Sidequest.cool

I Am Your Beast is the latest game from Strange Scaffold, the team behind the excellent Clickolding. An intense, but short experience, it fully utilises its small stature nearly perfectly.

A government branch, the COI, wants Alphonse Harding to do one more job. He’s not interested, having retreated into the woods. As he won’t do the job, the government plans to take him out.

Harding is your stereotypical, all-American killer government agent, which the game expertly reflects in its design. Each level is a tight affair, with the core ideas building on the standard first-person shooter concepts. However, its time-trial nature means that it takes some liberties with this.

You’ll be racing against the clock to complete objectives like killing all enemies and destroying satellites. The game can be brutal, so rather than forcing you to focus on being accurate and true, it instead takes over. As long as the enemy is in your crosshairs, you’re nailing the kill.

It truly feels like a one versus the world, with the revenge movie slant fully realised in its moment-to-moment gameplay. I Am Your Beast is one of the first games to truly make me feel like a super soldier, even in death. Of course, Harding might have died while being hailed with bullets, he isn’t invincible.�

A few levels see you not only racing against the clock and rising threat but also internal bleeding. Each level, despite being fairly samey in nature, doesn’t last long enough for them to feel tired. 

Though, most of the time, you’ll be utterly decimating the forces that are sent after you. It feels so good too, as you parkour up a tree, run over the branch and leap onto an unsuspecting guard. In that split second post-kill  – and with the hammering of the E key – you’ll swipe their weapon and obliterate the now-alerted pair standing behind you. 

But I Am Your Beast is quick to remind you that Harding isn’t a god. The interspersed story, almost told entirely through text on the screen and some cracking voice acting, quickly unravels a man who is fed up. Harding’s life has been dictated for a long time, and I Am Your Beast is him proving why he’s more than capable of telling his own story for once.

It’s not profound, but it’s equally as tight as the game portion itself. Like any good action-focused story, it peppers enough to keep you in its narrative, but not enough to bog itself down and keep you from itself.

I think the only thing that hindered this is that it leans a little too heavily into the time trial and score attack element. It’s a smart move by Stange Scaffold, as it ensures the player is learning and adapting to the game’s slimline mechanics. 

At some point, it dawned on me that actually, pressing Z to do a quick turn – as the game kept insisting I do – was super helpful. 

As I leapt down onto an enemy, killing them immediately, I ran forward and grabbed the gun from the box in front of me. As this was my fourth or tenth time doing it, I hit Z and took out the two goons that stood behind me. 

The problem is, is that at some point it gates progress behind your progress in the levels. For something with a narrative throughline, it’s super frustrating to not be able to experience the next bit of the dangling thread because I’ve not earned an S rank. These limitations don’t appear too much, but when they do, it feels like a slap for not being good enough.

Repetition is the name of the game here, and, luckily, I Am Your Beast plays so spectacularly. 

Part of this is done through its incredible level design. These small circuit-like areas don’t initially feel like they’re guiding you until you hit that 15th attempt. 

As Harding menacingly run towards the guards armed with just a knife, gliding into a murder spree and flinging a bear trap – as well as the knife – I begun to notice that each level is explicitly designed to ensure you never feel trapped. You’re constantly moving, constantly killing, and the game expects you to keep up the pace.

Movement is so important, that it does suck that a few instances where the game deemed a stomp from above incorrect, messing up my opening gambit. Or I found myself trapped down a corner after an ill-fated swerve (I panicked in the last second as someone with a shotgun surprised me), forcing a decent run to be reset and a worse score obtained. 

All this is done with a thumping, dirty beat behind you. It’s aggressive, pushing the adrenaline as you try to scrape off that last few seconds or complete a secondary objective to unlock the next mission.

I utterly fell in love with the music, as it revels in its intensity. Even as it softens up as Harding and his old boss argue, jumping to the next level to hear it taken up a notch conveyed more than minutes long, expensive cutscenes could ever hope.

That’s the beautiful thing about I Am Your Beast. The limited scope aids and abets every element of it. Yes, it can be frustrating to miss out on that millisecond between an A and S rank, but the impossibly tight and smart level design, along with super fast reload times, eases up that anger.

I Am Your Beast is super smart, in all the right ways, and that includes not lingering around for any longer than it has to. Sure, I’ll be jumping back into tackling more of the secret missions, but I feel satisfied with everything I’ve done in the three hours clocked on Steam. That’s a video game.