Back in the early 2000s when I was a shy teenager, games were gory and gross. Like all shy teenagers, this was perfect for me, and I happily used Cerebral Bores in Turok and dismembered innocent animals in Conker’s Bad Fur Day. In this day and age, though, over-the-top violence and poop jokes are less common, and as much as I like to pretend I’m out of it, sometimes I just want to play something gory and over-the-top. Gori: Cuddly Carnage is the perfect solution to that problem, and since all the gore happens with stuffed animals, you don’t even have to feel like a terrible person while playing.
Our protagonist Gori is just a humble house cat, at least until the world is taken over by stuffed unicorns and their leader, a jack-in-the-box. After Gori’s beloved owner is kidnapped, it’s up to this humble cat and a series of clever inventions to save the day through extreme violence. With plenty of blood and foul language, this story won’t be to everyone’s taste, but I found it quite refreshing.
To take back the planet from sentient killer toys, you’ll need a weapon worthy of a hero. For Gori, that’s a hoverboard that can be spun and slammed to create a deadly whirlwind. This is the character action combat we all know and love, with light and heavy attacks ensuring anything fluffy is effectively pulverized.
As you might expect, the hoverboard isn’t just good for murder, it’s also a great way to get around. You can grind rails, ride along walls, and cross gaps with ease on your trusty talking metal board. Mastering the board will serve you well in Gori: Cuddly Carnage’s many chases, but it’s also used to top up your fuel gauge for special attacks while you grind and ride along walls.
Your brutal bag of tricks in Gori: Cuddly Carnage is as extensive as it is deadly. You can use all sorts of attacks against a wide variety of enemies that deserve to be experienced. Shielded enemies need to be thrashed, flying enemies are easier to hit with missiles than melee attacks, and your own shield can be used to hit enemies like blood-filled skittles. Each move in your arsenal has its own purpose and is required if you want to save its owner. Thankfully, they’re introduced at the perfect pace over the course of the campaign.
As you travel from one bizarre sci-fi level to the next, you’ll not only gain new moves, but also money that you can spend on upgrades to make Gori an even more deadly fighting machine. Various attacks can be made more powerful, missiles can be upgraded to provide more ammo before needing to be recharged, and health and fuel can be buffed if they run low too often. In order to unlock these powerful stat upgrades, it’s pretty important to keep your bank account well-filled, so you’ll need to aim for high scores and fast completion times in levels to earn those big cash bonuses.
By far the most impressive aspect of Gori: Cuddly Carnage is the amount of new ideas and gimmicks packed into each of the game’s eight levels. From jumping into arcade games and shooting targets to chasing a goldfish in a flooded factory and sucking it dry to avoid drowning, the various gimmicks keep the game fresh from start to finish and make it easy to play through.
If you’d rather do more fighting and less dawdling, the arena levels are also an option. Each level features an unlockable arena where you face off against waves of enemies, with high scores to beat and extra cash to win. These completely optional bonus levels showcase one of the best aspects of Gori: the mix of combat and cool tricks to maximize your damage, and that’s what kept me playing them all.
Gori: Cuddly Carnage is a lot of fun, but there are a few things that keep it from being the best game when it comes to character action. The combat, while fun, isn’t sophisticated enough to be at the top of the genre, and the combos are so deep that those looking for something more complex will be disappointed. The quality of the boss fights is also variable, and a few of them were more annoying than entertaining.
Gori: Cuddly Carnage is a bloody blast that hides a ton of ideas inside its gritty and crude exterior. While the combat isn’t top of its class, it’s fun and wild, and the amount of interesting new abilities you gain as you play is pretty impressive. Some won’t like the constant swearing and gratuitous violence, but for everyone else, this is a bloody game that you won’t want to put down.
