I Am Your Beast is a tactical, smack-tical, I hope this tree branch doesn’t crack-tical while I’m hopping off it to land on this dude’s back-tical FPS. It’s from Strange Scaffold, of El Paso, Elsewhere and Booked For The Week fame. It is a euphoric splurge of murderous game verbiage that has you chaining together thrown knives and solar plexus punches, headshots and tree-fu. Lob an empty pistol at your screen, and then replace it, because you’ll need it to watch the trailer below.
As you can tell, the game overfloweth with Strange Scaffold flavour: subversive and a little ironic while still paying loving homage to the spent shell casings of yesteryear. The writing is great! There’s an odd poetry to the tutorial. The voiceover talks about how nice the bird I’m following is while I’m working out which side of the mouse does the punching. Soon, I’m introduced to Beast’s most tantalisingly ripe-for-nonsense feature: You can run up trees and perch on branches with a single key press. I tree-hop gracefully through the snowy woods, talking about this lovely bird, and it’s very freeing.
Anyway, the bird gets shot. I’m soon embroiled in a too-old-for-but-still-dangerously-good-at-this shit tale, which comes across a bit like the plot of spy thriller someone whispered rapidly in your ear in the dark corner of a techno club that smells way nicer than it has any right to. Also, it has great air conditioning. The game feels slick without being polished past the point of novelty.
Now, sometimes, that polish would be welcome. Context commands like the aforementioned branch hop can feel a little stiff and evasive, but everything still comes together well enough to pull off some skull-denting Wickensian combos.
I foresee that people are going to get very good at this game. They’re going to perfect replays that make any cutscene you could imagine look cumbersome and soggy by comparison. They’re going to nibble delicately at its nuances like a tactical lizard at a plate of mealworms. Each short stage grades you on speed and side objectives like ‘throw three knives’, which is a paltry amount of knives in relation to how many knives you will want to throw naturally. This one’s out August 15th, 2024, with a demo out now.
Disclosure: Xalavier Nelson Jr. has written for RPS
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