Publisher: Strange Scaffold
Developer: Strange Scaffold
Medium: Digital
Players: 1
Online: No
ESRB: Not Rated
As I played I Am Your Beast, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d played it – or at least a game very much like it – before. Despite the fact it just came out this fall, everything about the game felt very familiar.
On some level, you could say this is because I Am Your Beast is so simple and so intuitive. The whole point of the game – is to go into a level, kill everything that moves, and get out as fast as you can. Even if it’ll take you a long (long) time to master it, and even if there are some extra conditions added in some levels, the gist of the game is obvious the moment you pick it up.
At the same time, though, this familiarity may stem from the fact that the concept of “go fast, kill everything” is hardly all that new. Off the top of my head, in recent years we’ve had Neon White, Ghostrunner, Severed Steel, Ultrakill, and plenty of others – including El Paso, Elsewhere, which came out almost exactly a year before I Am Your Beast from the same developer and publisher. Obviously there are plenty of differences between the games, and I don’t want to take away from any of them given how good most of them are, but I’d be lying if they didn’t collectively lessen I Am Your Beast’s impact.
(I’ll also note that I Am Your Beast sort of reminds me of Children of the Sun, another game where you have to kill everyone. I wouldn’t include it in the previous paragraph since Children of the Sun is more like a puzzle game and requires more planning, but the overall vibe – of a person trained to be a murderous weapon unleashing their vengeance on the people who wronged them, with a story told largely in weird interstitial segments – is awfully similar.)
As long as you’re okay with a little sameness, though, I Am Your Beast can be a lot of fun. The short nature of the levels mean that you’re unlikely to get sick of the game (though given you also need to get an S-rank to unlock later levels, at a certain point you may get tired of doing the same level over and over to achieve that). Not only that, you move quickly, and the levels are generally designed in a way to optimize speed over everything else.
What’s more, as you’d expect from a Strange Scaffold game, the aesthetics are top-notch. The story is told via phone chats between levels, which are full of great voice acting and visuals that make them surprisingly compelling. On top of that, the soundtrack is outstanding – perhaps not as great as that of El Paso, Elsewhere, but not far off, either (which makes sense, seeing as both games were scored by RJ Lake).
Again, I Am Your Beast hardly breaks the mold as far as frenetic first-person murder games go. But it’s still a fun, stylish take on the genre, which means that you could do a lot worse than giving it a go.
Strange Scaffold provided us with an I Am Your Beast PC code for review purposes.
