Strange Scaffold’s newly released FPS, I Am Your Beast, is a lot of fun for a few reasons, but the most important of these is a deep appreciation for the poetry of good video game violence. I don’t use the capital P word to make an over-the-top comparison to something we might associate with mere craft or beauty, but as a nod to the game’s entertaining execution of what I’ve previously called “an exuberant extravagance of murderous gaming words,” so much so that I ate my Weetabix full of words one morning. The way the thrown knives, the kicks to the pavement, and the inexplicable decapitation all come together gives them an assonant, almost Suessian quality.
But it's also, well, a bit like Mad Libs. You play a man named Harding, whose legendary lethal strength is established very early on. The spectacle is there in the moment, but the narration is conveyed through cute gimmicks, like the fact that everyone you meet is so terrified of Harding that they'll keep a loud record of exactly what weapon he's holding at any given moment. Mad Libs comes from the fact that you can plot a route for Harding between A and B, and multiple heads will pop out of their necks along the way. You just fill in whatever verbs seem funniest to you at the moment. One of the verbs is 'wasp'. Wasp is now a verb.
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Here's the complaint, from the area on the far left, where only the most trivial complaints blossom: the final level results screen is awful. It gives you two buttons to click when you complete a level, both of which annoy me every time I interact with them. The first one restarts the level you just completed, despite hovering over the same screen area where a 'next level' button would naturally reside. The other one says 'exit' and takes you back to the level selection menu – a deeply unsatisfying solution. Wait. Let me reach into my bag of 99 bullshit and one point of constructive criticism and see if I have anything else to say about this and… no, no, this is just bullshit.
This was a minor thing for me, so a bit of a backhanded minority: I love the title of this game, and I love it even more the more I play it. This is an incredibly well-written and acted game – so much so that you start to get a taste of what could easily be unwanted interruptions between these sort of kinetic, snackable stages. But the main theme here really drives the whole thing. There's a wonderfully written speech early on about whether talented people should feel compelled to use those talents. I suppose you're supposed to take this as a manipulative tactic by the villain, but it struck me as a kind of counterpoint to the part in Bojack about how most of us can't even land a watered-down, populist version of our dream job – a speech that stays with me for reasons I think are pretty obvious. I'll have some existential longing in between getting my head chopped off, for sure!
But it’s those decapitations that hold it all together: the ripe, exploding cherries on top of the cake. Harding has so many acts at his disposal that few of them should cause so many head explosions with such frequency. This is the second play I’ve written about today, which I claim to be both an homage and a deconstruction at different points, but you have to admire something to take it apart, and I Am Your Monster is, as I said above, clearly deeply admired by the specific and joyful poetry of doing a man’s head off, simply by turning it upside down. won't be there anymore especially without good reason.
If you're on the fence about it, my main point of caution would be that unless you enjoy replaying levels over and over to reach higher scores, unlock secret objectives, and generally achieve the choreographed flow that comes with high-level gameplay, you may find this a bit weak as a package. There's also still a bit of a stiffness to the controls, which – while an improvement over the demo – does hold the game back from the pure pleasures of a more focused FPS. Still, I think it's a very nice offering overall.
Also, I'm not very good at writing about music, so I usually avoid it – but this is my favorite soundtrack of the year, and it's not even close.