Life Eater Review: A Grisly Puzzle For The The Murder Podcast Listeners

My wife loves a grisly true crime podcast. She’ll listen to tales of intense stalking that result in gruesome murders while baking some cauliflower and putting together a (vegetarian) dinner. She’ll read books about the psychology of serial killers and watch documentaries about their victims.

I don’t think she revels in the brutality, and she definitely doesn’t sympathise with the criminals, but she’s one of millions across the globe who have their interest piqued by stories of the worst specimens of humanity, about how animalistic desires can take over and what drives people to commit the most horrific crimes.

Life Eater puts the knife in your hand and thoughts of murder in your head. However, there’s no mystery as to what drives you to this life of violent crime: you’re simply obeying the violent instructions of your god, Zimforth. This being gives you instructions – how many people to kill, who should suffer – and it’s up to you to carry out its bidding. Commit the annual murder in Zimforth’s name, and prevent the end of the world.

The game isn’t really about murdering, though. It’s about planning your murders. You do this by interacting with a tool not dissimilar to a video editor, split up into sections for each portion of your target’s day. At first, these are filled with static, but you can uncover these innocent victims’ lives by surveilling and stalking them over the course of a week. You may elect to stake out at their house in a van, blackmail their boss, or simply yell a crazed scream as they’re giving medical aid to a loved one. Whatever works.

You must manage two resources in your preparation: time and suspicion. Acts like knocking on your future victim’s door will arouse suspicion, increasing a metre that results in your arrest if filled to capacity. Waiting outside their house for them to return from work is far less suspicious, but a lot more time consuming.

Once you’ve gathered enough data to move in for the kill, you can pounce. Find a time when they’re alone and swing the knife. There’s no cutscene here, no gratuitous violence, no gameplay to the murder. That’s not the point. The point is your preparation, the snapshot you get of someone’s life before you steal it from them, and the repercussions of your violence.

Life Eater never glorifies your actions. It doesn’t revel in the blood splatters or use intense realism to make you feel terrible about your actions like The Last of Us. Instead, it gives your victims real friends, real jobs, real habits – real lives. You have to live with taking all that from them to save the world.

After taking a life, you have to play a minigame not dissimilar to Operation, in which you remove certain organs based on the victim’s life. Remove their pancreas if they commuted to work, chop up their left lung if they have pink hair, that sort of thing. This is a ritual for Zimforth, and is a bit too reliant on your memory for my liking, but it forces you to engage with the timelines and get to know your victims. As a narrative device, it succeeds. As a gameplay mechanic, it’s left wanting.

Life Eater trails a narrative thread through the murders as you grow increasingly guilty about the deaths that you’ve caused year after year. You’ve also imprisoned an innocent bystander and developed a parasocial relationship with him, trying to befriend him as he lies in a cage while you dissect corpses to appease your foul deity.

The friendship is not reciprocated, for obvious reasons, but these slideshows of illustrations accompanied by fully voice acted conversations bring a dose of reality to proceedings. These brief snippets of your life away from murder show how inhuman you’re becoming, how unhuman your actions are, and how your god’s cruelty is equal parts manipulative and transformative.

I’m not sure I expected Life Eater to be such an emotional game, but with Strange Scaffold and Xalavier Nelson Jr. at the helm, I should have known this wouldn’t be a one-note stalking simulator. While its two main mechanics can start to feel a little samey after a few years of ritual sacrifice, all it takes is a medical emergency or parent looking after their kids to pull you back into the devastating reality of your situation.

Life Eater humanises your victims with deft skill and crafts simple, emotional stories without once giving your sacrificial lambs a voice. I often found myself imagining my own life cut up into violent video editing software, and reassessed my own priorities as I stalked through an innocent person’s mundane existence, preparing to rip it away.

Strange Scaffold is nothing if not unique. I’ve only ever played one game with a video editing interface before, and it was about editing videos. The developer’s varied portfolio – which wildly ranges across genre and theme with games including Sunshine Shuffle, Witch Stranding, An Airport for Aliens Currently Run By Dogs, El Paso, Elsewhere, and Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator – is a testament to its devs’ creativity and commitment to pushing the boundaries of gaming until they threaten to snap.

In Life Eater, this manifests through its interesting stalking mechanic and the Strange Scaffold staple of an exemplary script.

Life Eater

Pros

• Brilliant timeline mechanic
• Emotional script
• Engaging narrative that perfectly integrates with the game mechanics

Cons

• Memory tests can feel frustrating
• Reliance on one (admittedly great) mechanic can be repetitive

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