Review: I Am Your Beast

While El Paso, Elsewhere was among my favorite games released last year, this year’s offering from Strange Scaffold has left me somewhat cold. That’s okay. Clickolding and Life Eater were pretty experimental and they just didn’t gel with me.

I was going to overlook I Am Your Beast. Something about its trailers didn’t gel with me, either. At this point, I can’t even remember what it was that made me stick my nose up at it. That’s because when I actually sat down to play it, it didn’t take long to gel with me at all.

I Am Your Beast (PC [Reviewed])
Developer: Strange Scaffold
Publisher: Strange Scaffold, Frosty Pop
Released: September 10, 2024
MSRP: $19.99

You play as Alphonse Harding, who is very violently opposed to doing one last job for his employer, the COI. He was, supposedly, told many times before that doing one last bit of wetwork would free him from his employment, and now he’s just done. Jaded would be putting it lightly. He reacts to being pulled out of retirement by killing every one of his co-workers in the area. When more get sent in, he kills them, too.

I Am Your Beast is pretty loose with its narrative. It’s hard to really get a feel for the stakes, as it’s largely just you in a forest, killing anyone wearing khaki in the area. The job, your employer, and the goals behind them are left pretty vague. They sound cynical, but so does everything else. The enemy soldiers are extremely blasé about the whole “being killed by a hyper-competent mega-soldier” thing. It either sounds like an expected outcome or an annoying inconvenience.

Harding is also voiced by Xalavier Nelson Jr. (the director at Strange Scaffold), and he’s largely just the same character as James Savage from El Paso, Elsewhere. He speaks in a low, overly-calm voice with a cutting, lighthearted edge. If Alphonse Harding had turned out to be James Savage having a nightmare at the end of the game, I probably wouldn’t have been surprised. I mean, I really like that voice. The dialogue is fun, and the delivery is great. It’s just… the same character with a different backstory. 

The narrative also lacks depth, mainly delivering cliches of action movies with hyper-competent, nigh-invincible protagonists – my favorite kind of action movie – and it’s really hard to tell if it’s taking itself seriously.

The game itself, on the other hand, clearly doesn’t take itself seriously. It’s an action game of the highest speed. You’re challenged to complete simple objectives and exit the level as quickly as possible. Sometimes, this involves killing all the enemies, and other times, you just need to touch a few laptops. However, your expedience is what is really important.

I’m having some difficulty recalling a movement system I enjoyed as much as I Am Your Beast. While it has some parkour elements, it’s not focused around them. You can climb trees and cross wires, but you can’t, say, run on walls. There’s no diving like in Max Payne (or El Paso, Elsewhere, for that matter.) There is also no bullet time to help you make sense of the chaos.

Where it’s successful is where most games find their success in combat: it’s very readable. It’s easy to tell what object you’re about to grab from the environment, and whenever you hit an enemy in the face with something, you know that their weapon is going to come flying out of their hand directly into your path of movement. It makes picking up a branch, throwing it at an enemy, stomping on their head, catching their knife, and then hurling that at another enemy both possible and intuitive without needing to boil it down to dedicated interactions or QTEs.

It’s clearly a game based around the philosophy of making the player feel powerful. Enemies will bark out ridiculous, panicked statements like “Harding’s using headshots!” just to fluff up your ego. Marketing material calls it “he’s-in-the-walls player fantasy,” which feels appropriate.

It doesn’t last very long, though. Or, at least, it doesn’t maintain that momentum for long. I clocked in at 2 hours. It pulls the brakes on you a couple of times, the first requiring you to complete a certain number of optional objectives and the second requiring an S rank on at least one level. The cutscenes, which are almost exclusively big dialogue subtitles displayed across a pan over a forest, actually take up a large amount of runtime. My husband complained that every time he looked at my screen, all he saw were subtitles.

However, the main narrative serves just as a foundation for the gameplay. It encourages you to complete side objectives and try and increase your rank on each level. It doesn’t really reward you very well, but being able to act with its frenetic combat is its own reward. That’s actually quite refreshing since a lot of games these days prop themselves up with minuscule prizes to keep you interested. I Am Your Beast just lets the fun do the talking.

The soundtrack is also enjoyable, but because the game just felt like a flash of entertainment to me, it was hard to really take it all in. It’s the same composer as El Paso, Elsewhere, and I kept listening to that soundtrack after the game was done, so I’m happy. Xalavier Nelson Jr. lends his vocals to a few tracks again, which I enjoy, even if it furthers the feeling that he’s typecasting himself.

I Am Your Beast is weak in some areas, but not significantly so. A large portion of it is just fine, but what’s good is really good. It manages a combat system that is fast and chaotic while still remaining intuitive, which is an impressive feat. Part of me wonders if something like this could be applied across a wider, longer game without diluting it. As it is, I Am Your Beast applies it perfectly, making it a short-lived but impactful experience.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}