The Secret Horror Behind Carrion's Monster | The SCIENCE of... Carrion

dear phobia game studios hi it's me austin carrion was my favorite game of 2020 and matt told me i could do a video on it even though it's a bit of a niche so here we go i was infatuated with this game when it came out and i played it non-stop discovered one of the first soft locks by mistake had to restart played all the way through found every single thingamabob and oh my god i love this so much can we get more reverse horror metroidvania games please because i have not had this much fun since playing avp2 in college over a decade ago and oh my god i am so old i'm gonna die soon okay all right here we go carrion i spent a ton of time digging into everything this game has to offer and it left me with one simple question what the heck is the alien you play as to get everyone up to speed in case you haven't played the game and actually you know if you have not played it go play it right now it's pretty cheap and it's a really good and relatively short stop this video go play it then come back okay okay if you're still here that better mean that you have played carrion by now okay so a refresher carrion puts you into the shoes or the writhing tentacles of an alien monster it's it's not really clear there's some alien iconography in some places but otherwise there's nothing to indicate that it's actually alien other than it mostly doesn't resemble anything on our planet anyway it's a monster of unknown-ish origins that's trying to escape confinement from an underground laboratory run by a corporation known as relief science a private science firm and that's basically it that is it other than it's literally a standard metroidvania game where you run around past obstacles obtain new tools that allow you to bypass new obstacles backtrack go to new places bada bing bada boom infect the entire world with your rising mass of tentacles okay that last part is i think typically the lose condition for metroid but you know what i mean there's more lore which we will get to in a bit but first i want to establish my theory up front the carrion monster that you play as is i believe entirely and thoroughly not an alien and in fact originates on our very own planet and in order to understand why i think this we're gonna have to dig a bit deeper into the game the background of carrion is largely given through a series of flashbacks you can experience through plot uh devices that essentially show a group of scientists presumably working for relish science plunging the depths of an abandoned laboratory reasons aren't known what they're looking for is not known it seems to be constructed by humans it has a bunch of human technology in it like combat drones stun guns levers keys and similar construction to other relic organizational buildings but it also sports some anti-diluvian moss which is well okay so anti-deluvian means before the flood the flood in this case referencing the big flood in the torah where noah built his ark and all that stuff it's essentially a word that means prehistoric as heck so that's not super clear of a descriptor if it's a lab that's anti-diluvian this can't be a human laboratory as in anti-deluvian times humans were at best agricultural and at worst we were just hunter gatherers but given that the lab appears to be constructed very similarly to the other relief lab areas with these grates and doors it likely just means a sample of some really old moss that's either meant to imply that the lab has been abandoned for a long time or it was some old moss that was experimented on there there's a couple of alien looking things here but given the work that relith appears to be up to it's totally possible that these aliens aren't aliens at all and instead are just a product of fringe biological research the flashbacks take place in the desert which is reinforced by the companion comic story which desert it is is unclear and that really just doesn't matter in the very bowels of this abandoned laboratory a pulsing biomass is discovered the thing the thing that you play as it infects a scientist in an attempt to escape and is discovered through bioscanner drones whereupon it is presumably captured contained and transported to another facility the facility that the game takes place in right nope not that one and we know this because of the comic the comic opens with a weird acting scientist meeting with a military consultant they go into greater detail about the monster its behavior some of which we will get into later but the most important thing is they establish something incredibly key the beast the carrion monster learns it learns from things it eats it inherits instincts from the genetic code of its victims or rather for being a little bit more fair it's prey and this is the first major key to understanding the carrion beast the amalgamation of teeth and tentacles for what it really is an animal with the driving need to survive and this is the first clue we need to understand that this monster has origins on earth because well to put it simply dna is complicated not just anything can interact with dna it's a very specific evolutionary characteristic of life on our planet and something that not only eats us but gets useful genetic data from us by eating us has to either be from here or specifically designed by someone else to mess with us we learn this from the monster themself as the scientist has been taken over by the thing explains it learns from what it eats it absorbed biological instincts from the worms desire to survive desire to grow desire to eat but this is impossible right i mean i eat steak sometimes but i don't suddenly start growing horns or udders when i eat plants i don't attain the ability to photosynthesize what i eat is broken down to more basic molecules including the dna within the plants and animals which are then used by my body to build its own stuff out of this raw material the dna of a cockroach that's in my chicken fingers ain't gonna give me bug powers this hole learns from what it eats thing is totally ridiculous right absolutely positively wrong [Music] humans and as far as i know all mammals and probably all vertebrates and probably even most invertebrates behave in this exact way they eat something break it down to its most important building blocks and use those to build more blocks of itself before it goes on to reproduce combining its dna with the dna of a mate creating some random mix of the two which adds to diversity down the line bada bing bada boom you've got a species and you have evolution some species on this planet choose another way another path toward genetic diversity there's viruses of course which are so objectively weird that it's still hotly debated whether they count as life at all and then there's bigger stuff multi-cellular stuff stuff like rotifers of the class but oh my god i am never going to be able to say that word stuff like the rotifers of the class bedello idea microscopic multicellular organisms that don't have sex to reproduce but still show a remarkably large amount of genetic diversity why because they steal dna from their food and incorporate it into their own bodies they essentially steal biological diversity from their prey spooky stuff but it's not just animals that can do this in the ancient times the first plants on earth were just algae single-celled organisms that use photosynthesis to survive eventually when food started to exist on land the algae moved there from the water which required a ton of adaptation moving from being constantly wet and relying on all the things that exist in water to surviving on dry land is a huge evolutionary hurdle to leap over so instead of evolving slowly over time the single celled ancestors of algae spirogloia muscacola just stole the genes for dry tolerance from bacteria that lived in the soil i'll just take that yoink knowing this combined with the small amount of exposition from the comic everything falls into place every power you get in the game while playing is another bit of biomass dna that you pick up why is it even there to begin with well it all goes back to relief science in the comic it's made clear that the humans are intentionally experimenting on the thing in order to suss out its abilities and limitations it eventually breaks containment because of course it does sneaks into seattle and apparently causes quite a bit of havoc there until it is contained once again third time's a charm right no it gets out because of course it does uh how probably some of that intelligence it picked up from the lab mice that it ate basic puzzle and maze solving it's not entirely clear along the way it stumbles into dna samples that provide it with more powers and abilities some of them are actually pretty easy to source echolocation bats shrews dolphins and beluga whales all have incredibly powerful echolocation abilities arachnotisis shooting webs we got spiders for that things like photokinesis are a little bit science fictiony but uh have you ever seen an octopus camouflage itself they are really good at it keratosis the shield power it can develop was probably the hardest power for me to figure out since that's really not something a ton of animals can do just produce keratin on demand keratin is the stuff that makes up fingernails and hair and it's incredibly tough and complicated stuff it's difficult to synthesize on demand but then i learned about the fugu takafugu oh i almost made it through then i learned about the fugu takafugu rubrips a puffer fish that is incredibly popular among genomic scientists in particular because of its small genome that's easy to map and compare other things to there's no way that a place that was doing advanced research into genetic diversity and abilities wouldn't have some fugu takafugu rubric samples laying around and what's more the fugu takafugu rubrips is capable of producing semi-spontaneously a form of keratin mucus that protects it from invading fungi not quite a protective shell against explosions but it's what i got parasitism doesn't even seem that hard at this point there's plenty of organisms that can control brains even human brains it's just about cranking that ability up to 11. informing itself into a perfect human replica well we'll get there but this doesn't answer the questions the things i really want to know if it can absorb dna from what it eats why doesn't it just eat a person become a person and do whatever it wants the other question is where the heck did this thing come from i'm going to answer the second one first because i think it's easiest where did it come from it was made by people probably the relief science people they created an organism probably even a manipulated form of bedelio dia rotifers that took this dna stealing up to the next level and it was safe at first just a hyper evolutionary water creature until it kept going it got samples it wasn't supposed to got into some tube effects worms got into some humans dogs cats and who knows what else bacteria plants lizards anything that would make it bigger and smarter and more complicated and it spiraled out of control humans made this thing while studying genomics and in so doing created a monster not unlike the one dr frankenstein created except this one is an amorphous rising mass of hunger and consumption but then the latter question if it can steal dna from anything at all why doesn't it just eat a human learn how to change into one enough to pass the scanners bada bing bada boom world conquest well this is because of one final little nugget given to us in the comic that if it eats something that has a survival instinct that conflicts with its own it can create problems like if it absorbs the dna of too many humans that want to see it dead it will quite possibly want to kill itself so it needs something without that instinct early on the humans that stumble upon it in the abandoned lab probably don't have that instinct because they don't even know what they're up against but the rest of the labs they totally do so it has to be extraordinarily careful with what dna it absorbs and what it just eats for energy not just any sample of human dna is gonna work and that's why it has to go to the heart of the facility to unpack the prize a completely untainted sample of human dna where did it come from who knows but it's clearly important because it's behind so much security and it offers precisely what the creature needs to escape a perfect disguise humans created something that they didn't fully understand and in trying to understand it they created a literal monster why who's to say maybe they were studying cancer or longevity or new forms of gene therapy or biological weaponry who knows but here's the real question you're probably asking could this thing exist in real life and the answer to that is it already does and it's right behind you jason no i'm just kidding this thing is totally a work of fiction dna isn't like game boy cartridges where you can just modularly insert them into yourself like a device and have it do whatever thing it did on another animal if someone gave me bird wing dna i wouldn't just grow bird wings plus the rate at which this thing grows is absolutely absurd it would let off a ton of heat like for example there's this dubious claim that john brower minoch was able to gain 91 kilograms in a week this sounds implausible and the citations are kind of weak but let's say that it is real this is nothing compared to what the monster gains it's able to gain biomass in seconds hundreds of pounds in minutes if we're being generous this would be letting off so much heat that the darn thing would be smoking letting off fire and be in danger of its proteins denaturing this thing is purely a work of fiction thank god no caveats no butts worst case scenario we could make some sort of monster that every year could grow an extra brain or mouth or something but that's just about it none of this it has become a towering skyscraper monster in two hours and has about 15 magic powers stuff but um just in case i um am wrong uh don't go experimenting too much on those little asexual rotifers please pretty please just don't do it i i really don't want to die i do want another carrying game though so make one now phobia game sincerely austin and i'll give a personal shout out to my top tier patrons is b mads jurgensen ronald coleman jared beecher ellen hagars added damn tp nicholas blinger marissa resnick and mazer you guys are awesome you're the best patrons i could ever have and if it weren't for you guys little goofy videos like this one would never exist thank you so much [Music] you

Channel: The Game Theorists

Views: 1,972,610

Keywords: Carrion, carrion ending, carrion gameplay, carrion monster, carrion ending explained, carrion trailer, carrion comic, carrion explained, scary game, horror game, scary, the science of carrion, carrion game, the science, the science of, game theory, game theorists, matpat, game, carrion, carrion walkthrough, carrion part 1

Id: 1D_XCVzg86g

Length: 16min 50sec (1010 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 04 2021