You Can’t Spell Slaughter Without Laughter
Grab your hoverboard, crank up the volume and don’t forget to use and abuse that Meow button. Gori: Cuddly Carnage is here to overwhelm your senses and have you grinning from ear to ear while doing it. Whether you are drenching the screen in unicorn blood or grinding on neon billboards, the titular carnage does not stop in what is likely to be a future indie gem.
What Is Gori: Cuddly Carnage?
Gori: Cuddly Carnage is an indie hack-n-slash title from Angry Demon Studio and published by indie gaming kings Wired Productions. The game puts you in the paws of Gori as you ride your hoverboard through levels slashing and smashing waves of enemy toys and painting the once bustling human cities with their artificial blood.
The game consists of 8 large levels each of which includes a mixture of platforming, exploring and plenty of combat. The combat consists of using your hoverboard as a weapon, whether that’s slashing with its extendable blades, smashing with the hammer-like weapon or blasting with the built-in rocket launcher, there are plenty of fun ways to dispatch enemies and tie different attacks together.
What Is Gori: Cuddly Carnage About?
You play as Gori, a prototype synthetic pet. When the toys from Cool Toyz Inc. go crazy and start mutating, they all but wipe out the human race. So it’s up to Gori, his foul-mouthed robot hoverboard friend F.R.A.N.K and their less-than-cheery computer program CH1-P to scour the earth for parts to build a weapon that may take out the leader of the Adorable Army.
Along their journey, Gori & F.R.A.N.K will slice their way through waves of increasingly more creepy and disgusting toy unicorns and other horrors from the Cool Toyz Inc. production line on a mission to save the earth and their beloved creator Professor Y. No unicorn can be spared.
Visuals
Many of the outdoor levels are set at night, highlighting the futuristic billboards and posters around the cities as well as graffiti added by the Adorable Army themselves.
Gori: Cuddly Carnage has a cartoon-like graphical style with characters that pop from the background environments and this really allows for the bloodflow from fallen enemies to be incredibly striking. This excessive blood has even caused the game to be censored in Japan, China & Korea with the blood from the toys being replaced by purple ‘toy juice’ as the team at Angry Demon Studios has confirmed, and if you are curious this option is available in the western release of the game as well.
Each level starts with a comic book-style recap of events leading up to the toy-pocalypse, which plays out with a partially moving comic effect and are also fully voice-acted. Once you complete the level these comic book covers can be found behind door no 1 on your ship and make a nice collection of great artwork.
Gori: Cuddly Carnage also comes with a brilliant photo mode from the outset, feeling as good as what you would find in the modern Spider-Man games, with a selection of options and filters to use as well as Gori: Cuddly Carnage stickers, and more filters can be purchased from the in-game upgrade stores.
Audio
Gori likes to rock out when he knocks out all those nasty toys. The game has an excellent soundtrack that is heavy with electric guitars which amps up when you get into larger fights. When you pull off a killer finishing move, a riff of electric guitar even plays through the Dualsense’s speaker.
That isn’t the only great use of the built-in speaker either, CH1-P will call you at times from the ship with his voice coming from the controller, and if you leave Gori idle for a minute or so, well, I’ll let you find out for yourselves, but trust me when I say it is very cute.
So the important thing to remember here is to turn up the TV volume and the volume on your controller as well.
I would likely get in trouble with Angry Demon Studios if I didn’t tell you that there is a dedicated Meow button, because you can’t have a cute animal game without the option to spam a cute animal noise.
What’s Great About Gori: Cuddly Carnage
There is so much to love about Gori: Cuddly Carnage, the gameplay is smooth and reactive, and the violence is gory and fun. Riding around on F.R.A.N.K whether boosting at high speeds or jumping from platforms to wallriding a billboard to grinding on a pole feels easy enough to master but still fun to do through the length of the game.
Once you have completed the story, there are collectables to go back for if you didn’t get them the first time around. Don’t worry this isn’t a Ubisoft game, there are only 3 parts to a key in each level, with each completed key unlocking a new room in your ship, these give you a new top for Gori and a surprise in each room as well as unlocking extra challenges for each level like saving non-infected unicorns.
Once you have finished a level you will be given stars based on your top combo, time taken, overall score and difficulty. These add some replayability to each level.
The game also finishes up its story really well, with a great conclusion but the tease of more to come, here’s hoping that the game does well enough to warrant a sequel as I would personally love to see another adventure with this great cast of characters.
What Could Be Better
This section is pretty difficult to write, Gori: Cuddly Carnage hits a lot of highs and it feels like Angry Demon Studios really pulled out of the bag everything they were going for.
The game is however very linear compared to many offerings around at this time, which some may find a little tedious, and the combat may become quite repetitive at times for some players.
Conclusion
Gori: Cuddly Carnage is a blood-soaked treat for the eyes and ears with fun chaotic gameplay. The story is engaging and worth seeing through to the end while you slice up hundreds upon hundreds of enemies. The boss fights are genuinely entertaining and some will have you laughing with glee as you them down.
If you are still unsure of whether to try Gori: Cuddly Carnage then there is a free demo available on all platforms, remember demos? So why not give it a try and see if you think it is buying the full game?
Angry Demon Studios has crafted an exceptionally well-made and entertaining title, and we hope to see more great stuff from this team in the future, as well as another adventure with Gori and pals, Cuddlier Carnage perhaps?
Gori: Cuddly Carnage is out on PlayStation 4 & 5, Nintendo Switch, Xbox X/S, Xbox One and PC on August 29th.
