It’s hard to conceive of a nastier workplace than Mouthwashing’s spaceship – that delirious, foam-clogged labyrinth of cracked sunsets and fire-freshness – but developers Wrong Organ are certainly upping the ante with their new game Carcass Clad. Announced just today, it’s a co-op simulation about a tank crew traversing a gutted and unholy city, loosely inspired by the 1939 “Winter War” between Finland and the Soviet Union.
Three players must collaborate to operate a dreadful machine, while going up against other dreadful machines covered in squirming and screaming “divine livestock”. Each player handles a different part of the tank. The Commander scouts through the periscope, plots routes, and monitors the radio; the Driver looks after steering, fuel consumption, and power allocation; the Gunner aims, shoots and reloads, as fast as they safely can. Amongst other difficulties for international audiences, all the tank controls are labelled in Finnish.
Mouthwashing was one of 2024’s finest singleplayer horror games, summarised by Ed Thorn (RPS in peace) as “a well-told, succinct descent into a crew’s deepest darkest secrets and struggles”. As such, I wasn’t really expecting Stockholm-based Wrong Organ to pivot to multiplayer.
“Ya we actually weren’t either,” says Jeffrey Tomec, gameplay lead, in an email conversation ahead of the reveal. “Carcass Clad was originally conceived as a singleplayer game about controlling three people in a tank simultaneously, but was shifted very early in development. To answer your question more fundamentally though, we had to ask some pretty existential questions about what Wrong Organ should do next as we finished up Mouthwashing’s development.
“Despite our love for narrative games, we don’t want to be pigeonholed as a walking simulator studio,” he goes on. “We think there’s a lot of room to grow and we want to make a game that shows our range. Carcass Clad is much more gameplay driven than Mouthwashing, and has very little in terms of a direct story. If I dare to call Mouthwashing our SOMA, then Carcass Clad should be our Amnesia: The Bunker. That being said, Wrong Organ is certainly not done making narrative games, we’re just determined for our next games to be more than just chasing Mouthwashing’s shadow.”
Mouthwashing was in part a game about being absolutely despicable to your colleagues, its opening line “I hope this hurts” a jab at unspecified abusers in the games industry. I’m morbidly curious to know whether Carcass Clad might foster similar antagonism between players, but writer and art director Johanna Kasurinen says it’s the exact opposite. “Carcass Clad is all about teamwork, the tension comes largely from learning how to work effectively as a unit while under pressure,” she tells me. “We wanted the characters to reflect that as well. They’ve already been a part of the ongoing war when you step into their shoes as the players. Now for the first time they’re truly alone in hostile territory with only each other and the tank to rely on when shit really hits the fan.
“I think the fantasy of going into a game like this is that you’ll be a well-oiled machine with your friends from the get go but without good communication mistakes begin to quickly stack up,” Kasurinen continues. “Have you ever had to navigate for someone who is driving a car by using only a physical map? Things get heated quickly when you were supposed to tell them to switch lanes ideally uhhh, a few minutes ago. What I will say is that by far the best playtests we’ve had were from groups that were already used to working together in some capacity. I guess if Mouthwashing was narratively about bad colleagues, with this game you can actually test how collegial you really stay under pressure.”
From Lethal Company to Peak, there’s been a trend recently in workaday-horror, slapdash-feeling co-op experiences that lend themselves to amusing sabotage and pratfalls. These games are often derided as “friendslop”, which I think is more a commentary on their overabundance than how they are to play individually. “By virtue of being a short playtime co-op game, Carcass Clad will likely be described as such,” Tomec acknowledges. “In my opinion though, our game is a much more directed and difficult experience than you would expect in a friendslop title.
“Our mechanics are all designed to create an oppressively brutal experience instead of a free-form social one,” he goes on. “The team really has to exist as one unit and work together to make any progress. One of the developers of Peak actually described our game as FriendSweat, which is perfect I think.”
FriendSweat could make a fine alternative title for the Yksiö, your tank. The tank’s name is, in fact, Finnish for “one bedroom apartment.” Kasurinen – who is Finnish – magnaminously notes that “mispronouncing goofy Finnish words is part of the spirit of this game, so just go for it.”
This streamer-friendly humour forms part of a more serious excavation of Finnish culture and history. “The setting is not a direct parallel, rather we wanted to bring in aspects of especially Finnish culture you don’t see depicted all too often,” Kasurinen goes on. “We had a lot of fun being able to work with Finnish voice actors for the trailer and everything inside the tank for example is written in Finnish. It’s a hard language to incorporate into the physical space of the tank controls because a lot of the words are just so long. I tried to pick relatively easy to pronounce names for our player characters, Kanerva, Taisto and Erkki. But with some stuff it’s just more fun to go with the more difficult ones…”
Technical designer Dave Van Egdom summarises the tank’s operation as “an amalgamation of military-inspired hardware and custom technology”. It sounds like it’ll be a nightmare to drive, “one of limited visibility, loud machinery and big cannons, where survival depends on how well your crew can work together,” as Van Egdom goes on. “An experience inspired by how we felt when playing multi-crew vehicles in some more realistic military games but also movies such as Fury, though done the Wrong Organ way.” (If you’ve never seen Fury, here’s a representative clip.)
Van Egdom professes to be “a bit of a tank guy myself”, a remark that makes me profoundly anxious about the contents of his garage. “We like to take inspiration from more obscure and interesting military technology that we can then put our own creative twist on given the freedom of a fictional universe,” he says. “Obviously, firing a blank into your V10 engine will see it roar to life, of course it does. And obviously you manually operate the full loading process of your 158mm cannon from magazine to breech, of course you do.” Of course.
“On top of that, the Yksiö features a range of other proprietary systems for you and your friends to learn and put to use out there,” Van Egdom continues. It’s not clear whether this extends to being able to cover it in flesh; by the sounds of it, that’s the exclusive prerogative of your enemy, the Green Lion cult, which is where the game bleeds more overtly into fantasy. “The carcasses part [of our title] mostly refers to the masses of divine livestock that the Green Lion cult attaches, effectively as improvised armor, to their weapons of war,” Van Egdom explains. “It is alive, grotesque, and also challenges your crew to find a way to punch through it all somehow.”
I’m not much of a tank guy, myself, but I do live in a yksiö, and I will always find time for a game – even a mandatory co-op game – in which I am slave to some ghastly apparatus. I’m one of the god-defying sickos who actively and full-throatedly enjoyed the Kinect game Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor, which alloyed the frenzy of piloting a deathtrap to the clumsiness of motion-sensitive controls. I’m also pretty big on videogames that investigate the exploitation of animals, in however farcical a way. So consider me enthused about Carcass Clad (no release date yet, sadly). Who amongst you is sufficiently out of love with life to join my crew? Bagsy the Driver’s chair.