed by a camera crew as well as a sardonic narrator (the pleasantly sonorous Chris Parnell) as part of a reality show that, ostensibly, is documenting Scaly Pete and his crew as they hunt for a shark. The twist, however, is that you don’t play as that beautiful female bull shark. The game’s plot kicks off as Scaly Pete rips open that female’s stomach and drags out a premature bull pup and mutilates it, so he’ll “know it when he sees it.” That proves to be Pete’s big mistake, since as soon as he throws that bull pup back in the water, it takes his hand with it, resulting in a vicious, Captain Ahab-via-Quint-via-Cajun-accent feud that fuels the rest of the game.

The rest of the game progresses like so: your shark discovers an underwater grotto in each new area that serves as its home base, and which you can use to fast-travel throughout the open world as long as you are not in combat; you level up by eating prey and finding “nutrient caches,” which are really just cases of junk food lying around on the ocean floor, in itself an implicit commentary on pollution; you get accustomed to other predators in the area, and go on a few quests to control prey populations in order to lure out the apex predators (which range from alligators to barracudas to mako sharks to hammerheads to orca whales to sperm whales); you explore the area, uncovering landmarks and license plates (which serve as the main impetus to 100% the game); and you eat lots and lots of humans, which serves to lure out progressively more-powerful shark hunters and boost your infamy, much like in Grand Theft Auto (although your infamy never diminishes).

Every time you reach 60% or so completion in any given area, you “check in” with Scaly Pete, and witness a pretty bog-standard dramatic plot between him and his son, who just wants to go to college. Eventually, you kill his son, causing Pete to increase his hostility towards you (he even poisons entire areas at certain points in the game), and the game’s plot ends with a pretty easy series of confrontations with Scaly Pete, climaxing as you jump onto his boat (in a bald-faced homage to Jaws), and he triggers a bomb that kills him but pretty much barely leaves a scratch on you.

It’s an extraordinarily simple and repetitive game, which gives credence to many of the complaints leveled against it by gamers who are used to much more complex, involved, and difficult RPGs. Bloodborne, this is not. The devs made a few superficial attempts to provide some sense of involvement by introducing the option to equip and upgrade abilities based on your stock of nutrients (like bio-electric teeth, toxic tail whips, and razor-sharp bone armor on your fins), but as long as you Just Keep Swimming and growing (your shark begins as a pup, but I very rapidly ascended to the level of “megalodon,” and your level is capped at 30), you can mostly ignore this system. Combat consists mainly of evading (which your bone armor can turn into an attack in and of itself) and mashing the “bite” button.

Sure, the first time you accidentally stumble upon an orca you’re gonna get your ass kicked, but I was able to take down a level 60 sperm whale with ease by the end of the game. (This isn’t even mentioning my favorite boss fight, which was against a big ol’ orca whale in a SeaWorld-esque arena. Orcas and sperm whales both have the ability to punch you with their snout, and this particular orca knocked me out of the water into the stands before following me out. I was able to get back into the water, but the orca wasn’t, and I basically just kinda swam around while the orca— in a very scientifically inaccurate, and honestly kind of sad, manner— suffocated to death on land.)

So if the gameplay is so thin, what kept me coming back to Maneater? Hell, I still pick it up and play for 30 minutes or so here and there whenever I’m bored, and it’s always a pleasant experience. If the game is as empty as its detractors say, shouldn’t that override even my love for sharks? Well, first of all, nothing can override my love for sharks, so jot that down. Second of all, while I’m sure many would disagree, I found the gameplay fiercely addictive. I have severe ADHD, and although there are absolutely big and complex games that I adore, my brain finds it particularly soothing to have a simple structure and routine to adhere to (or at least it does when I’m indulging in play, which sure does seem counterintuitive now that I think about it). Eat fish, eat people, eat the apex, kill the hunters, repeat.

But Maneater also employs a treasure trove of aesthetic tricks that make it, in my opinion, an extremely engrossing experience. First and foremost is the narration of Chris Parnell, who indulges in his role as sardonic and smug reality show host with gleeful relish. The thin veneer of nature-show-narrator rapidly gives way to open contempt for what humans have done to the natural world, and razor-sharp (though not exactly subtle) satire of capitalist avarice and human arrogance bleeds through every time his voice floats through the water. The hidden landmarks are awash in pop culture references, ranging from the obvious (you can, at one point, find SpongeBob’s pineapple home) to the more subtle (Subnautica fans will be delighted with a certain easter egg). Parnell’s narrator occasionally indulges in below-the-belt classism against the shark hunters and lazy, dumb tourists in particular, but that’s my only gripe, and it’s pretty mild when balanced against the insidious and disgusting corporate greed and cowardice which the game’s writing spends much more time lambasting.

Secondly, there’s so much blood and gore in this game. It’s not the most lovingly animated (you’re not gonna find any artfully-dessicated corpses lying around, beautiful in their grossness, a la The Last of Us), but the spurts of blood, the crunching of bones, and the thick-skulled screams of humans as they are consumed by your shark are immensely satisfying. Something that I found to be a neat trick was that it’s much more upsetting to attack the animals in this game than the humans. Seals bark pitifully, makos and hammerheads whine, turtles wail miserably. Early in the game, attacking larger predators requires a greater deal of hit-and-run, resulting in some truly disturbing imagery like a newly-legless alligator worming his way through the water like a snake.

Meanwhile, the game’s feelings towards humans are almost-uniformly awash in misanthropy, as tourists and hunters indulge in hilariously stupid exclamations (“I’d kill for a nice breeze!”), stand around dazedly, and cower in gawping, useless fear as your shark flops around on a beach eating ten of them in a row. The one human with an ounce of sympathy is Scaly Pete’s son (who ineffectually, but continually, offers some dribbles of mild resistance against his monstrous father), and you eventually eat him. The upcoming DLC for the game, Truth Quest, promises to make even Chris Parnell’s narrator into a myopic, vengeful villain, once again emphasizing that although you may be playing as the “bad guy,” you’re not doing anything to these humans that they didn’t bring onto themselves. In real life, that outlook could be viewed as anything from victim-blaming to apathy towards humanity’s conflict with nature, but in the game (and taking a bird’s-eye view of the shark-human relationship, which has resulted in 100 million shark deaths per year and a 70% decline in worldwide shark populations), it sure does feel righteous.

In short, if you’ve ever watched any number of eco-horror films (Frogs, Orca, Grizzly, Piranha, Arachnophobia, or even Alexandre Aja’s recent exercise in claustrophobia, Crawl) and felt infinitely more sympathy for the animals defending their turf against the foolish humans, then Maneater is a game for you, as long as its sense of humor and endless carnage don’t end up becoming a bore (and, for me, those things accomplished quite the opposite).

In contrast to Maneater, Carrion is almost hilariously reserved, but it’s an over-the-top game in its own right. It gets right to the fucking point, as you rock your controller back and forth in order to release your amorphous, red-tentacled blob from an experimental holding tank. In-game dialogue elides traditionally articulated speech in favor of anguished, visceral shrieks and gunfire, which serves to punctuate the long periods you spend whipping and sneaking around the remote research station in complete and utter quiet. The 2-D aesthetic, in some ways, makes the blood and gore feel far more unnerving than the bloody clouds of Maneater; you must attack humans in order to regain health and grow your biomass, and the result is is that you spend much of your crunching humans in half and flinging tiny blood-red pixels around the screen, staining every conceivable surface. Your creature itself leaves a puddle of green goop when it absorbs a human, and as the game goes on and you get bigger, you start leaking blood everywhere you go like a thick snail-trail.

Carrion doesn’t care to have any meta aspects in the way of Maneater’s Chris Parnell explicating the situation or leavening the proceedings. Occasionally text prompts will appear on screen, principally to tell you how to exercise a new ability or to give you a tiny hint as to the way forward, but for the most part, the excellently rubbery controls and the Metroidvania map layout do the storytelling for you: you are a creature of pure instinct, and you move forward in any direction that opens up for you, slaughtering any human pathetic enough to get in your way. If Maneater was explicitly misanthropic, Carrion makes that misanthropy both more implicit but much more unforgiving. While Parnell would offer specific critiques about the humans’ decisions in Maneater, Carrion simply lets the surroundings do the talking.

Carrion is an absolute joy to play. I’ve gushed enough about the controls, but it bears repeating how easy it is to reach out your tentacles and snag a human, operate a lever, or smash through a door. Every new obstacle introduced comes packaged with a promise that you will be able to conquer it in short order: underwater walls impede your progress only until you gain the power to turn yourself into a mass of disgusting worms that can seep through the gaps; wooden walls are soon able to be smashed through with impunity; heavy-duty barriers are eventually revealed to be nothing more than plugs that you can yank out with ease.

The humans get more and more scared as the game continues, with a variety of responses. Unarmed scientists and research assistants lock themselves in rooms and cower; you can herd them into areas for easier access by growling through the walls and terrifying them away. Meanwhile, the military presence continues to arm itself to greater and greater extents— simple handguns become shotguns and automatics and flamethrowers, and late-game additions like armed security cameras, defensive-offensive floating drones, and machine-gun-equipped mechs that track your every move slowly become the majority of what you’re fighting against. The skittishness of the unarmed humans becomes unthinking aggression for the soldiers, who will respond to your growls by rushing to the source and firing blindly, walking backwards to try to keep an eye on you (although you’ve surely descended into a vent or the water below, far out of sight).

While the humans continue to artificially and superficially plump up their own defenses, so too does it become clear how powerful you are. Forget any number of military-propaganda Call of Duty games, forget the paranoia surrounding Doom as a “murder-simulator”— Carrion is a true power fantasy, and its central appeal is that you are not human. In the view of Carrion, as in Maneater, humans are soft, weak, stupid, and pliable. Your creature eventually even gains the ability to extend a probing tentacle and infect a nearby host, allowing you to gun down other enemies to their own shock and dismay— if they do happen to see you in the process of taking over a human host, they mow them down in a hail of gunfire, causing you to burst out of their body in yet another disgusting, fleshy explosion of violence. Carrion is a cruel and cynical game, yes, but putting you in the body of this terrifying creature makes all that violence seem like only the coldly logical means to an end. Carrion may have marketed itself as “reverse horror,” but the really scary, and all-too-real, appeal of the game is that it makes it impossibly easy to sympathize with the tunnel-vision of a single-minded thirst for more power.

Carrion concludes with you absorbing a mysterious power called “Parasitism.” While every other new power was accompanied by a brief text description, this power is accompanied only by a button prompt. You press that button, and your horrible tentacled form caves in on itself, compressing inwards with sickening sound effects, before revealing that you now look like any other human you’ve eaten so far in the game. You climb upwards, exit the research facility, and climb into a helicopter headed for civilization. The jury is still out on whether you continue your tentacled-monster ways or simply become the CEO of Amazon.

Maneater and Carrion are two of the most fun and compulsively playable games I’ve had the opportunity to experience within the last few months, maybe matched only in concise power and grim forward momentum by Playdead’s Inside. While Carrion is (rightly) regarded as the more intelligent of the two, both are illuminating on the subject of human hubris and our failures at controlling the universe in which we accidentally ended up living, whether that is the horrifying atrocities we’ve visited upon our own flora and fauna, or the futility of our attempts to reach out to anything otherworldly. Life, uh, finds a way, and if we know what’s good for us, we’d better get out of the way and mind our own fucking business.

-xoxo, Ellie

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