Gori: Cuddly Carnage Review

Gori: Cuddly Carnage is a third-person character action game developed by Angry Demon Studio and published by Wired Productions and CouchPlay Interactive (Greater China). First revealed in 2020 and suffering several delays due to many outside factors like hardware failure and, uh… the pandemic, it is now ready for release on the 29th of August. With so many great games coming out this year, this went under my radar until now. In all honesty, I saw the cute cat on a hoverboard and I just had to try it out. So, let’s dive into this insanely messed up world and see what it—— aaaannnddd in the first level, there is a man hanging from a party balloon.

Oh, this is going to be fun.

The Adorable Army has taken over the Earth! Okay, the name isn’t as threatening as it sounds, as well as the fact that they’re actually toys, but you try and fight off a horde of horribly mutated unicorns. You play as Gori (pronounced “gory”), a synthetic housecat who is on a quest to save their owner and the world with the help of their foulmouthed weaponised hoverboard and a depressed ship A.I. Yeah, it’s as ridiculous as it sounds, but it’s done very well here.

The writing is pretty funny, with tons of dark humour and liberal use of swears. It can come off as trying a little too hard to be edgy, but it definitely works. My biggest regret, though, was buying the upgrade to uncensor the hoverboard’s dialogue early on. The bleeps would’ve made some of the banter a little more hilarious and you can’t re-enable it once you buy it.

You gotta love Photo Mode.

The presentation is pretty on point for this game. First off, cutscenes are either done in-engine or in these comic book-style scenes. It's well-animated, and the art for the comics are really good, but special mention has to go to the soundtrack. Some of the songs that play during combat sound like something you would listen to in DOOM (2016), and it's dynamic too as the better your fight goes, the more intense the music becomes. Definitely made me eager to unlock the jukebox.

As for the graphics, they are… very bright. Since it’s set in a cyberpunk dystopian future (before the toys started an uprising) and almost everything you come in contact with is some sort of children's plaything, of course there’s going to be a ton of neon lights and bright colours around the place, to the point where it might hurt your eyes if you look at it too long. There's a reason why the game warns you of bright flashing lights because it can get quite brutal with it at times. That being said, the character designs are also really good. Gori and their allies are quite adorable and the enemies they face are… significantly less-so. They range from uncanny to outright horrifying and disgusting. And, as you can tell from the title alone, the game is very gory and you’ll be turning unicorns into mince meat in any given fight, covering Gori's fur in their blood.

The colours might blind you after a while, but its so damn awesome.

And what will you be using to go around the levels and spill unicorn blood? Well, that will be F.R.A.N.K., a hoverboard equipped with blades, a flail, a shield, and a grenade launcher and is happy to kill anything in your way (he’s supposed to be a toy, by the way). Combat is actually rather simple to understand and execute. You essentially just attack with light and heavy buttons while occasionally using grenades. Where the complexity comes in is how you use your boost.

Boosting is more than just making you go faster, it enhances your attacks and abilities. Your light attack turns you into a tornado of death, your heavy attack becomes ground-shaking slams that will force enemies into the air if they haven’t been turned to paste, and the launcher can break through the defences of tough enemies and stun them for a short while. However, boosting requires fuel, and if you run out, you’ll feel like a sitting duck. But how do you gain more fuel? Well, by killing enemies or doing stylish tricks like wall-riding and grinding rails.

If you want to destroy your enemies efficiently, you have to fight as stylishly as possible, knowing when to attack and to recharge your fuel to keep your combo going. You won’t get very complex combos, as I did find myself just holding down buttons eventually, but it’s still very frantic as you juggle your fuel, ammo, health, and style meter while you’re fighting off several types of enemies at once. Getting a PPP rank (the highest combo rank) will be hard, especially on the higher difficulties, but pulling it off feels good and makes you feel like a total badass, which gets easier to do as you buy upgrades to make Gori and F.R.A.N.K. more deadly. However, most of those upgrades are just buffing your numbers. More damage, more health and fuel, more health dropped from finishers etc. After the first two levels, you’ll have your entire arsenal, which is a little disappointing.

...And I will kick your ass.

However, it isn’t always about combat. You’ll often need to use F.R.A.N.K.’s movement abilities to get through platforming challenges and races against a pursuing wall of death. Thankfully, despite being on a hoverboard at all times, Gori feels good to move and you feel like you have a lot of control of their movements. It isn’t quite like walking normally in any other third-person game, but there’s enough weight and control to ensure that if you ever manage to fall off a ledge, it’s probably on your hands rather than the game.

Outside of the normal levels, you also get optional challenges to test your skills on, having some unique requirements to really make you work for those gold stars. They’re really fun to do, if a little annoying at times. And you might want to do them outside of 100% completion. The game has a pretty short playtime. On House Cat difficulty (Normal), doing everything before beating the final boss will take around six to seven hours, with some additional post-game content to tackle if you want to get the true ending. It shouldn’t take you more than maybe five more hours to 100% the game, and that’s completely fine.

Onto some of the issues I ran into. None of them are performance-related, other than a few hiccups it ran perfectly at 60 FPS throughout, but I might have run into a few softlocks. At a couple of points, I had to reload my checkpoint because the path forward wouldn’t open for some reason. I might have even skipped part of a puzzle or something, it was strange. Maybe it’s because of some enemy spawns not working quite right. For example, I had one challenge that required me to hit a PPP Rank combo for the gold star, but one damn unicorn spawned or just went below the stage that took several retries to find. The next wave doesn’t spawn until all enemies are dead, and I only needed a couple more kills so it definitely put a little damper on things. Also, I wasn’t too much of a fan of the lock-on. These issues might be resolved on release so don’t take them too seriously. 

What a cute little furball of death.

Okay, let me be blunt: Gori: Cuddly Carnage is amazing. It’s cute, creepy, and full of carnage, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.