Steam Sale Includes Indie Horror Hit Carrion for 80% Off

Cult indie flips survival horror on its head by letting you become the creature

Horror games usually put you in the shoes of someone desperately trying to survive. Maybe you’re creeping through a dark hallway with three bullets left, hiding under a bed while something searches the room, or running away from a creature you have absolutely no hope of killing.

But what if you got to be the thing everyone else was running from?

One of the best games built around that idea is heavily discounted on Steam right now. Instead of asking players to survive the monster, it lets them wreak havoc as a writhing mass of flesh, teeth, and tentacles that slithers through a research facility devouring anyone in its path.

Carrion, Phobia Game Studio’s 2020 “reverse horror” game, is available at a massive discount right now as part of a sale for all Devolver Digital titles. It's currently at $3.99 on Steam, down 80% from its usual $19.99 price. The promotion runs through Aug. 31.

Carrion casts you as an amorphous extraterrestrial creature being held inside a research facility. After escaping containment, you slither through vents and corridors, grabbing scientists and guards with tentacles, devouring them, and steadily evolving into something even more dangerous.

Polygon’s original review called Carrion a “body horror masterpiece,” praising the way its controls make you feel like a huge, grasping monstrosity rather than a conventional video game hero. The creature can crawl across floors and ceilings, rip doors apart, possess humans, and gain increasingly gruesome abilities as it accumulates biomass. The end result lands somewhere between John Carpenter’s The Thing, a Metroidvania, and a particularly bloody game of Rampage.

This Carrion deal is part of a broader Devolver Digital sale on Steam, with several of the publisher’s best-known indies marked down. Cult of the Lamb, the cute-but-morbid mix of roguelike combat and cult management, is 60% off at $9.99, while Weird West: Definitive Edition, the supernatural action RPG from former Arkane developers, is 85% off.

The sale also includes discounts across Devolver’s wider catalog, making it a good time to dig through the publisher’s particular brand of strange, stylish indie games.