Life Eater is an unnerving horror game about ritualistic sacrifice

In 2023, Strange Scaffold released El Paso, Elsewhere, a horror-tinged throwback to the likes of Max Payne that also told a deeply personal and unsettling story about a toxic relationship. Its next game, Life Eater, puts players in the shoes of a serial killer seeking out new targets to kill and sacrifice to a god he’s starting to question the existence of. This isn’t a Manhunt- or Hitman-style stalk-and-kill game; it offers a feeling of detachment by having players parse through timelines to learn everything they need to abduct and properly sacrifice a target.

Life Eater is a brisk, yet unnerving experience. Even if it doesn’t quite reach the heights of El Paso, Elsewhere, it affirms that Strange Scaffold is one of the best studios working in the horror gaming space right now.

Life Eater follows a man who emerges once a year to sacrifice innocent people to a god called Zimforth. He does this by scouring the weekly schedules of several people to uncover information that affirms that a potential target falls within the parameters Zimforth set forth. Each piece of information uncovered on a timeline comes at the cost of time and a bit of notoriety, so the challenge of Life Eater is ensuring that you gather all the correct information without getting caught and within a time limit.

It doesn’t stop there, though, as Life Eater checks if the player was paying attention during the actual sacrificial process. The sacrifice requires the removal of certain body parts depending on the person’s schedule. For example, you might have to remove someone’s pancreas if they have a commute or their large intestine if they don’t. Mess this up, and Zimforth won’t accept the sacrifice, so you’ll have to restart the search from square one.

The timeline=parsing gameplay and memorization that Life Eater demands aren’t nearly as entertaining as El Paso, Elsewhere‘s slick shooting, but this minimalist gameplay cleverly reinforces the narrative themes. To