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Strange Scaffold is a developer I admire, putting out tight, short games that are small in scope but big in ideas. Life Eater, a "horror fantasy kidnapping simulator," falls into this wheelhouse well. You play as [REDACTED], a poor man with an obscured name tasked by a mysterious god, Zimforth, to sacrifice one or more people of a specific quality each year, or the world will end. Maybe, if Zimforth is even real, that is. The story's drama comes with Johnny, who is captured early in the story and locked in the basement by [REDACTED]. We follow these two over several years and their subsequent sacrifices, seeing how their kidnapper/kidnappee relationship shifts while the weight of Zimforth's demands on [REDACTED] grows heavier.


The gameplay for Life Eater focuses exclusively on these sacrifices, opening up a blurred-out schedule (think of a TV guide filled with static) for your potential victims' week. To capture them for your god's ill intent, you must select a time slot within a sacrifice's schedule on a given day and choose how hard you want to essentially spy on them while simultaneously managing both how suspicious you're being (fill up the bar too many times, and you're arrested: game over) and how long you have to complete the sacrifice (each spying attempt takes a little bit of time off the clock from the world ending, as does resetting your suspicion meter). There are a handful of other mechanics, but for the most part, the game is a puzzle of piecing together information to determine the correct victim based on a few vague hints from your cruel deity.

After a successful kidnapping, specific organs and bones must be plucked to "water the flower" of your vile lord, requiring further reading into the victim's traits like their hair color, whether they commuted, and if they lived alone. These aspects must be memorized before kidnapping, as the timeline vanishes once they're on your basement butcher's table, and you can't check to see if they use the toilet more than once a day for your hungry god. This gameplay is intended to make the player feel invasive, prying into these innocent victim's lives and most vulnerable moments.


While an interesting mechanic and story concept, Life Eater struggles in its execution. The game is played across 10 levels, each being bookended by voice-acted storyboard-esque cinematics explaining the progression of [REDACTED] and Johnny's relationship, but rarely given a real sense of the extended time passing each time we meet them. While the game covers a decade, these characters feel like they, at best, spent a few weeks together and only a cursory glance into their ongoing and tormented lives. Part of this is bumping up against the tight scope of the game, with limited time to spend with these characters.

From a narrative standpoint, it's almost antithetical to the game's premise, which focuses on delving deep into a stranger's life and their many insecurities. We can see how long a stranger stares at the wall to the dot, but what [REDACTED] and Johnny, our main characters, get up to in their private and intimate moments, mostly left up to a few scant impressions throughout the game. It's not enough to ruin the narrative, as it remains impactful throughout, but it invariably leaves the player wanting more of this drama.

That's not to say that these narrative choices aren't without merit. This lack of information dovetails with our lack of understanding of our main character himself, who only appears as [REDACTED] when named in the game. He is a nameless stooge whose wants, desires, personal thoughts, and even his name are rendered meaningless under the weight of his god's demands. I didn't quite feel like the game landed on a strong narrative conclusion to these themes, but it certainly leaves plenty to think about.

While gruesomely novel and challenging, the gameplay suffers from an extremely tight scope that can lead to a frustrating experience. Many levels are vague on how to solve them and even what needs to be solved in the first place. For example, one of the levels requires you to find two relatives among four people living together, but the key to this information can only come from picking a random spot on a single day of the week to discover a clue. This led to a brute force "trial and error" style of play where I figured out where the hint would likely be and spammed those scheduled time slots for every character to see what popped up.

Likewise, once I reached the sacrificial portion of the game, the specific criteria always remained the same, so it became less about analyzing the victim's individuality and more about "Did this person have kids or black hair?" every time. If I didn't discover how often a person went to the bathroom or whether they drive to work, you are allowed one bad guess before failing the chapter and having to restart with a new randomized schedule for the potential victims. This happened a lot!


This is a very tight, short game that can easily be beaten in a couple hours (maybe a bit longer if you're struggling on some levels). It's atmospheric, with excellent voice acting and some memorable character dialogue. While some horror aspects are extensively present, too much of the gameplay feels divorced from anything too gruesome or invasive to strike me as offputting despite what the premise implies (although ruminating too deeply on the actions [REDACTED] is implied to perform may leave you with some dark thoughts of your own). Instead, this game feels much more like a tragedy as we watch [REDACTED] struggle to live with the many barely understood burdens placed upon him.

That divorce between "information" and "individual" does feel intentional to some degree, with [REDACTED] continually referring to his victims as "beasts" to further dehumanize them and reduce his guilt. We, too, as players, learn a lot about these victims' lives and the specificity with which they live, but much of it is superficial. They are weak and flawed human beings, but they are all faceless and interchangeable outside of our god's vague whims. The sense of randomness in all of these events, from [REDACTED] being chosen to the victims Zimforth wants, to even Johnny being at the wrong place at the wrong time to kick off the game, lends to the true sense of dread at Life Eater's bloody heart: terrible, awful things happen, and there's no reason why.

I would have loved to see a larger version of the game with a few more mechanics or systems and a more elaborate story that was at least double its length. I would have also loved a more elaborate tutorial and guidance instead of mainly relying on guesswork and brute force for many puzzles. Tailoring the criteria for the sacrificial portion of gameplay based on the actual generated nuances of a character instead of unchanging criteria could have also elevated that sense of learning about these victims.

However, Life Eater knows the fun in its core conceit has a limited shelf life and avoids becoming too tedious or having to ramp up later level's difficulty by remaining short and sweet. This crux of Strange Scaffold's development model, where putting out games at a healthy pace while remaining in scope as the priority, has resulted in a growing library of incredibly creative and genuinely original indie games. To that end, I'd argue that a brief stint into the cursed world of Life Eater might not hit all the marks but strikes quite a few, which might be more than enough.

Great game if you love pain and suffering, but in a funny way.

A fun and challenging little roguelike deck builder + escape room. Great atmosphere and world. Props to switching the entire system just when I feel I've figured it out. It even has charming FMV bits to boot! Has a lot of heart, and I hope it's successful!

A stellar game that plays like you're gliding through a David Bowie album presented in the style of Yellow Submarine. It's about overcoming the expectations of others, struggling with imposter syndrome, and of building your own identity. More about psychedelic imagery and ~vibes~ than pure technical gameplay. Don't come to this game for exceptional difficulty or a skill to master, but for an experience.

If that doesn't sell you, there's a dedicated "Play Guitar" button that you can hammer down for nearly the entire game.

The Trap of Authorial Intent: The Game.

This is not your traditional game. You may not enjoy it.

If you like thinking about games beyond a surface level you may love this game. I certainly do, and it's my favorite game I've ever played. I like to come back to it every few years, and each time it's meant something different and I've formed new perspectives on what this game speaks to me about.

I think this is an important piece of art. You may not like it, but I think if you take this game and try to appreciate what it is for what it is than this may change the way you look at every other piece of art for the better.

This game is, honestly, falsely advertised. Very few of the features used to advertise this game actually made it into the final product and what you pay for is a bare bones version of what should have been an amazing game. I do not recommend this game for the price of $60. Maybe, MAYBE, if they add several patches worth of content it will be worth a portion of that...but that's somewhat unlikely to happen.

EDIT: It has been many years, but they did, in fact, make that happen. If a sandbox-y space exploring game with a ton of extra features like base/ship building and a cute little story sounds like fun this game is a pretty good option. It actually got pretty close to the original launch as advertised, and I gotta hand the developers major props for sticking with this one despite the (in hindsight, very over-dramatic) backlash.