I Am Your Beast

My first few minutes with I Am Your Beast felt almost too simple: drop into a small woodland arena, eliminate every operative in sight, get out fast. Then the ranking screen loaded and I immediately restarted the level. That loop, chasing a better time and a cleaner kill chain through compact, purpose-built spaces, is exactly what this game is selling, and it sells it with remarkable confidence. You play as Alphonse Harding, a former Covert Operations Initiative agent who has spent six years in the woods and wants nothing more than to stay there. The COI disagrees, and that disagreement escalates into a one-man guerrilla war across the North American wilderness. The setup is pulpy action-film stuff, but Strange Scaffold actually follows through on it. Story beats are delivered between missions via phone conversations, presented through a kinetic typography system where voices play over still forest imagery while words animate across the screen. It sounds like a budget workaround, and maybe it is, but the voice acting is sharp enough that the scenes carry real weight. The relationship between Harding and his handlers develops in ways that surprised me, and the dry comic timing in some of the inter-mission dialogue is genuinely funny. The combat is where the game spends most of its budget of attention, and rightly so. The movement system layers slides, head stomps, contextual parkour, weapon tosses, and quick turns into a vocabulary that feels fluid once it clicks. The arsenal runs from pistols and sniper rifles up through bear traps and rocket launchers, and the levels are built around making each tool situationally relevant. Explosive barrels, elevated sniper positions, shortcuts, and improvised weapons all feed into how you optimise each run. Each level also carries a unique secondary challenge alongside the base clear objective, such as finishing without any kills or activating targets within a strict timer, which stops the format from going stale. The parkour has some rough edges, and the shared button for picking up weapons and triggering objectives causes occasional misfires at the worst possible moments, but neither issue derails the core rhythm for long. The bigger caveat is length: a first campaign run lands around two hours. The replayability is real, especially once you are chasing S-ranks to unlock harder challenge content, but if you want sprawl, look elsewhere. The presentation punches above its budget throughout. Composer RJ Lake, who scored El Paso, Elsewhere for the same studio, delivers a soundtrack that shifts between hard synth drives during combat and quieter atmospheric stretches in the cutscenes. The comic-book-inspired visual style keeps things readable at high speed. Performance is rock solid, with framerates staying near the 120fps cap across the compact levels, and the PC build ships with ultrawide support and granular accessibility options out of the box. If you are the type of player who gets one clear run in a Hotline Miami stage and immediately hits restart trying to find the faster line, I Am Your Beast is built for you. If you need 20-plus hours of content to feel a purchase is justified, the per-run brevity will frustrate. For everyone else, this is a focused, confident action game that knows exactly what it wants to be and rarely wastes a second of your time.

Alex · Scout Team

Catch-all

Be the first to comment on I Am Your Beast.