I wasn’t sure what to expect from Carbonflesh. Members of its creative team were involved in several of my favorite point-and-click games, including Primordia and The Excavation of Hob’s Barrow, both of which offer a depth of literacy and creativity that seeps out of every pore, with their puzzle elements soon giving way to impossibly vast worlds packed with lore and history. These are worlds often just outside your reach, but you can still sense them. They’re tantalizing, yet surplus to the games themselves. This is what I wanted from Carbonflesh, and I wasn’t disappointed.
Even pinning down a genre for Carbonflesh feels borderline impossible. At the outset, it’s a sci-fi prison escape adventure. You spend your time torn between Sims-like gameplay, a demonic clicker game, resource management, tower defense, and I think at one point I might have opened a bookshop. And behind it all, the sense of time running away from you makes you manically busy. You can’t look away. A split-second wrong decision could be the end.
The demo available on Steam doesn’t give too much away about the plot, but you can feel the wide world of Carbonflesh looming in the background. You know it’s there when the game makes you do a tarot reading, remove your own eyeball, and meditate yourself into a hallucinatory land of cavernous rock – all in the first ten minutes. An Anubis-like dog-headed mentor in a sharp suit guides you. He reveals, piece by piece, a little of the world you’ve come to inhabit.
Waking from a coma on a prison train bound for his own demise, Jack must escape before time and track run out. Unlike many action heroes who never seem to eat, sleep, or go to the toilet, our hacker must do all these things and more. He has to keep his hygiene, rest, focus, comfort, fitness, and hunger in check – all to keep his performance high for the endless hacks ahead. That’s the Sims-like gameplay segment and time management.
With the use of an Eyehole Drill, an unpleasant contraption that makes its home in our hero’s eye socket, Jack gains the ability to hack into various systems, as well as an all-access pass to the black market. The hacking minigame boils down to frantic clicking, but you can upgrade the power of your clicks over time. That right there is the clicker segment. You gain infamy (and therefore money) by doing odd hacker jobs on the black market, but your main goal is to hack the train and delay it from reaching the Temple of Spiritual Greatness – both the literal and metaphorical end of the line.
The demo doesn’t offer a taste of the game’s tower defense or resource management, but they’ve been promised as features for the full release. Even so, I still got a real feel for how this bizarre and beautiful adventure will play out. Trying to manage your bodily needs while having to make money, meditate, and complete enough hacks to stop the train – all within a world you’re still getting to grips with.
It’s a deeply uncanny experience, both visually and in terms of the wild creativity employed in dreaming up this impossible world. Religious symbolism is squashed together with futuristic tech and cyberpunk aesthetics to create something uniquely dark and threatening. You get the sense that magic exists here, but only the bad kind.
I’m excited to see what else the full game has in store, as the demo scratched a very odd itch for something entirely surreal and surprising. You can be sure I’ll be there for the full release the moment it arrives. In the meantime, you can download the demo from Carbonflesh’s Steam page.