Carrier takes the 'Jill Sandwich' line in Resident Evil and turns that into a whole game.
(Content Warning: some dreamcast era gore and gun violence)
I'm a person who very much enjoyed the state of survival horror in the late 90s and early 2000s. Resident Evil 1 - 3 were all games I loved, Parasite Eve is still one of my favorite experiences to return to, and Silent Hill remains a video game that I think about frequently. So seeing that there was a survival horror game that looked quite a bit like the Resident Evil series, I was stoked to jump in here.
Carrier tells the story of a gigantic aircraft CARRIER (get it?) that was returning home from a mission but had lost all contact with its home base in North America. A duo of soldiers from the organization SPARC (one of whom is your playable character) are sent to investigate what's going on. On their way there though, they are shot down by the carrier and crash land on its surface. This is where the game begins in earnest.
The game then, nearly unceremoniously, drops some zombies on your front door and lets you have at it. The game almost assumes you've played Resident Evil before and don't need an introduction into what is going on with the zombies. You've got a gun and there's zombies, you know what to do.
It's worth noting here that the controls of this game are similar to the earlier RE entries in that they are using 'tank controls'. What this means is that there's a fixed camera that is swapping positions between visible scenes and you control your character by pressing up to move forward and down to move backwards, regardless of what position the camera is in. I know that this is a pretty painful way to control a character, but I also think that using fixed camera angles can really benefit games in the horror genre. By restricting the things the player can see, the designers are able to play tricks on the player and warp their expectations about what is around any given corner. Not to mention, taking away some aspect of control from the player feels like a very effective tool for creating an atmosphere that can feel hostile and dangerous, but in the way you would want a haunted carrier to feel. A good example of this kind of camera use to scare the player can be seen in one of the first scenes in Silent Hill 1. The way the camera begins in positions that the player is used to and slowly starts to weave around is genuinely unsettling and serves the purpose of the scene incredibly well. If you've got the stomach for some PS1 gore then it's well worth the watch.
All that said, I don't find the minute-to-minute action of Carrier to be particularly exciting. I suspect this is because I've played games like Resident Evil 4 or even the more recent Resident Evil Village and by comparison the action in these older-style survival horror games doesn't feel as fresh. That's not to say it's bad, it just isn't the thing that I think this game is doing well.
What I do like about this game is its dialog and vocal performances. To be clear, the dialog is very bad and it is performed in a way that no real human would speak. However, I love that. Similar to things like the zoom-in on someone's face in Oblivion, I don't think the dialog was built to be intentionally campy, but the effect is still so much fun. The flip-flop between running down a hallway of unspeakable plant-zombie monsters and then ducking into a room to meet the weirdest guy you've ever seen is genuinely enjoyable. I'd give some longplays of this game a watch if that at all sounds interesting.
While Carrier doesn't feel like a high point for the Dreamcast or the genre, it was a pretty fun jaunt while it lasted. Considering that Resident Evil: Code Veronica also launched within a few days of this game, I'm not surprised that a lot of folks missed this one. But if you're a fan of the genre or like campiness in games, then this is at least worth booting up to see just how wild the cutscenes are.