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Death Trash and others want to know how the sausage is madeThe floor is meat
The floor is meat
“What’s with all the meat everywhere, anyway?” myDeath Trashalter ego Mildred asks. “It’s just there. Grows.” the meat merchant replies. “Maybe we’re living on a planet full of flesh and right now we’re standing on a crust of stone and dirt. So, do you want a piece of meat now?” I really don’t. But Mildred does. After all, this mystery meat is the main healing item in the game. It’s what keeps you and the world around you alive. It’s harvested from the ground like precious stones, the literal blood flowing in this grotesque world’s barebones economy, eaten raw and served in meat bars.
But where does the meat come from? Whence the amorphous flesh blobs and pools of blood? From another planet, another dimension? There are no animals in this strange ecosystem apart from Fleshworms. The strange meat seems to be linked to another mystery, the advent of the flesh titans (which are exactly what the name suggests). Soon we discover that we are able to commune with the meat and, through it, speak to a enigmatic being called The Oracle. The meat is a kind of universal consciousness, a flesh and blood information highway, into which those who are attuned to it can plug in. Whether the meat and the flesh titans are good or bad for humanity is up for debate, and there are factions that deify and others that hate them, vying for power. The clot thickens.
Death Trash Review Early Access | Challenging RPG In A Strange WorldWatch on YouTube
Death Trash Review Early Access | Challenging RPG In A Strange World
Death Trash isn’t the only game where mysterious meat, supercharged with strange powers and properties, dominates the world. The indie horror gameCarrionis another example in which an amorphous growth of meat takes over and creates a world in its image. In it, we play as an ever-growing toothy biomass that devours meat (mostly in the form of people) to become ever more massive.
Carrion’s meat monster bristles and twists with unnerving energy.
The same is true even for digging in the ground, which is seen as the flesh of the Earth. The whole town and the ground on which it is built becomes a gigantic metaphor for a universal, cosmological body, with districts named after anatomical parts likeBackbone, Gut, Marrow and Hindquarters. The Abattoir, a temple turned slaughterhouse in the outskirts, is in many ways the heart of the town but is also paradoxically hidden from sight and inaccessible for the most part of the game.
Pathologic’s bull enterprise sits at the heart of the town’s industry.
Whale meat features heavily throughout the Dishonored series.
Meat is everywhere, but its source is hidden. It’s a secret, even occult substance that separates the ignorant from the initiated, but it’s also something familiar and universal that connects all sentient beings. It is foreign and alien, but also something that we have an intimate connection with, eating it and making it a part of our own flesh. It’s something relied upon for survival and prosperity, but also a potentially hostile and insidious force that corrupts and spreads moral and physical disease. It is both alluring and disgusting, grossly material and almost spiritual.
The hunger of Little Nightmares' grotesque passengers is so all-consuming they’ll even try and eat Six if she strays too close.
An illustration of Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs' monstrous meat machine god. |Image credit:Frictional
