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CarnEvil


The reviews on this site are the text versions of the videos on my YouTube channel. The text based reviews use (if at all) very little pictures. Please follow the link to the corresponding video in order to see in game graphics.


CarnEvil is a light gun game made by Midway in 1998. In the story a group of teenagers visits a spook tour on a graveyard. The main protagonist does leave the tour and finds a strange looking tomb stone with a golden coin token and a matching insert slot. He inserts the coin which causes the whole graveyard to transform into an amusement park called CarnEvil. The player may choose amongst 3 levels. After those a fourth level is unlocked. Each level concludes in a bossfight and three levels feature a mid boss. Special weapons such as a shotgun, a sub machine gun, a flame thrower and an acid thrower can be collected by shooting at them. There is also a magazine capacity upgrade which lasts for one life and disappears after a continue. The levels are: A haunted house, a Christmas village, a freak show and finally the big top of professor Tökkentäkker, the main boss.


The player controls the game with a plastic pump action shotgun with pistol grip. This brings the shotgun shaped light guns made by Titan Concepts (China Delta Group) to my mind which were released for the XBOX and the PlayStation 2. Sadly there is no console port of CarnEvil.


Tökkentäkker speaks with a thick accent nearly as bad as mine. The game includes lots of black humor and puns. Examples are some names of the enemies. One boss is called Eyeclops as in Cyclops, because he has plenty of eyes instead of just one. Tökkentäkker is pronounced Tokentaker in the game as he runs an amusement park. The game was made with much love for details and has many Easter eggs. The game can be set to be rather gory and bloody. However the violence can be turned down a lot in the options menus. In the options some other parts of the game can be altered in order to make the game less offensive, such as swapping the baby boss enemy for a teddy bear, or cause the enemies stop making vulgar gestures.


In my opinion this is a great game. It manages to be a horror themed light gun game without copying titles such as The House of the Dead or Beast Buster. The animation of character movement is well done, the graphics are impressive for their time and the music matches the setting perfectly. I think the difficulty of the game is well adjusted however it can be tweaked in the options as well, through multiple settings, which I highly welcome in any light gun game.


After the main protagonist beat the game he is set back to the tombstone which started it all. Then he did the same thing as I did: He inserted the coin right again for another playthrough.