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Metascore
68

Mixed or average reviews - based on 9 Critic Reviews What's this?

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  • Summary: If you don't sacrifice your neighbors, the world ends. Life Eater is a horror fantasy kidnapping simulator where you must become intimately familiar with your targets' lives one intrusive action at a time... and hope that the dark god you serve is even real.
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 4 out of 9
  2. Negative: 0 out of 9
  1. Apr 19, 2024
    90
    Life Eater by Strange Scaffold and Frosty Pop stands out in the simulation genre with its innovative approach to gameplay mechanics and narrative integration. The game excels in creating an atmosphere filled with suspense and dread, backed by a strong audio-visual presentation that immerses players in its unsettling world. The strategic elements of managing time and suspicion while solving puzzles to successfully carry out dark rituals offer a fresh take on the simulation genre.
  2. Apr 16, 2024
    80
    An inventive kidnapping sim, Life Eater is one of 2024’s most creative (and uncomfortable) games yet. Yes, it’s fucked up. But will you stop playing? Absolutely not.
  3. Apr 16, 2024
    80
    Life Eater humanises your victims with deft skill and crafts simple, emotional stories without once giving your sacrificial lambs a voice. I often found myself imagining my own life cut up into violent video editing software, and reassessed my own priorities as I stalked through an innocent person’s mundane existence, preparing to rip it away.
  4. Apr 16, 2024
    70
    Life Eater provides something quite different from anything else available, and will likely live long in the memory. For that reason, even in spite of its faults, it's probably worth a try for anyone with even a cursory interest in horror or new ways for games to tell their stories.
  5. Apr 16, 2024
    65
    Life Eater is a game I’m a little sad I can’t rate on concept and premise alone. Snooping through timelines of activities of potential targets and investigating tidbits to try and correctly take down those requested is good on paper, offering the same highs of franchises such as Hitman. However, its execution is a little underbaked. The qualifiers for targets are equally too vague and too simple with little variety, leading to friction and distrust about whether or not you’re on the right track. There is quality design in the way you’re managing meters to avoid suspicion and maximising your time, along with some stellar returning performances from the likes of Xalavier Nelson Jr. However, Life Eater needed a little more time bunkering down, taking notes, and just getting every little thing right. The perfect hunt it is not.
  6. Apr 17, 2024
    60
    Mechanically, Life Eater uses a diary-based puzzle system in some really interesting ways, but it struggles to say anything meaningful about the shock-factor setting it's gone for.
  7. Apr 16, 2024
    55
    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, then it nailed it. Unfortunately.

See all 9 Critic Reviews