While El Paso, Elsewhere was among my favorite games released last year, this year’s offering from Strange Scaffold has left me somewhat cold. That’s okay. Clickolding and Life Eater were pretty experi?mental and they just didn’t gel with me.

I was going to overlook I Am Your Beast. Something about its trailers didn’t gel with me, either. At this?? point, I can’t even remember what it was that made me stick my nose up at it. That’s because when I actually sat down to play it, it didn’t take long to gel with me at all.

I Am Your Beast (PC [Reviewed])
Developer: Strange Scaffold
Publisher: Strange Scaffold, Frosty Pop
Released: September 10, 2024
MSRP: $19.99

You play as Alphonse Harding, who is very violently opposed to doing one last job for his employer, the COI. He was, supposedly, told m??any times before that doing one last bit of wetwork would free him from his employment, and now he’s just done. Jaded would be putting it lightly. He reacts to being pulled out of retirement by killing every one of his co-workers in the are??a. When more get sent in, he kills them, too.

I Am Your Beast is pretty loose with its narrative. It’s hard to really get a feel for the stakes, a??s it’s largely just you in a forest, killing anyone wearing khaki in the area. The job, your employer, and the goals behind them are left pretty vague. They sound cynical, but so does everything else. The enemy soldiers are extremely blasé about the whole “being killed by a hyper-competent mega-soldier�thing. It either sounds like an expected outcome or an annoying inconvenience.

Harding is also voiced by Xalavier Nelson Jr. (the director at Strange Scaffold), and he’s largely just the same character as James Savage from El Paso, Elsewhere. H?e speaks in a low, overly-calm voice with a cutting, lighthearted edge. If Alphonse Harding had turned out to be James Savage having a nightmare at the end of the game, I p??robably wouldn’t have been surprised. I mean, I really like that voice. The dialogue is fun, and the delivery is great. It’s just�the same character with a different backstory. 

The narrative also lacks depth, mainly delivering cliches of action movies with hyper-competent, nigh-invincible protagonists �my favorite kind? of action movie �and it’s really hard to tell if it’s taking itself seriously.

The game itself, on the other hand, clearly doesn’t take itself seriously. It’s an action game of the highest speed. You’re challenged to complete simple objectives? and exit the level as quickly as possible. Sometimes, this involves killing all the enemies, and other times, you just need to touch a few laptops. However, your expedience is what is really important.

I’m having some difficulty recalling a movement system I enjoyed as much as I Am Your Beast. While it has some parkour elements, it’s not focused around them. You can climb trees and cross wires, but you can’t, say, run on walls. There’s no diving like in Max Payne (or El Paso, Elsewhere, for that matter.) There is also no bullet time to help you ma?ke sense of the chaos.

Where it’s successful is where most games find their success in combat: it’s very readable. It’s easy to tell what object you’re about to grab from the environment, and whenever you hit an enemy in the face with something, you know that their weapon is going to come flying out of their hand directly into your path of movement. It makes picking up a branch, throwing it at an enemy, stomping on their head, catching their knife, and then hurling that at another enemy both possible and intuitive without needing to ??boil it down to dedicated interactions or QTEs.

It’s clearly a game based around the philosophy of making the player feel powerful. Enemies will bark out ridiculous, panicked statements like “Harding’s using headshots!�just to fluff up your ego. Marketing material ?calls it “he's-in-the-walls player fantasy,�which feels appropriate.

It doesn’t last very long, though. Or, at least, it doesn’t maintain that momentum for long. I clocked in at 2 hours. It pulls the brakes on you a couple of times, the first requiring you to complete a certain number of optional objectives and the second requiring an S rank on at least one level. The cutscenes, which are almost exclusively big? dialogue subtitles displayed across a pan over a forest, actually take up a large amount of runtime. My husba?nd complained that every time he looked at my screen, all he saw were subtitles.

However, the main narrative serves just as a foundation for the gameplay. It encourages you to complete side objectives and try and increase your rank on each level. It doesn’t really reward you very well, but being able to act with its frenetic combat is its own reward. That’s actually quite refreshing since a lot of games these days prop themselves up with minuscule prizes to keep you interested. I Am Your Beast just lets the fun do the talking.

The soundtrack is also enjoyable, but because the game just felt like a flash of entertainment to me, it was hard to really take it all in. It’s the same composer as El Paso, Elsewhere, and I kep??t listening to that soundtrack after the game was done, so Iâ€?™m happy. Xalavier Nelson Jr. lends his vocals to a few tracks again, which I enjoy, even if it furthers the feeling that he’s typecasting himself.

I Am Your Beast is weak in some areas, but not significantly so. A large portion of it is just fine, but what’s good is really good. It manages a combat system that is fast and chaotic while still remaining intuitive, which is an impressive feat. Part of me wonders if something like this could be applied across a wider, longer game without diluting it. As it is, I Am Your Beast applies it perf?ectly, makin??g it a short-lived but impactful experience.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

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It’s late notice, but Strange Scaffold has announced that they need more time to deliver their micro-sandbox FPS, I Am Your Beast. It was originally s??lated for August 15, but has been pushed back to September 10.

It’s always a difficult decision to delay a game’s launch, but pers?onally, I’m a bit relieved. There was no way I’d have time to play it for review this week. Next month? Possibly!

In a Twitter post, Strange ?Scaffold said, “We want to make sure it’s as breathtaking as you expect and we know it can be, while letting our team hit that goal in a healthy and sustainable way.�Healthy ??and sustainable? In this economy?

Furthermore, the information I got from their PR is that this is to ensure the game is stable. It h?appens. Sometimes bug squashing and polish doesn’t go as smoothly as hoped.

I Am Your Beast is a fast-paced “covert revenge thriller FPS�that has you sprinting through hordes of enemies, taking them out in fanciful? ways. It focuses on player fantasy, making you feel powerful ??and hyper-powerful.

There was a demo during Steam Next Fest this past June, but I was recovering from a nervous breakdown and wasn’t able to fit it into my schedule. I figured I’d circle around to it anyway, since I’ve been keeping an eye on Strange Scaffold for a while. El Paso, Elsewhere was one of my favorite games of last year. This year, I wasn’t as keen on Life Eater or Clickolding, but I appreciate their vision. Playing a game that tries something interesting but misses the mark is much more meaningful than playing one that competently does nothing special. Hopefully, I Am Your Beast is both interesting and hits the mark.

I Am Your Beast will now release on PC September 10, 2024.

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Oxford Dictionary defines a cuckold as “a man whose wife has sex with another man.�In modern parlance, it has been appropriated to describe an erotic fetish involving deriving pleasure from watching one's partner in a carnal act with another. It’s often�/p>

Oh, the game’s name is Clickolding? Well, this is embarrassing.

Clickolding (PC)
Developer: Strange Scaffold
Publisher: Strange Scaffold, Outersloth
Released: July 16, 2024
MSRP: $2.99

Clickolding comes to us from Xalavier Nelson Jr.’s label, Strange Scaffold. Recently, it gave us El Paso, Elsewhere, one of my favorite games of 2023, and Life Eater, which is also a game. The developer is all about experimenting, and Clickolding is certainly an experiment.

You find yourself in a motel room, with a man in a mask staring you down and a tally counter in your hand. The man instructs y??ou to click it. Then click it again. Then click it 9,998 more times. At that point, the tally will roll over back to zero.

He just wants to wat?ch. He wants to see you in the perverse act of pressing a button repeatedly. Just you and his tally counter in an incremental embrace as he watches from his chair in the corner of the room. Roll that counter over, get paid, and then avoid eye contact whenever you bump into each other in public.

Here at Destructoid, we don’t kink shame.

While your depraved button pressing is the center of the action, you’re also able to move around the room to�fidget, I guess. There are interactive objects scattered about, but largely, you’ll only poke at them when your client/aggressor tells you to. At the mos?t complicated, you have to find a key, but by the time that happens, you might have already found the key through the course of your pacing.

As the tally racks up, the mask?ed pervert will talk to you. The idea is that the?? narrative advances as you climb to 10,000, but it really doesn’t go anywhere.

Clickolding positions itself in a way that suggests it’s about difficult subject matter such as prostitution and shame. It kind of is, but it’s wearing mittens. Not that it needs to be overt, but it should at least be insightful. It’s not. There are sometimes euphemisms an??d other times it’s more cryptic, but it never gets a punch in. It doesn’t delve very far into the person who is watching you. If it tries to make the player feel shame for their actions, it’s not effective. If it wants to frame the kink that it is representing in an empathetic or judgmental way, it completely fails to do so.

The narrative was where Clockolding needed to hit hardest, and it’s more of a soft stroke?.

There are things that Clickolding does well. For example, the clicking works. If you click fast, the number goes?? up quicker, and if you click slow, it doesn’t. It’s a really good way to shor?ten the lifespan of your mouse and carpal tunnels.

Beyond that, the atmosphere is well executed. The motel room?? is small, cramped, and just crappy enough to be believable. You move in increments, like an old dungeon crawler, so you aren’t able to inspect things closer, giving everything a sort of claustrophobic feel. There aren’t many places you can hide from the gaze of the masked man, but you are allowed to leave if you want to lose all your progress for absolutely no reward.

I don’t want to spoil things, but there is an epilogue if yo??u click?? well.

There isn’t really much else to say. Clickolding is Clickolding. It’s $3, and it gives you a reason to click 10,000 times. There are games out there that cost much more and don’t provid??e nearly as? much clicking.

Clickolding really needed to nail its narrative to be a successful experiment, and it really doesn’t. It’s much too unfocused and far too superficial, never really drilling far into its subject matter. There were a lot of directions that could have been taken, and none of them were. That doesn’t mean that Clickolding doesn’t have value, but it’s not something that needs to be experienced. You could g??et the same pleasure from just watching.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

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El Paso, Elsewhere has its sights set on another platform in the not-so-distant future. The next stop for the neo-noir ??shooter from developer Strange Scaffold is PlayStation 5, which will welcome James Savage with open arms, and most likely in slow motion, sometime this fall.

In addition to a digital launch, physical plans are in store for the PS5 version of El Paso, Elsewhere. The retail release from Nighthawk Interactive will pack the game with a poster and a download code that grant?s access to a digital version of the original soundtrack. Check out a trailer for the physical version while we w??ait for a specific date.

El Paso, Elsewhere has been available on PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S since September 26, 2023. The game puts players in the dual-wielding shoes of James Savage, a vampire hunter who has to battle supernatural enemies and the ever-present skeletons in his own closet. It's got a solid throwback aesthetic that further connects it to its key inspirations, namely the Max Payne series. 

The gunplay in El Paso, Elsewhere isn't going to blow everyone away, but its story is something that deserves to be experienced. It's nice that more will be able to do so once Strange Scaffold's dark rumination launches on Sony's console later this year. Beyond that, we still have that film adaptation�which is set to have LaKeith Stanfield in the role of James S??avage�to look forward to at some point.

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Strange Scaffold, the developer behind El Paso, Elsewhere and Life Eater, has announced their next game, Clickolding, which I don’t want to write out in it??s stylized, all-caps format around my mo?ther. Although, I don’t think she’d get the reference.

Clickolding bills itself as an “incremental narrative�game. You play as someone holding a tally counter. A strange person wants to see you click it. Yeah, click it. Click it harder. Just like that. I’m guessing that as you click, the story advances. Judging by the trai?ler, the person pulls out a pistol coercively, but some of the screenshots also suggest a cash reward if you’re able to reset the counter.

Beyond simply clicking, the press release promises that there will be “environmental puzzles and managing a tenuous and uncertain relationship with an uncanny host.�/p>

I’m not really certain how in-depth I should go in explaining the subject matter. It’s hard to be certain how facetious Clickolding is, though it seems clear that it’s trying to plunge into the darker side of the subject matter. It will supposedly feature an “uncomfortable and shifting atmosphere.�/p>

Approaching what could potentially be a sensitive and disturbing topic reminds me of Strange Scaffold’s Life Eater. With that game, I felt that its handling of the subject wound up blunting the message. However, in that case, it was mostly that ??the gameplay did not support the narrative, whereas here, the actual game part of the game is so simple that it doesn’t seem like it could even bend that way.

We won’t have to wait long to find out. Clickolding is set to release on July 16, 2024 on PC.

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Strange Scaffold’s 2023 hit El Paso, Elsewhere is the next indie game in line to have it narrative transferred to the big screen. According to Deadline, LaKeith Stanfield is being tapped for the role of protagonist James Savage. Di Bonaventura Pictures and Colin Stark are set to p??roduce.

El Paso, Elsewhere was one of my favorite games of 2023, and that was almost entirely because of its narrative. While its gameplay was a neo-noir shooter in the style of Max Payne, the story is of a demon hunter trying to stop his ab??usive vampire ex-girlfriend fr?om ending the world. While the concept may sound otherworldly on the surface, it delves with meticulous detail into emotional abuse and its effects on the victim.

I’m not at all sure how well that will translate to film as it’s entirely set within an abstract, ethereal world hidden beneath a motel. The characters only interact with each other during vig?nettes where James descends the floors in a hostile elevator. It lends well to the cutscene-level-cutscene flow of a video game, but for a compelling to watch experience, this will need to be extrapolated on. Thankfully, there's a lot of backstory and worldbuilding aroun??d the core game.

While the game’s developer, Xalavier Nelson Jr., has acknowledged the movie, it hasn’t yet been sta?ted if he will be involv??ed in the creation process.

It’s a weird time we’re living in where game-to-TV adaptations like Castlevania and Fallout are finding praise and niche titles like El Paso, Elsewhere and Iron Lung are being adapted to film. I still prefer playing games to watching absolutely anything, but I never thought I’d see the day where justice was bein??g done to the medium.

There’s no set timeline for when we might see the El Paso, Elsewhere film.

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If an unseen God threatened to end the world if you didn’t sacrifice someone every year, would you do it? That’s the core concept of Strange Scaffold's Life Eater.

Me? I wouldn’t. That sounds like way too much work with very little reward. You’d have to buy ??tarps, figure out what to do with the bodies, and get creative with establishing alibis. So much preparation, so much work, and for what? No one’s going to thank you. What’s?? in it for you? Continued existence doesn’t seem like much of a reward.

But that’s what video games are for. Th?ey allow us to live out situations that we are much to lazy to do in real life.

Life Eater (PC [Reviewed])
Developer: Strange Scaffold
Publisher: Strange Scaffold, Frosty Pop
Released: April 16, 2024
MSRP: $14.99

Life Eater has you appeasing the god Zimforth, who will end the world if you don’t do his bidding and sacrifice someone (or someones) every year. You play as?? a character whose name is deliberately obfuscated, and his sanity is questionable. Is he a tragic hero, a warped sadist, or just?? some guy who has a strange yearly ritual?

Your ??job is to abduct your targets, and as a bonus, you also need to perform a quiz-based ritual at the end of each level. You’re presented with the timeline of one week, and it’s up to you to uncover ever little detail you can about your target within a ??limited time.

Your target’s schedule is presented as a video editing timeline consisting of blocks of activity. You uncover each activity by performing one of three actions. Each action you take will cost time off the clock, but this amount changes each turn. Some blocks require you to take more invasive actions, which will also raise your susp?icion meter. The challenge here is to uncover enough information to fulfill a threshold that will allow you to abduct the target.

This starts off simple, but before long, Life Eater starts requiring you to find your target amongst a small group?? of them. You need to dig into the details of all? the subjects until you find the nugget of information that confirms who your target is. It means you have to learn as much about your target as possible and retain some of that knowledge so you know how best to sacrifice them.

That sounds like a pretty evocative experience that delves into the sanctity of privacy, but Life Eater’s gameplay is a bit too simple and distant for that. The timeline feature, and the fact that you donâ€??™t really see your targets asid??e from a shadowed depiction of them, doesn’t entirely connect you with what you’re uncovering.

Because of this, these pe?ople don’t seem like people. That might be a statement in itself, but what I mean is that it’s hard to see them as beings instead of just a puzzle?. It doesn’t feel like there’s someone behind the blocks, so any impact that your task might have on you is dulled. You just find yourself pushing to meet the criteria, and the information you uncover is essentially meaningless.

It’s further dulled by the fact that, while there are some random elements of each chapter, failing will grant you foresight. If you discover that one of your subjects isn’t the target you’re searching for, on a repeat playthrough, it’s easy to identify them again. If there is one moment on the timeline you’re seeking, it will a??lways be on that same time and day. You’re probably going to fail at some point b??ecause the instructions aren’t always clear, and experimentation is necessary.

The story that overlaps everything doesn’t really make up for this. It’s mainly about the player character interacting with someone they took captive for reasons aside from sacrifice. It’s a decent story that does a good job of delving into the complicated situation the main character finds themselves in, but since it doesn’t do much worldbuilding, it’s harde?r to care about the world or the people who inhabit it.

The gameplay itself feels somewhat shallow. Or rather, it feels like it doesn’t quite achieve everything it set out to. It seems like there should be more random generation here, but aside from characters ?and their hair color, I never really saw it manifest. Gameplay often falls to clicking on tiles, finding the actions that take 0.5 hours, and empty??ing your suspicion gauge when it gets full.

It’s short, and despite its incredibly novel concept, it ?feels extremely routine.

There’s an endless mode that is comin??g shortly after launch (I’m told about three weeks), but I don’t think that will address my complaints. The main core narrative needed to be more impactful, but it misses the mark.

Life Eater feels like an experiment that neither fizzled nor exploded. All the parts are there, but they don’t fit together quite right. Something is missing, and before that something was located, it was released into the wild as-is. Because it can’t find its effectiveness, the central concept that should be so compelling and disturbing is just kind of fluffy. If an apathetic detachment from ritual sacrifice was what Life Eater was aiming for, t??hen it nailed it. Unfortunately.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}

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El Paso, Elsewhere developer Strange Scaffold has announced a five-game deal with publisher Frosty Pop. As part of the announcement, they’ve revealed a trailer for their next game, Life Eater, which ??is out on Apr??il 16, 2024.

I find this trailer rather unsettling.

The trailer shows off the game’s timeline interface where you must learn the habits and schedule of your quarry so that you may find the opportunity to abduct them. You play as a “modern day druid�who is tasked with performing an annual sacrificial ritual to delay the end of the world. It looks like once you have your quarry, you then take their organs to “water the flower.�/p>

Life Eater looks to be a rather evocative game. It has you violate the lives of others while framed as someone performing a necessary evil. Just the fact tha??t you’re learning intimate details of the lives of others and monitoring them for the moment to strike is rather discomforting. The information on the game even suggests that the whole â€??œdark godâ€?angle might be false. I'd play it.

The store page promises “replayable blend of authored and generated stories.�It features music from David Mason who was the composer of Dredge.

As an aside, there are modern-day Druids, a?s Druidry is a modern religion based?? on pagan cultures. I don’t think they generally converse with dark gods and perform sacrifices. Just weird to see that as a contextual descriptor.

Life Eater releases on PC on April 16, 2024.

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That’s a lot of words

Strange Scaffold has announced another title in their stable of upcoming games, Teenage Demon Slayer Society. It’s currently only announced for PC and only has a release window of 2024.

Teenage Demon Slayer Society bills itself as “a bol??d new turn-based take on character action games, featuring style ranks, customizable movesets, and cool, endearing characters.�Strangely, my brain can make sense of that salad of descriptors, w??hich is sad, because I get confused when paperwork asks for my address.

//youtu.be/nmm2POiMNXQ

A trailer?? dropped alongside the announcement, showing off the game's style. I dig it. I like turn-based strategy that involves exactly one character. It’s not really all that much different than moving a bunch of characters around, but?? it makes me feel cool.

Real demons

Since Strange Scaffold is best known for An Airport for Aliens Currently Run by Dogs and Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator, Teenage Demon Slayer Society kind of blows my mind. Those two games?? employ more of a jank-pop aesthetic, whereas this one looks more like a stylish anime. It makes sense, though, since Japan is the only place where teenagers fight demons anymore. Actual sexy demons, I mean. Not like alcoholism or the imaginary kind that televangelists and?? Alex Jones shout at you about.

This is also quite the pace that Strange Scaffold has going on. It’s the development label of Xalavier Nelson Jr., whose work extends to a number of other great games beyond Strange Scaffold and into places like Hypnospace Outlaw. It feels like An Airport for Aliens Currently Run by Dogs was released yesterday, but because time has no meaning, it was actually 2021. Still, Teenage Demon Slayer Society joins Sunshine Shuffle and El Paso, Elsewhere in upcoming titles from the developer.

Teenage Demon Slayer Society is Currently only announced for PC. It is targeting a 2024 release.

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See your deliveries through and possibly destroy the moon, too

There are plenty of games about the mechs that do battle in war, but what about the ones moving supplies behind the lines? Can Androids Survive ?is a new short-form game about carrying out deliveries as a battlefield courier, and it's out right now on Itch.

As a walking supply truck of a mech, Can Androids Survive has the pla??yer navigate around various obstacles and hazards while dealing with their fuel gauge. While you undertake your mission to deliver supplies on the war-torn Moon, you might also learn a bit about yourself, and what your existence really is. And, apparently, you blow up the Moon at some point.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=vP8e70Tresg

Can Androids Survive is written by Can Androids Pray writer Xalavier Nelson Jr., who also wrote this year's An Airport For Aliens Currently Run by Dogs. It's developed by aPriori ??Digital, with music by Priscilla Snow and sound design from Audiac Audio.

This mech-delivery sim is available now on the Itch.io storefront for $14.99, though plan??s are in place for a console release in early 2022.

Now, I do love some good giant robot combat. But I'm pretty interested in this take on mechanized warfare as well. Seeing a version of war that shows the logistics behind the frontlines, while letting you view the carnage from a di?fferent point of view, sounds pretty intriguing.

If you're into the idea of Death Stranding with a lunar, mechanized twist, ??this might be up your alley.

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