Wrought Flesh is held together by rotting sinew and prayer. It is mechanically and aesthetically grotesque. It tears itself apart with ambition and harbours more bugs than maggot-ridden offal. It is wholly unique despite being comprised of incongruous parts sewn into a Frankensteinian mass. It is a casu martzu, off-putting in nearly every regard but a delicacy for a select few.

The core of Wrought Flesh is simple. Pursue your prey and assimilate viscera into your body cavity along the way. Organs function like gear in a typical RPG but rather than be assigned slots, they take up a certain number of spaces within your body like Resident Evil. Further complicating matters is the fact your organs deteriorate through use; imbibing corpses wears down your intestines, healing over time breaks your heart, taking bullets fills your fat with holes. Some items lack durability but these are typically unique and come with some other caveat which will more likely than not make your other organs rot even faster. For example, a literal iron lung bestows massive agility but tanks your HP regen, making your heart(s) work harder and wither quicker. The player is constantly on the hunt for new organs to replace aging ones. This weaves a rapid gameplay loop where caution is typically thrown to the wind to kill enemies before your body fails. Parts can even be swapped in combat, but good luck playing inventory Tetris with bugs flying at your face. An option to quickly replace organs could have made the process of mending oneself mid-fight a smoother experience, but the current system of risk-reward works well enough. Organs can also be eschewed to leave space in your body cavity to hold more ammo and Killfuck. I, however, saw the cons of not having those stats to heavily outweigh doubling my reserves.

Organs are central to Wrought Flesh's Bio system. Some guns use blood instead of bullets for ammunition. As such, higher health pools mean a greater supply of shots, higher regen rates ensure leeched vitality is recuperated faster. Organs can also have elemental attributes like Fire, Electricity, Acid, or Explosive. While those impart resistance to their respective damage types, they also imbue Bio weapons with damage of that type. Bio weapons are greatly customisable as a result, able to exploit the weaknesses of some foes should the player have the appropriate organs. Even without picking up Bio weapons, the player always has their Finger Gun available should they throw their weapon to the floor, so in a pinch those elements still come into play, and this is in fact critical to defeating enemies which resist bullet damage. Elemental organs invariably occupy an inconvenient amount of space in your body cavity, which helps keep Bio in relative lockstep with weapon upgrades, neither becoming greatly stronger than the other.

Aiding the blistering pace of Wrought Flesh is a skiing system straight out of Tribes, though it leaves something to be desired. Without the jets of Tribes, momentum vanishes when hitting an upward slope. A high agility stat helps by giving you a greater jump and speed to simply leap over hills, but without enough agility you're going to be walking uphill a lot. One quirk of the engine is that your falling speed is taken into account when you start skiing, so jumping from a monstrous height onto flat terrain leads to ludicrous speeds.

The map design is effectively a series of spiderwebs, a central town stretching into small areas every which way for encounters and quest objectives. The lack of a map screen and repetitious environments would ordinarily cause navigational confusion. However, since there is invariably a separate objective in each of the cardinal and ordinal directions, and quest destinations are expressed as belonging to those directions, it is difficult to get lost. Those quests are also pretty damn simple for the most part, being in the vein of kill these enemies, get these key items. Some break the mould by offering a choice or requiring the player to carry certain organs in one piece to a destination.

Wrought Flesh's world is no masterwork of worldbuilding and lore, but the snippets of exposition gleaned from dialogue are engrossing enough and paint a portrait of disturbing dystopian surrealism in the tradition of H.R. Giger and Zdzisław Beksiński. In this land it is not only the bleeding flesh which is worshipped, but the euphemistic as well, the player character often rewarded for their efforts with a satiation of carnal appetites.

These constituent parts are rather incongruous at times, but Wrought Flesh is a perfect melange of grotesquerie for me, a Cruelty Squad I can gel with, a Brigand: Oaxaca of a different flavour.

Regrettably I am presently softlocked due to crashing on load, a shame since I loved what I was able to play.