Life Eater Review – A Game About End Times and Abduction Has Us Losing Our Minds

Life Eater Review: A New Horror Simulation Experience

I’m a big fan of simulation games, which is precisely the variety that has me stressing out over time management and trying to get all my numbers in a row with limited assets. And then I found out about Life Eater. Developed by Strange Scaffold, the minds behind one of my favorite games from last year, El Paso, Elsewhere, in collaboration with Frosty Pop, this new video game has the outlandish pitch of being a horror fantasy kidnapping simulation game where you sacrifice people to a dark god. It’s so absurd that it has to be something special.
And I wasn’t let down.

Navigating the Timeline: Mastering Life Eater’s Core Mechanics

Life Eater stars a really cursed individual—so cursed that they won’t give you his name. This player character was one day cursed by a dark god named Zimforth. Zimforth apparently rules the earth and will cause the apocalypse.
There is one way to stave off the end times, though: a nice and straightforward yearly task-
Ritual Sacrifice.

It’s not an immersive simulator. Life Eater instead sits you down in front of a ‘target timeline’, visually similar to that in a video editing program. However, instead of blocks of inserted media, you have the schedule of your target over the course of a week—or targets, depending on how clear Zimforth is with their orders.

Challenges and Strategy: Tactical Gameplay in Life Eater

To uncover sections of the target timeline, you click on these schedule blocks and can perform different tasks. Each task costs a certain amount of time and raises the ‘suspicion gauge.’ If the task is successfully executed, the actions of the target during this time will be uncovered. However, certain schedule blocks will require time-heavy investment or more ‘invasive’/suspicion-increasing tasks to uncover.

Life Eater redefines the horror simulation genre with its chilling narrative and engaging puzzle mechanics.

Once you’ve gathered enough information on your target, you can abduct them and perform a ritual known as ‘watering the flower,’ in which you dissect them in a way that functions as a knowledge check to see if you know everything about them.

But of course, it’s not as simple as just clicking all the boxes to uncover them because that ‘time-heavy ’-ness comes from a literal timer that decreases every time you select an action. You’ll have to strategize and plan what timeframes you want to uncover to ensure you have all the necessary information. And then Zimforth will leave you goddam riddles instead of giving you a target.

This effectively turns Life Eater into a stressful horror-laden puzzle game. Tensions are high, and the title is highly atmospheric. The title has a phenomenal soundtrack, and the User Interface is easy to read, understand, and figure out. It’s low in visual detail, but it’s enough to be highly evocative and leaves the most intriguing hints to work out the character of the person you must abduct and kill.

The game’s innovative use of a ‘target timeline’ turns every decision into a high-stakes strategy, making Life Eater a uniquely immersive experience.

The primary campaign has ten levels and is clearable in about 4 hours if you don’t get tremendously stuck on a particular section. Whilst this isn’t much content, an endless mode is planned as a free sometime soon, allowing for more gripping problem-solving.This gameplay is also compelling because there’s also a perfect story here. That synopsis up there may seem like an excuse plot. While the story, taking the form of roughly 20 short cutscenes composed of still images, may not seem like much for a complete narrative, the presentation is immaculate. Every line counts, and I dare not spoil just how good they are lest you tell me to choke on it.

Atmospheric Design: Visuals and Soundtrack of Life Eater

The intro sets up the gameplay in a very compelling way. It is backed by that phenomenal soundtrack, has some incredible vocal performances, and the title only gets more and more intense and upsetting as it goes on. Every part of this game works in service of another. The narrative supports the gameplay, the presentation of the mechanics adds to that narrative, and the gameplay adds to the narrative.

With its atmospheric soundtrack and minimalist visuals, Life Eater creates a hauntingly beautiful tableau that lingers long after the game ends.

I was enthralled by Life Eater’s gritty and tragic tone and atmosphere. I was hooked on the simulation mechanics. So I played until I got stuck. Then, when I got unstuck, I played the rest of the game. I’d intended to take a break before the final level, but when I got there, I found a finale so well presented I couldn’t just stop there; I was losing my mind.

Life Eater is a phenomenal game that excels at everything it tries to do. This entertaining and tense title, as a side effect, will leave the visual of the countdown timer decreasing and repeating inside your dreams. It’s an incredible experience that justifies the price of admission, and I cannot wait to see what this team will do next.