Gori: Cuddly Carnage – PS5 Review

From Swedish dev Angry Demon Studio and publisher Wired Productions comes action hack and slash platformer Gori: Cuddly Carnage, Gori being a cute orange cat that brought to mind original Xbox game Blinx: The Time Sweeper. Only Gori isn’t the one doing the wisecracks, it’s your talking hoverboard F.R.A.N.K. That’d be a backronym, but we’re happy to remain ignorant. Or we zoned out during the cutscene explaining that part. You see, he’s really damn annoying.

One antagonist even tells us something we’d already concluded by this point, but as moments of realisation go, it’s up there with the execrable film Top Cat Begins in which the protagonist finds a bin full of DVDs of the film he’s appearing in. Gori himself is all purrs and cute cat touches, but sadly his companion isn’t.

The traversal is by way of running around on foot, grinding sick rails and wall grinding along billboards. You can also remain airborne a fair while by chaining a combo together, but this isn’t that reliable. If we were really lazy, we’d write a mini-review and call this a half-baked cross between Sunset Overdrive and any number of action slashers, with a little Ratchet and Clank into the bargain.

Only it lacks the refinement that was present in Insomniac’s Xbox One exclusive almost ten years ago, nor the variety in dispatching enemies from the same developer’s PS5 technical showcase. An aside, did Microsoft honestly think it would sell consoles? We only played it as we’d already backed the wrong horse at that point. What can we say, it was a birthday present.

At any rate the backstory, such as it is, is that your creator works for a toy company who is seeking their next big product. You see, Gori is an animatronic doll pet thing, but he’s ordered destroyed when the company go with a different angle. That being cute fluffy unicorns.

Only they go bad and take over the already messed up world. It’s down to you to see them off. Practically this is you wading through hordes of enemies across the eight levels on offer. They start out as just basic groundborne enemies, but as you progress, enemies you face in subsequent levels are added to the opponents you face.

They require you to mix things up a bit, but we cry foul at the seahorses that you faced on an aquatic level showing up on landlocked stages. Not for the out of context floating around seahorses, more the fact they project a shield over enemies. We get that the devs want to use the expanding menagerie and that you’re to face them, but ugh.

It doesn’t help that the enemies look like a bit of a mess. Yes, this is an indie and your aim is to slice them up in no short order, but things are rough from the first unicorn encounter and don’t improve. Talking of the slicing, it’s fun enough but meeting a tough enemy AKA a tank is a guaranteed combo breaker. Perhaps we’ve missed the nuances of the combat system a little here, but it feels a bit mean spirited.

Each level has a par score, time and maximum combo to reach. Beat these and you’ll get a good score and count towards a trophy for getting all stars in all levels. At least these stack so you’re not required to do them in one run, but it still means replaying levels over and again. Angry Demon would have you replay levels repeatedly, but despite the mechanics encouraging you to do so, we didn’t feel compelled to do so.

You see, the levels are pretty uninspiring for the most part with lots of similar looking rooms that you’re not entirely sure if you’ve visited or not. This is especially noticeable on the third level set in a factory that had us going over what felt like the same ground repeatedly. The museum/underwater level had some character at least.

As well as combo/score/time scoring thresholds, there’s also three key segments per level that grant you access to a redux of the boss fight from the same stage without needing to replay the entire level again. It’s all well and good, but as is the case with so much in Gori: Cuddly Carnage, you’ll be looking at replaying levels over and again to find the pieces and hence unlock what the trophy description seems to describe as a new game+ of sorts. Forget getting a decent time on a level if you’re looking for these keys.

There’s also multiple chase sequences where you have to outrun a wave/toxic sludge/whatever and they all generally pan out in similar fashion. You run into the screen in the style of Crash Bandicoot like it’s 1996 all over again, only there’s no real challenge in doing so. It feel a bit arbitrary and tacked on for no real reason other than to disguise the relative blandness of the levels or to make a perfect run necessary to get the gold star for the time.

At least these work. We’ve had multiple glitches not triggering the next part of a heavily scripted sequence, one notably mid boss encounter of sorts where we waited in vain for the next part to trigger having beaten that current phase.

Fussy jumping from one grind rail to another isn’t a big problem when you’re in a normal level, though its imprecision is acutely felt in boss fights. Especially when the floor is lava/electrified/toxic sludge etc. This, in conjunction the game camera just doing entirely its own thing makes for a very frustrating and harder than it should be experience. If you’re in the general vicinity of a rail, you’d hope the sticky nature exhibited on occasion would come into play, but it often doesn’t.

Replaying the first level after a bit of time away from Gori revealed that tapping  in the vicinity of a rail snaps you to it, but a tooltip would be handy. We play so many damn games that the nuances of each control scheme don’t come naturally, so you’ll have to excuse us there.

It has been more through luck than judgement that we’ve prevailed on a couple of occasions, one boss fight being an electric floor delight combined with the aforementioned camera frustrations, meant we took more damage from missing a ramp than being hit by the boss directly. All while trying to grind and launch rockets at the obvious weak points, it made for a far more arbitrarily torturous experience than we’d have liked, only escaping with a sliver of health.

Another frustration is that all upgrades are gated by an in-game shop, with prices set deliberately high so that you have no choice with regards replaying levels if you want to snag upgrades to aid your way, The most stingy upgrade being an immediate continue that is consumed on use. Only it costs $5,000 a pop. This is money you could well use on a permanent upgrade, we’d recommend you did so as we didn’t and left ourselves a bit short for a while. It’s a mistake we only made the once anyway. At least the likes of Star Wars Outlaws let you find cosmetic items in the wild, here you have to pay for them instead of getting a functionally useful upgrade.

In conclusion, Gori: Cuddly Carnage is a fair action slasher but the technical shortcomings with the camera and scripting just not triggering make for a frustrating time.  The par scores and ability unlocks try to encourage repeat play, but we found one playthrough of a level was enough. We found ourselves playing the first level over and again just to mitigate the grind if we’re honest, if nothing else to avoid those damn seahorses.