Life Eater Review

Chopped Liver.

Strange Scaffold has been on a monumental run over the last few years, releasing great games at a flurry that is difficult to even fathom. With some personal favorites such as I Am Your Beast and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Tactical Takedown under their belt, I was excited to finally get my hands on the serial-killer simulator Life Eater.

Publisher: Strange Scaffold, Frosty Pop

Developer: Strange Scaffold

Platform: Played on PC

Availability: Released Apr 16, 2024 on Steam.

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That premise is no joke, by the way. The entire concept of Life Eater is that your character hears the call of a malevolent god named Zimforth who tasks Ralph to commit increasingly specific murders. If you fail to complete the task, or mess up the more ritualistic aspects of it, Zimforth will destroy the world. How true that threat is falls under player interpretation, of course.

Before you can complete your ritual sacrifice, you must first learn about your target. Zimforth’s criteria change each year, forcing you to find the specific person you are meant to kill through their daily activities. If you need to sacrifice a person who works two jobs, you’ll have to stalk a pool of targets before uncovering which one makes a bit extra on the side. Once you learn enough about a target, you can begin the ritual to “water the flower”. Once that sacrificial menu is pulled up, you’re greeted with an assortment of memory tests that force you to complete pointed tasks based upon your victim’s attributes. For example, you could be given the directive to destroy their liver if they are under 40 years old, or destroy their intestines instead if they are 40 or older.

It is an interesting premise that is, unfortunately, marred by its execution. Stalking your victims amounts to very little beyond clicking blank spaces until a differently colored block appears, giving you your answer or additional information. The type of information required for each victim also remains the same: Age, hair color, are they regularly armed, how long do they sleep, do they live alone, do they have kids, and do they commute to work. All of this is readily communicated in the uncovered spaces, so you’ll fall into a simple routine of gathering that information before chopping away at the task at hand. If you fail to get the right person or mess up the ritual, the game simply starts you back at the top of the yearly chapter.

As your god calls upon you, you must obey.

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Of course, there is something to be said about Life Eater making such a grisly task so routine. Everything that you do in service of this god feels detached — mechanically and narratively. The gameplay is little more than clicking through a series of simple menus until you’ve done enough to advance. There’s no difficult strategy or reasoning required, as the time limits are very lenient and your options for uncovering that information are extremely straightforward. As it stands, you can basically use the second discovery option for 90% of the game, using the third only for extremely difficult tasks and using the suspicion blockers to avoid gaining too much notice.

From the story perspective, you simply get the call from on-high and begin your work, without any real thought put into examining whether or not Zimforth is real or truly has the power to bring about the end days. At least at first. It is a boon that Life Eater doesn’t shy away from the content of its story, almost normalizing the grisly murders the main character undertakes. Without diving too deeply into the extremely concise story beats, there comes a moment for Ralph to examine if what believes to be true is actually true, but you’re not going to get clear answers on that. 

It is a boon that Life Eater doesn’t shy away from the content of its story, almost normalizing the grisly murders the main character undertakes.

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In fact, you don’t get much of anything from the story at all. Life Eater is extremely short, with only 10 main story puzzles, none of which seem to be even tangentially connected. Between these puzzles you get some glimpses into the characters, but even those scenes barely last more than a minute or two. Thankfully, the acting, music, and artwork are superb, so there’s a ton of emotion packed into those brief glimpses. However, the gameplay is not varied enough or interesting enough to really make up for the dearth of narrative content within the title.

In many respects, the entirety of Life Eater comes across as a collection of underdeveloped good ideas, each inches away from being something truly gripping. The story doesn’t go far enough with putting you in the killer’s shoes or confronting the depraved nature of the sacrificial endeavors you’re taking part in, and the “stalking” gameplay isn’t quite varied enough to remain interesting or entertaining beyond a few short moments. Had it even fully fleshed out one of these things, I think we’d be talking about this game in a much different way.

Verdict

Life Eater is a game with great promise. It has a unique and horrific premise that sees you as a serial killer fulfilling the wishes of some demonic god through ritual sacrifice, but never manages to live up to that promise through its gameplay or story elements. In many ways I wish they would have leaned harder into everything from the main character's motivations, to the “stalking” mechanics of the gameplay. A collection of underutilized ideas that gets buried under the monotony of it all.