Erin's Extreme Avatar Guide: Carnival of Terror

The Basics

Carnival of Terror is essentially a point and click game played entirely with a mouse. Use your mouse to guide your cross hair around the screen and shoot clowns with left click as they appear. Clowns can appear by running across the screen from the left and the right sides, or they can float on screen from above using umbrellas. Occasionally, they will throw pies at you that damage your health, but you can shoot pies to avoid this.

This game does not have levels; it just continuously goes until you run out of time, health, or ammo. If you run out of any of these three things, it’s game over! Three meters at the bottom of the screen display your time, health, and ammo amounts. If they display as green, you have plenty of shots left. Yellow means you should look for some bonuses to boost you back toward green, and red means you’re in danger of ending the game. Obtaining bonus items is the key to making your game last long enough to get the avatar score. Without them, your game will end around 300-400 points, which is miserably low when you’re aiming for a score of 725+.

Bonuses

Bonus items parachute down to help fill the meters at the bottom of the screen. They’re not worth points, but they are absolutely necessary to getting the avatar score like I stated above.

Health – this looks like a green cross and increases your health meter by one pie’s worth of damage.

Ammo – this looks like a brown crate and increases your ammo by 10 shots.

Clock – this looks like–well–a clock, and it increases your time remaining by ten seconds, which can really add up when going for the avatar.

Ammo and clock bonuses are what really matter in this game. Don’t worry about your health too much. It takes a lot of pies to actually bring your health down to a critical point, so don’t waste your precious ammo on hitting health bonuses until (or if) you really need them. There’s also a cheat code in the game that will reset your health, discussed in the Tips & Tricks section below.

The key to getting the avatar in this game is to keep the game going for as long as possible and keep your ammo full so you can continue to play. That being said, prioritize going for clock bonuses over all others. You get cheat codes for health and ammo (discussed below), but the game does not have a cheat code to reset the clock and give you extra time. Thusly, time becomes your biggest concern.

After clock bonuses, prioritize hitting ammo bonuses. You can also use certain strategies to preserve your ammo and maximize your points, which we will discuss below. Getting the avatar score is based on a lot of luck, as bonuses appear at random. As you practice this game, you will run out of ammo or time a lot, and it will be frustrating. Eventually, you’ll get lucky and get enough ammo and time bonuses to reach the avatar score.

Scoring & Strategy

The chias' body parts have different point values when hit, so take note of how the game is scored:

Head – worth 2 points. Shooting the head will expose the body.

Arms – worth 3 points. These are harder to shoot, considering their size and how quickly the chias move across the screen.

Body – worth 6 points. This is by far the easiest to shoot due to its size, so I suggest you prioritize shooting the body over everything else. However, be careful! If you shoot both the arms and legs off of a chia, it will explode and do damage to you! If you see a chia smoking and vibrating, it’s about to explode and you should shoot the body as quickly as you can.

Legs – worth 2 points.

Umbrella – worth 1 point. You can use one shot of ammo to shoot the umbrella the chia’s float in on from the top of the screen. I avoid doing this because it’s a waste of ammo.

Pie – worth 1 point. I do try to shoot these to get an extra point and avoid doing damage to my health meter.

The best method I have found is to hit the head, which exposes the body and gives you 2 points. Then, hit the body, which will give you 6 points, for a total of 8 points per chia. This maximizes the amount of points you can receive with the least amount of ammo used. It’s also one of the faster ways to eliminate chias as they come on screen, ensuring you will hit most of them.

Of course, you can always try shooting the head, arms, legs, and body of the clown in that order to net you 13 points per clown, but I find this takes too much time and ammo. This method usually makes me miss other clowns and run out of ammo much more quickly than I’m comfortable with, but I know a lot of players who do this.

Tips & Tricks

If you have a lot of health left but you’re low on ammo, avoid shooting the pies and let them hit you to conserve ammo.

If you’re low on ammo but have a decent amount of time left, save those shots for ammo bonuses.

Type “custard” to reset your health bonus once per game. Doing this will probably prevent you from ever having to shoot for health bonus using your previous ammo.

Play on the largest screen size possible to help with your aim. This can also help you get the chias that dart across the very back of the fairground, but I try to avoid them as a rule because I usually end up wasting my ammo.

Type “piecrust” to reset your ammo to full. I usually avoid hitting any of the ammo bonuses in the beginning of the game and go for as many chias as possible first. When my ammo is one shot away from ending my game, I use the piecrust cheat to reset it, and after that is when I start going for the ammo bonuses.

Some say that viewing the instructions of the game and clicking on the clock results in more clock bonuses appearing. This is just a rumor, but feel free to try it and let me know if it really works for you. It seemed to help me when playing, but maybe it was just luck.

Stay spooky (and extreme), everyone! Now, get out there and claim that creepy clown-faced avatar for yourselves!