I Am Your Beast is now my favorite Strange Scaffold game, as both its story and gameplay is concise and quick. This is a game that will be fun for speedrunners, but if that’s not something you’re interested in, you’ll still be invested in seeing things to their natural end. Replayability and improving towards perfection is what will draw you back in once the story is completed. I Am Your Beast is fast and frenetic, where its gameplay enables you to be creative in its micro-sandboxes for one hell of a revenge thriller.
Stepping back: you are Alphonse Harding, a retired secret agent who worked for the Covert Operations Initiative (COI), and is being asked to come back to the life he left behind. Harding is wholeheartedly finished, now living in the woods, best to be left alone. Instead, the insistence that he return requires that he keep them at bay. However, this results in an escalating conflict from the COI in the hopes that this will convince him to return. It’s here where Harding begins the onslaught against COI forces encroaching on your peaceful retirement with a resounding “no” echoed with gunfire.
Harding goes into every mission without a weapon. Depending on your starting point, you can jump on an enemy’s head, Mario-style to pop their head like a zit. Then whatever weapon they were carrying becomes yours for the taking. This includes pistols, shotguns, assault rifles, and even sniper rifles. If you can’t find a weapon, you’ll have to make use of nearby logs to throw at enemies – this is what’s called “weapons of opportunity”. You can also slide into enemies to daze them, and stomp on their heads for a gruesome finish. Every weapon has limited ammo, when you’re out you can throw it to stun a nearby enemy. You’ll constantly be picking up weapons, and can even deploy bear traps to slow down the ensuing forces.
You’ll be reminded by a lot of games like Neon White and Anger Foot in particular, but mainly for their short levels and stopwatch that times you throughout each of them. The goal is to complete the objective asked of you: whether it be to use a number of laptops, eliminate all the enemies, or survive waves of attackers. Once completed, a marker will highlight an escape route via hatch. There’s no difficulty select, and out of all the missions, it wasn’t until the 20th mission where it actually felt challenging. This one really puts everything to the test. You’ll have to find every health pack or healing branch to see it through. Putting Harding on his back foot for a few missions is the right amount of power fantasy reset it needed until you reach the game’s climax.
At the end of a level, you’ll receive a rating anywhere from C through S. It’ll calculate your current time, time to next grade, and types of kills. The types of kills you do while in a level can earn you anywhere from 0.1s to 0.5s and even 1.0s in bonus time. After the level is completed, it opens up a bonus challenge to complete upon replay. If you complete that challenge, another bonus challenge opens up. It’s odd though, that even when you complete a level successfully, the only options are “Try Again” or “Exit”. There should be a “Continue” button to progress the story and/or move on to the next level. Instead this ruins the flow. I wish you could spend more time in a level to stalk your prey, but it’s entirely possible to run out of time and have to restart. This is a game about being quick and efficient rather than slow and careful.
You yourself are a squishy person, with a health bar displaying in green, yellow, orange, and red, then you’re dead. Thankfully there’s a quick restart button to start things over in a hurry. There’s a minimap that will point to a heatmap in red where enemies are going to be, always giving you information of their whereabouts, even if they’re on the move. This is the only information Alphonse has when in a level, other than his own eyes.
There are 26 levels in I Am Your Beast, and I completed it my first time in just over two hours, which included deaths, replays for challenges, and just general experimentation. I ended up beating a second time as progress was wiped (purposefully) during the review period. And seeing it through again, was just as good as the first time.
There’s a unique storytelling device they use between missions called “kinetic typography”. As every character Alphonse interacts with isn’t ever seen, everything is typed out in text across the screen while a serene image of a level is played behind him. It’s a good font that supplements traditional cutscenes with conversation with fantastic voice acting that’s bolstered by text on-screen. There’s some really earnest moments had in these dialogs, and you kinda feel for a few of them.
it’s so easy to make comparisons of I Am Your Beast to something like “John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum”, but when everyone is after you, the way Harding tilts guns when aiming down sights, and the first challenge mission is titled ‘Baba Yaga’; what else are you gonna compare it to? Despite the fact that Alphonse Harding doesn’t bring any weapons into a level, he still scrounges for ammo and weapons similar to John Wick after exhaustive gun battles. Having to constantly take guns from others to advance or push through is a novel and satisfying to pull off.
I Am Your Beast runs incredibly smooth, with the framerate capped at 120fps (the game’s highest offering), it rarely if ever dropped below that. Levels are small, which likely help its ability to maintain a stable framerate. Out of the box, it has ultrawide support and looks great while doing it. There’s tons of options to include field of view sliders when sliding or shooting, adjust bobbing for motion sensitive folks (like me), and VFX sliders for intensity if some of them are off putting. While it doesn’t do anything ground breaking, there are no performance issues that get in the way of a good time.
My PC Specs:
– Microsoft Windows 11 Pro
– Intel Core i9 13900K @ 5.8GHz
– ASUS ROG RYUJIN II 360 ARGB AIO Liquid CPU Cooler
– G.SKILL TRIDENT Z5 6000MHZ 64GB (32×2) DDR5 RAM
– ASUS ROG Strix GeForce RTX 4080 16GB GDDR6X
– WD_BLACK SN850X M.2 (4 TB)
– LG UltraGear 34GP950B-G (21:9 Ultrawide @ 3440×1440)
I Am Your Beast twists the formula of the prey becoming the predator, you’ll never tire of the “he’s-in-the-walls” reactions from enemies. The short runtime works in its favor to not overstay its welcome, but a healthy amount of replayability will keep you coming back for that next “S” rank. The game’s soundtrack will get your blood pumping as also you empty it from your enemies. I Am Your Beast is a blissful mix of speed and brutality that will make you a bogeyman among men.
A Steam code was provided in advance by the publisher for review purposes
