Decarnation Critic Reviews

Decarnation is an incredible and well written video game, supported by an intelligent and always engaging and impactful storytelling. Furthermore, the play structure fascinates and surprises. Must have absolutely.

Decarnation has an excellent story that makes you feel a lot of emotions to keep playing it for hours, but the gameplay mechanics and parts are a little stained in the painting.

Ultimately Decarnation is incredibly thought-provoking. Gloria’s life in the physical world is slowly falling apart, which in turn has a significant impact on her deteriorating psyche. You’ll find yourself thinking about this game even when you’re not playing it, and there can be no greater praise than that.

It's quite hard to recommend Decarnation, because the game itself is rather bleak, depressing and melancholy-inducing. But then again - that's the whole point.

This is a narrative adventure short but intense that relies on a well-crafted pixel-art style to deliver a solid story about mental struggle.

Despite several useless and unsatisfying gameplay elements, Decarnation still features one of the best stories I've seen in a horror game with a fantastically portrayed message both visually and narratively and lots of excellent references.

Decarnation is not about the gameplay, but about the journey. And that journey is wrought with existentialism, Lovecraftian horror, and psychological quandaries that may be trigger inducing. It will grip you, refuse to let go, and entrap you until the end of its story. Should you play Decarnation, you will be opting into experiencing horror through the eyes of a protagonist you may, or may not, empathize with. Should you play Decarnation, you should also avoid sharing its execution of horrors that should remain unspeakable. In other words, avoid spoiling whenever possible.

Decarnation’s story is thrilling and unsettling, and every point the game gets is because of how well-crafted the winding nightmares are in relation to the overall progression of Gloria’s life.

Decarnation is a unique horror puzzler that tries to make sense of the main character’s emotional breakdown in ways that don’t make sense. It effectively keeps players off balance throughout, but also in ways that knock the gameplay off balance, unfortunately.

Had Decarnation not fumbled with its gameplay, I’d probably be giving this a perfect score. Its disturbing, yet engaging narrative, and top-notch presentation all come together in a way that somehow managed to exceed my already lofty expectations that the preview build had left me with. It’s just a shame, then, that those gameplay issues are so very intrusive. All too often I had my immersion broken and found my interest in continuing through Gloria’s plight waning due to how often Decarnation forces the player into irritating mini-games, or fussy stealth segments. On the whole, though, Decarnation still ends up being more than the sum of its parts, and I can confidently say that it’s worth the time of any horror fan.

Decarnation lives suspended between carefree French songs and disturbing melodies from a horrific world, between reality and nightmare. With a similar dualism, the work carried out by Atelier QDB presents peaks worthy of consideration from both narrative and visual points of view, intermingled with low-quality interactions – which often result in mere parentheses between a dialogue and the other, devoid of a proper sense – and poor technical realization. In this respect, in fact, the version for the Nintendo console is full of bugs that, in several cases, have seriously affected the enjoyment of the experience overall.

Decarnation flirts the line of pretension but ultimately handles the subject matter decently. The gameplay is too on the light side, and sometimes frustrating when it doesn’t work how it should. However, the audio/visuals are stellar making it a decent psychological horror that should please fans of the genre.

Decarnation is a game that carries you to the end precisely because of the appeal of its narrative and the way it illustrates the difficult issues it deals with, being the main reason for players to give it a chance. On the other hand, those looking for a more interactive experience may find that Decarnation just scratches the surface.

Decarnation is a game with a lot of potential that it just doesn't realize. There are absolutely good points to the game, such as its fantastic sprite art for the environments around you or the grotesque monster designs you encounter throughout, and the plot is also at times very relatable to anybody else going through a similar downward spiral in life, but this is not enough to counteract the overly long minigames or the unfortunately lackluster puzzles. This is made a bit worse by the fact that the game hits the point where most stories of this type usually end, and then keeps going for upwards of an hour, doggedly refusing to roll credits in favor of a drawn out series of epilogue scenes. I really wanted to like Decarnation–it was near the top of my list in terms of most anticipated indie titles for the year–but sadly it just did not deliver the experience I had hoped. It is not what I would necessarily call a bad game, but it is one held back by its multiple missteps along the way.