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Carrion Reanimating! (Ouch)

You know what there aren't enough of? Black and white games. A few exist, but it's a format I'd love to see someone do with a big budget. However, in the meantime, this little splodge of oddness will do. Carrion Reanimating (oof) is a small arcade game in which you must reanimate corpses of locals you have murdered in order that their visiting friends and relatives won't be concerned. Of course.

Your character, Herbert West, carries a giant syringe, which is used to turn the dead bodies into zombies. Then they must be kicked in the correct direction, to reach whichever door their worried visitor is at. Wrong zombie at the wrong door means eaten visitor - less than ideal. If you fail to get their zombie buddy to them in time, the police will be called, and then you've got to deal with the plod traipsing around the house as well, trying to make sure he doesn't catch eye of your dastardly experiments.

It's made by Zombie Cow Studios (they behind the great Ben There, Dan That), teamed up with "internet legends" Lemmy and Binky (they behind such classics as Sexy Seaside Beachball and Admiral Adama’s Stareout Challenge), and despite the 1930s design, features 3D and shader 2.0 graphics and stuff.

Okay, green, black and white.

It's not exactly in perfect working order. The Options menu doesn't appear to do anything, which means a desired windowed mode isn't an option. In fact, the resolution is so bonkers that it somehow manages to move icons from my left monitor onto my right one, simply by running. It's also a bit buggy - on my first go Mr West was permanently wedged into the body of one of the zombies, which made things challenging. There's also perhaps a somewhat limited amount of game going on in there. But at the price of free, let's not get too picky.

And rather splendidly, the excellent dialogue (written by Zombie Cow's Dan Marshall) is narrated by our good chum, Jon "Log" Blyth, who does an excellent job. The whole game is a Lovecraft world presented in the style of Masterpiece Theatre, our host sat in an appropriately large armchair.

There's also online high score tables so you can compete to reanimate the most corpses, or alert the fewest bobbies. And all for free. They're too good to you. Download it from here. And here's the trailer:

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John Walker

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Once one of the original co-founders of Rock Paper Shotgun, we killed John out of jealousy. He now runs buried-treasure.org

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