"A game for everyone is a game for no one": Don't expect an easy ride in Carcass Clad, the co-op tank horror game from the makers of Mouthwashing

Tanks for doing your part

On my final day of Gamescom, strolling (running) around the indie area to make sure I don't miss anything good, I stumble upon Wrong Organ’s upcoming Carcass Clad. Set in a wartorn Soviet city, empty of people but littered with tanks wearing coats of Frankensteined cattle corpses (light stuff!), Carcass Clad is a three-player co-op experience that shares the stressful responsibility of piloting a tank and taking down enemy units between those unlucky three.

If you read the name Wrong Organ and thought, ‘Wait, the Mouthwashing team? They're making a multiplayer co-op game?’, I can't fault your surprise. Edwin did interview them about it back in June, but I walked up to the booth knowing the devs themselves and little more, so I was experiencing all of Carcass Clad and its heavy departure from their previous work for the first time.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun / Critical Reflex

“We wanted to make sure we tried something entirely new, and weren't just stuck in the box of painful walking sims," gameplay lead Jeffrey Tomec told me. "Mouthwashing was a game that’s hard in terms of narrative – Carcass Clad is a game that’s hard in terms of gameplay.” As Tomec lightly puts it, what made Mouthwashing ‘hard’ – a game where you live out the last months of a stranded spaceship crew – was its focus on psychological horror and exploring the depths of depravity humans can reach when forced into impossible situations; experiencing the narrative, at times, felt like trying to swallow rubbing alcohol (complimentary).

Carcass Clad is very unlike Mouthwashing in its approach to being ‘hard’.Tomec and executive producer Kai Moore gave me a guided tour of what turned out to be a very complex experience (and saved me from the added horrors of playing with complete strangers from the show floor). I load into the claustrophobic cockpit of a rusty Soviet-era tank, flush with slots for three players: Gunner, Commander and Driver. They tell me Gunner is the simplest role of the three, so I swallow my pride and take a seat behind the cannon, with the beautiful, wide-eyed low-poly models of my teammates visibly squashed up against me in this metal prison. If there’s anything that’s familiar from Mouthwashing, it’s the simple yet expressive artstyle of the human characters. The setup at the Gamescom booth also includes a literal periscope on the desk for me to peer through.

Image credit: Wrong Organ

Teamwork in Carcass Clad is key to victory; your goal is to blow up an enemy tank before it blows you up first. But there is pressure and tension in that collaboration: “The horror in this game is in trying to work with your friends and yelling at them for not doing their job,” Tomec explains. Said yelling is carried across mic channels in-game that simulate the audio distortion of, well, being in a tank, complete with incredibly loud background noise of treads and motors, crackly and low-quality audio output, and an increasingly frustrated tone as your fellow soldiers beg you to just load a goddamn shell already. Maybe that last one is just in my case.

Image credit: Wrong Organ

As Gunner, I'm responsible for loading artillery shells from huge rotating internal cylinders into the cannon itself, spinning and juggling the cylinders to dispose of spent shells without blocking the entry of new ones, manually calibrating the intended distance for a shell to travel, repairing damaged internals when necessary, and peering into the periscope (again, literally!) in order to aim at a target and hope to god I don't miss. I did, several times. If that sounds like a lot to handle, that's because it is. It's also all controlled with just a mouse, requiring precise and deliberate movements to not rotate the cylinders incorrectly, overshoot a target while aiming or lose precious time struggling to aim a repair kit at a fire inside the tank, lest the enemy tank take advantage of your hurried mistakes.

With so much to juggle, it's easy to forget that there are two other players with just as stress-inducing, complex jobs as you. As intended, this results in an intense pressure on every player to not only do their own part, but to listen carefully to each other and actually respond in kind. It's like working in a busy kitchen, but you're all dead if you mess up too many times. When I raise the difficulty with Tomec, he explains “A game for everyone is a game for no one. We’re okay with it being less accessible to absolutely everyone; we wanted it to be something that isn’t just booted up to have on in the background.”

Image credit: Wrong Organ

I have time for just one round of Carcass Clad – the first time I've had devs yell at me in an entirely consensual and agreed upon context – but together we manage to pull together and take down the enemy tank. Our tank does, admittedly, succumb to its damage seconds after the enemy, resulting in a victory screen that lasts only a few precious moments before we technically lose, but Moore defiantly states “It flashed up a victory screen! We won! Don't worry about it!”, and who am I to argue with a developer?

Carcass Clad is a unique experience, and Tomec isn't kidding when he says it won't be a game for everyone. But, if you've ever yearned for a game that makes yelling at your friends to do their fucking job justifiable and fun, and simulates a very specific stress in a controlled environment separated from the horrors of reality, Carcass Clad might be for you. It's a shame the physical periscopes are just for the Gamescom booth, though – Wrong Organ could make a killing selling it as a peripheral.

Travel and accommodation to Gamescom were provided by Hooded Horse.