Early previews for Swedish developer Angry Demon Studio and publisher Wired Production’s upcoming Gori: Cuddly Carnage are flooding in, and since there’s no such thing as too much praise, I want to get my two cents published before it drops next month.
Between the ubiquity of distractions on smartphones and the oversaturation of new games on the market, players have ever-increasing demands of their attention, but if there’s a title that can hold even the most distracted person’s attention, it’s this one.
For me, Gori is an amalgamation of things that I have enjoyed at one point or another — hack and slash, skateboarding, cyberpunk, comic books, dubstep… and cats. However, the eponymous character whom the player controls is not actually a cat despite his being so feline, cute, fluffy and prone to grooming himself.
No, soon after starting, the player finds out that Gori is an Ultra Pet™ which was a property of Cool-Toys Inc., the corporation most at fault for a toy uprising and the apocalypse which followed.
The cutscenes depicting Gori and Professor Y (Gori’s creator) in the days leading up to the apocalypse are presented in comic book-style panels with voiced dialogue to get the player invested in Gori’s quest of finding his creator and saving her from the clutches of the evil Adorable Army.
On the surface, Gori‘s concept sounds similar to that of Stray — another adventure involving a ginger cat’s odyssey through a post-apocalyptic, cyberpunk world to reunite with its loved ones. That’s where the similarities end, though.
Where Stray dealt with heady themes such as existentialism, artificial intelligence and unbridled human ambition, Gori thrives in absurdity and is all the better for it as gameplay is far more important than story in an experience like this — with an action focus, players must not only hack and slash, but also wall-ride and grind with his rocket-powered hoverboard.
Each area in Gori is dynamic and often strange, but level design is also consistently balanced and intuitive. The world felt fairly open, especially in the bigger city areas sometimes offering a few ways to get to a destination, but I never had a hard time figuring out where to go. However, where the game really shines is in its fast, fluid and, of course, gory combat.
Fans of Bayonetta or Lollipop Chainsaw will appreciate the frenetic pace of combat and how Gori provides the player with weapons to hack, slash, smash and blast their enemies to smithereens, allowing for a wide variety of ridiculously gruesome enemy murders.
For instance, whenever a hostile “uglycorn” is lying dazed on the ground, the player can press R1 (if playing on a controller) and Gori will perform a finishing move by pouncing on the enemy in slow motion before tearing it into shreds, spraying blood everywhere. With some bigger enemy types, Gori might launch into the air and decapitate them with its hoverboard.
Speaking of Gori’s hoverboard, it’s a joy to ride and fight with, but also a great source of comic relief. Its humor is consistently absurd and vulgar, but tastefully so — there’s even an upgrade which allows players to turn off the profanity filter so they can hear it in all its unbleeped glory.
In general I was into the themes and tone, though I did have a few concerns about mechanical aspects at this stage. For example, the floaty physics sometimes led me to overestimate how far I needed to jump to land on a rail, causing me to fall. Then, I’d be six feet below a rail when I hit the button, only to suddenly be on it and grinding.
I could also simply mash my attack while I was in the air to cut through flying enemies without having to aim, and once I figured a the trick to make bigger enemies vulnerable, I dispatched them with relative ease by doing the same thing over and over. This applied to bosses as well, though I still enjoyed their design and their variety of attacks in multiple phases.
While there are some glitches and bugs to be ironed out in addition to any possible work that might go towards navigation and combat, I still found it to be fluid and engaging, and I’m looking forward to exploring more of it and rooting for its success when it finally drops into 1.0 on August 29th.
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