What is I Am Your Beast, You Ask? Let’s Ask the Developers

“Dear Diary… Did I tell you I saw a bird? It had brown feathers and a red chest – it gleamed against the sky…Then I heard the gun shot…Seeing the way they treated this innocent, beautiful thing. I snapped…I’m what the COI made me. And I’m not going back.”

This is an abridged version of the first words you’ll hear playing I Am Your Beast, spoken by the main character, Alphonse Harding. Harding is a retired Covert Operations Initiative (COI) agent, burnt out after years of “one more job” too many. So, when the COI surrounds his home in the forest and offers him another “one last job”, Harding decides to hand in his notice. That notice comes in the form of kicking a COI agent in the face, grabbing their gun in mid-air and moving forwards.

Fast-Paced, Revenge Thriller FPS

Turn the tables on the military-industrial complex who are hunting you down with lightning fast, tree climbing, kick delivering, knife throwing, gun catching FPS action. From guns, to bear traps, to beehives, there are plenty of ways to use your environment to get to the end of the level. At that end, you’ll find a score and rank, so if you’re into speedrunning, or just getting the best times you can, you’ll probably end up going back to these levels a few times!

I Am Your Beast  comes complete with all the free extra content we released. This includes the story expansion Support Group, where a group of COI Agents sit and retell the fantastical sounding tale of what happened to them in the main game at the hands of a seemingly superhuman Harding. The second, Cold Sweat is a no     story, all challenge, all weird set of challenges. It’s our love letter to the speedrunners who have latched on to I Am Your Beast.

Tyrants Better Run

If you’re looking to speedrun, enjoy the fully voice acted, funny, intense, touching and slick story or enjoy an FPS that can be played in short bursts over more than 20      levels, I Am Your Beast is for you. Oh and I nearly forgot the soundtrack! Let me tell you, the soundtrack is, to borrow a term from the internet, “a banger”. If it was in the Eurovision Song Contest, I’d give it 12 points. (That’s the most points you can give one song, it’s not important to know that for the game, but it’s good to learn new things.)

“I want players to come away feeling cool” says Dan Pearce, Lead Developer on I Am Your Beast. “The experience we really wanted to create, and having a structure of short levels with timers running helps create this, is that we really wanted to push the player to a place where high skill play always results in you having this action sequence. You’re throwing a gun, you’re catching a gun, you’re stomping…” and all of this leads to a sense that you’ve just been through one of the best action scenes you’ve seen, and you didn’t just watch it, you created it!

“The feeling of discovery…is a large part of what makes games like this so interesting. You’re not just playing it once and forgetting, we added a lot of elements for replay ability” says Jim Brown, Level Designer on the game. “Players finding the secret things we have in the world, creating their own challenges and discovering their own ways to play” are something they take a lot of pride in. “The fun part is playing around and figuring it out.” I Am Your Beast features a score system, and you get a rank at the end of each mini-sandbox level. Getting an S Rank will mean finding all the paths and different ways you can take out enemies.

I asked both to describe I Am Your Beast in one word.      Jim went with “Dynamic. The ways you move around this environment is not static, it’s not set in stone. You should feel dynamic as you move and play it the way you want to play it.”

Dan, who pointed out that this is a nightmare question as they worked on this game for eight months      settled on “Visceral. When you’re getting a good run down, it makes you feel like a dog tearing apart      someone’s homework. Visceral is the closest word I can find to that experience. The homework is the military industrial complex, and you are the dog!”    

This game is a labor of love from all of us here at Strange Scaffold, and a game we’re very proud to present to you. We’re a small, remote first, collective of games people and we hope you enjoy this one as much as we do.

I Am Your Beast is available on Xbox right now.