Gori: Cuddly Carnage review for PC, PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch

I feel like it’s been a long time since I’ve played a game I’ve really loved. That’s not to say I haven’t played some very good games in the last little while, but if we’re talking about games that make you feel giddy, that you can’t/don’t want to put down…those, obviously, are rare.

Gori: Cuddly Carnage qualifies as one of them, though. It’s amazing in every way imaginable.

To be sure, it’s the kind of game that will only appeal to you if you’re after a very specific genre and feeling. It feels like it belongs to about 10 or 15 years ago, like a midway point between Bayonetta and DmC: Devil May Cry, and Sunset Overdrive. It’s a wildly over-the-top hack and slash action game, with insane colours, lots of swearing and juvenile humour, and bucketloads of blood. I didn’t know I was secretly pining to return to that era, but the entire time I was playing Gori: Cuddly Carnage, I had a massive smile on my face.

I think this is because the game never lets up. You start slaughtering mutant unicorns in chaotic and violent ways right from the get-go, and Gori is basically propelling you forward from that moment on. Whether you’re flying through the air on your hoverboard across massive gaps, or launching missiles at evil eyeball spaceships, we’re talking about a game that’s pretty much constantly in motion.

To this end, it helps that Gori excels at keeping you moving. Soaring around levels on your hoverboard is an absolute blast as you grind across billboards and along rails. Combat is effortlessly fast-paced, allowing you to run headlong into levels and just start attacking everything that moves. Most importantly, the camera never gets in your way, so you always have a good view of the destruction you’re wreaking.

And this is a destructive game (in the best sense of the term). Your hoverboard is equipped with blades that allow you to scythe through enemies with ease. It’s. It long before the game gives you a rocket launcher, adding to your arsenal in delightfully explosive ways. You can chain together combos in the sky, flying upwards as you slice unicorns limb from limb. We’re talking about a game where you can rip off a unicorn’s head to stab it through its heart, and where you can kill giant walking hands by slicing off their thumbs and stabbing them in the eye (located, obviously, in their palms).

To top it all off, you get to do it all as an adorably cute cat. You communicate in meows, obviously, and it never stops being awwww-inspiring. (I regret nothing about that pun.)

Everything about Gori: Cuddly Carnage is simply amazing. It delivers absurd, over-the-top action in a package that’s tailor-made for anyone who holds a soft spot for ‘00s gaming, and as far as I’m concerned it’s one of the best games of the year so far.

Wired Productions provided us with a Gori: Cuddly Carnage PC code for review purposes.