By Matt Gardner,Senior Contributor

Copyright forbes

I Am Your Beast’ is the best way to feel immortal in a quick, brutal, and stylish way.
Strange Scaffold

You can play as many indie games as you like, but every year, you know you’ll miss something special — for me, it was Rollerdrome in 2022 and Cassette Beasts in 2023. I Am Your Beast, which came out last September, is annoyingly absent from my list of the best indie games of 2024.

All is not lost: I’ve finally caught up, and it’s never too late to make amends. After I Am Your Beast shadow-dropped onto Xbox Game Pass on September 2, this self-described “shortform covert revenge thriller FPS” proves to be the single best addition to the service in recent months, for all the right reasons — even if you’re knee-deep in an 80-hour AAA, or thinly spread between four games across as many platforms.

As the brainchild of Strange Scaffold — the same studio behind the delightful El Paso, Elsewhere — I Am Your Beast offers a dip-in-and-out experience to cleanse your palate between other gaming sessions, thriving on self-contained and frankly batshit battles against faceless enemies. Of course, it might just take over your life for a couple of highly strung nights, but you can finish it in four or so hours, so long as you’re not a completionist.

I Am Your Beast puts you in the well-worn boots of Alphonse Harding, a retired secret agent living the quiet life in a snowy forest. You’re asked to do one last mission, even though you’ve fulfilled this career-ending request numerous times before. Anger and apathy soon transform the narrative into a revenge story, as you duke it out across mini-arenas, killing multiple enemies and avoiding dozens of threats while focusing your approach on speed, accuracy, panache, reactions, and basic orienteering.

MORE FOR YOU

It immediately feels like a reverse SUPERHOT — one where taking your time and reading the room are the least of your worries, while movement and speed are your top priority. I Am Your Beast also has elements of its frankly brilliant, sense-assaulting Game Pass stablemate Mullet Madjack, rewarding you for kills with time, which continuously ebbs away at your score bar, measured from S to D. You’re a trained murderer, so you best act like one.

Yeah alright mate
Strange Scaffold

Sure, shooting someone in the chest eventually does the job, but is it rewarded as well as a headshot, bear trap to the torso, or kicking someone’s face off when they’re stunned on the floor? Not on your nelly! As you learn your objectives, terrain, obstacles, speedier routes, and enemy positions and weapons, you start chaining things together. Before you know it, you brain someone with a log, grab their knife and throw it at someone’s head, grab their pistol, whip it into someone else’s throat, kick their face off (as discussed), grab their shotgun, decimate three idiots, and drop down a hatch to the relative safety of another arena where the orgy of violence starts again.

Between missions, you’re rewarded with some genuinely strong and often funny dialogue and world-building, reminiscent of the phone calls from In Bruges (though never quite hitting the heights of “inanimate object”). There are no faces or deeper back story — just a solid narrative that you’re expected to (and should) watch, if only to mentally prepare yourself for the next twist in the tale: armored enemies, helicopters, and more.

‘I Am Your Beast’ constantly ramps up its threats, but you luckily feel increasingly capable of dealing with them.
Strange Scaffold

Admittedly, I Am Your Beast thrives on making you do more than the bare minimum to get to the end, locking later missions behind ever-increasing hurdles. It initially asks you to complete more side missions, which are, to be fair, a lot of fun. Soon, you’re forced to become an even more ruthless killing machine by delivering multiple A-grade performances, before your arm’s twisted behind your back to deliver a solitary S-grade. At the time of writing, I’m still trying my best to get my S together, and I know how — I just need to run a few (read: many, many) more drills.

I Am Your Beast is precisely what the title suggests, in way more ways than one, both as a character and player: a compulsive FPS that pushes you to your limit without dissuading you from trying again, quietly encouraging you to do better because it knows you can. You know you can. And even when you can’t, at least the soundtrack by rj lake is an absolute banger. Get it played.

Editorial StandardsReprints & Permissions