Carrotting Brain

I have a soft spot for small games that know exactly what they want to be, and Carrotting Brain is very clear on this point: get four or five friends on a couch, hand everybody a controller, and watch cartoon bunnies detonate each other across crumbling planetary arenas. That pitch will either grab you immediately or it won't, and the game has no interest in convincing the undecided. The physics engine is the real star here. Built on Unity's native rigid-body simulation, it treats every explosion, falling boulder, and stray bullet as a genuine physical event. Bullets can ricochet off terrain and penetrate surfaces depending on calibre, so a badly aimed sniper shot can tunnel through the ground and loop back around on a spherical map. The terrain itself uses a vector-based destruction system rather than a pixel grid, which means craters and tunnels hold clean geometry instead of jagged blobs. On the gravity-well arenas like the Moon map, you can dig straight through a planet and ambush someone on the other side. That moment, the first time it happens, is genuinely delightful. The weapon roster covers an impressively wide slice of carnage: blunts, blades, pistols, SMGs, shotguns, rifles, machine guns, sniper rifles, grenades, and rockets all share space in the loadout. The variety is real, and combined with the destructible multi-planet stages it means sessions rarely play out the same way twice. Comparisons to Worms and Liero are earned, though the real-time movement and simultaneous chaos puts it closer to Soldat's frantic energy than Worms' turn-based deliberation. Split-screen supports up to six players, which is the number where the whole thing tips from chaotic into beautifully illegible in the best possible way. Here is where honest scouting requires a pause. This game entered Early Access in October 2015 and, as of this writing, the last developer update was over eight years ago. Only two Steam user reviews exist. There is no evidence of an active community, no visible roadmap progress, and the original Early Access disclaimer from Valve is still live on the page. On Mac, support for older OS versions was quietly dropped along with Steam's 32-bit sunset. What you are buying is a snapshot of something that had real promise and a clever technical foundation, arrested mid-development. The bones are genuinely good - the physics sandbox produces moments of accidental brilliance - but you are buying a preserved alpha, not a finished product. For solo players there is nothing here. This is purely a local multiplayer experience, a party game that requires bodies in the room and controllers in hand. If that specific context applies to you - game night regulars, a TV setup with a few USB controllers collecting dust - then Carrotting Brain punches above what its obscurity suggests. Go in with calibrated expectations about its unfinished state and the chaos it generates is real and reproducible. Go in expecting a polished release and you will feel the years of dormancy immediately.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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