Developer Strange Scaffold's catalog includes a wide variety of games.Last year they published the excellent Monster Hunting max payne-like El Paso and other locationsI consider this to be one of my favorite games of 2023, but that doesn't mean every game is a third-person shooter.
They have a sci-fi body horror economic game (Space General Organ Trafficking Simulator), a cute story-based poker game (sunshine shuffle), and even a talking adventure game with dog stock photos (Alien airport is now run by dogs).Even knowing the variety of themes and gameplay they've been working on, I doubt they were ready to announce life eaterthey describe it as a “horror-fantasy kidnapping simulator”, but at the same time it lives up to its description and was not at all what I expected.
The setting of the story is very simple. You are a modern-day druid living in the suburbs, and once a year you must sacrifice someone to the god Djinn Force to prevent the end of the world. After the first chapter of the game, the protagonist kidnaps a man and locks him in a cage in the basement of his home, and the relationship between the two becomes the heart of the drama. Over the years, we see their relationship develop as they question their faith and discuss heavy themes of how far their devotion will take them.It was clear from El Paso and other locations Creative director of that strange scaffolding Zaravia Nelson Jr. has a great sense of story and character, and there's a great warmth and empathy to both of their writings. It's all told through cutscenes featuring stylish still images with full voice acting, making for a highly engaging narrative package that traverses between levels.
So what exactly is Horror Fantasy Kidnapping Simulator and what does it entail in terms of gameplay? It's a lot more abstract than you might expect. Rather than actually controlling an avatar and sneaking around, you use a video editor-like interface that gradually reveals information about your target's schedule, and determines the percentage of schedule you need to abduct your target without getting caught. I'll clarify. Each person has a timeline for each day of the week, initially filled with boxes blocked by static electricity. Clicking on that box will give him three options on how to reveal it, each taking a different amount of time and adding different amounts of suspicion to your character.
These options range from “slash the tires” to “hack the computer” to “break into the house”, but this is mostly just flavor text since the important part is the “resources” you use. Each level has a fixed amount of time given to you before abducting the target, so it is very important to be on time. The Suspicion Meter also needs to be managed, but can be reduced by time-consuming activities. Even if you fill up the Suspicion Meter, it won't be game over as he will be allowed three attacks before being caught by the authorities. Each action option has a different chance of discovering activity on that block, but it's never clear exactly what percentage you're dealing with. If successful, it will reveal blocks in the schedule due to activities such as sleeping, eating, and work, and you will finally be able to understand the shape of the person's day.
It's a very clever setup, but the game sometimes struggles to balance the abstract nature of the mechanics with the story it's trying to tell through options and schedules. For a while now, I've been paying attention to whether people are stealing their pets or stalking their social media, but after clicking through a few schedule blocks, I've mostly noticed the numbers involved. I was just watching. Even when I was paying attention, the choices still felt disconnected from the action. It feels unnatural for something like slashing someone's tire to reveal that they are having dinner at the time. That said, there were plenty of tense moments where I had to make careful choices to get it done, and when that tension paid off, it was exciting.
Apart from the schedule-revealing resource game, there is a clever puzzle aspect. life eater It brings you back to the game's story. In many levels, you'll be given ambiguous orders by the Jinforce about who to target, and you'll have to investigate multiple people to determine who is the correct target. This forces you to work on the narrative aspects of uncovering the schedule and successfully tying mechanics and story together. There were times when I was genuinely surprised by the results of these investigations, and other times I was frustrated trying to figure out exactly what the game was trying to tell me. Missing the wrong schedule square can severely impede your investigation progress, prolonging the problem, or forcing you to play the level again and start over. On at least one level, I felt like I chose my victim based on my intuition, but in the end I got it right and wasn't sure if I understood the designer's intentions for the puzzle, which was unsatisfying. To do.
Each time you are kidnapped, you are also required to perform a sacrificial ritual to appease the Jinforce. This screen contains the victim's internal organs and several questions about the internal organs that must be answered in order to proceed with the ritual. For example, depending on whether the victim commutes to work or not, the pancreas or colon may need to be removed, or certain ribs may need to be broken if the victim has children. These questions remain the same from level to level, but are another tactic to get the victim more involved in the actual content of their schedule. There was a fun tension of having to keep looking for answers even though the required schedule was already clear, but the answer didn't feel as clear as it should have, or the ritual failed for some reason. There were times when I would do something like that. It wasn't clear to me.
Besides being a very good-looking film, the visual design life eater Helpful, but overwhelming. It has a nice color palette tied in with the cutscenes, but the video editor aesthetic isn't particularly visually stunning, although it's refreshing to see as the game's main interface. Everything within the UI is very clear and laid out in an intuitive manner, but despite being such a UI-driven game, it doesn't focus on next-level art. .
Strange Scaffold prides itself on its close-knit, employee-healthy studio culture, so it's nice to see a game like this properly scoped. The core mechanics are down and find ways to add wrinkles and break out before it feels too stale. I liked the way the story unfolded through both cutscenes and mechanics throughout the three-hour campaign, but I still wish the final product could have been a little more polished. There were some great moments that came to light in my research, but those moments of inspiration weren't as frequent as I would have liked. I'm glad the game is able to blend mechanics and story, and the fact that it can do that shows it can do it, but there are so many things about its structure that it gets in the way at times. I definitely see the storytelling potential this format has, so I'm hoping that the Endless mode coming post-launch will help refine that process and show what's actually possible .
Until then, life eater It's a smart experiment in using unique gameplay mechanics to tell a compelling story that doesn't live up to its full potential.
Life Eater comes to PC via Steam on April 16th. Code provided by publisher.
