Video Game / I Am Your Beast

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General Burkin: What do you think you're doing here, son?
Alphonse Harding: I believe I'm making it very unpleasant for a COI agent to exist in the relatively small patch of forest I've made my home. What do you think I'm doing here?

I Am Your Beast is a 2024 First-Person Shooter made by indie developers Strange Scaffold, the minds behind El Paso, Elsewhere and Clickolding, released on the PC. You play as Alphonse Harding, a "retired" operative for the Covert Operations Initiative who's been dragged into their messes post-retirement again and again. One day, he decides to spend some time running after a bird, only for it to be shot down by a COI operative on a whim. This ends up bursting the dam of Harding's resentment against the COI, resulting in him waging a bloody and brutal one-man war against his former employers.

Most of the gameplay revolves around killing your enemies and navigating through the levels as fast as possible using whatever weapons are lying around, with a few levels having you fend off waves of enemies, and a lot of the appeal comes from redoing the levels while completing bonus objectives and outdoing your previous times and scores. The game has a unique, economical way of telling its story, using kinetic typography and voice performances in lieu of fully animated cutscenes.

A set of post-launch levels depicting a group of COI agents after the events of the game in a anonymous support group for the few survivors of Harding's rampage, aptly named "Support Group", was released on 22nd November 2024.

It reminded me of the best days on TV Tropes. When I felt I did good.

• Actually Pretty Funny: At the end of the game, Harding asks Burkin if it was all worth it, to which Burkin immediately says Fuck No, causing Harding to chuckle. When Harding apologizes for laughing, Burkin admits that he too, sees the humor in it.
• Back Stab: Kicking an enemy from the back will kill them instantly.
• Bear Trap: One of the weapons you can use, either in the normal way or by flinging them at enemies.
• Boom, Headshot!: The preferred way of taking out enemies using a gun; doing so always removes their entire head.
• Boring, but Practical: No matter how many weapons Harding grabs on his rampage, the humble pistol tends to be his best choice, as six chances to headshot somebody tends to be more reliable than the lower clip size of the shotgun or the low damage of automatic weapons.
• Break Them by Talking: Burkin spends half of his screen time tossing Hannibal Lecture after Hannibal Lecture at Harding to make him accept the latest job. Harding just keeps telling him to stuff it and leave him alone.
• Broke the Rating Scale: It's possible to go so fast that you get negative times on levels through racking up enough bonuses.
• Carry a Big Stick: Can't find a proper weapon lying around? Just smack those suckers with a giant piece of wood! Sometimes, enemies will even react incredulously to your unconventional choice of weapon.
• Contrasting Sequel Main Character: Well, follow-up rather than sequel, but though Alphonse Harding and James Savage are similar in some respects, in others they couldn't be more different:
  • James is stoic and reserved, with most of his humor being dark or deadpan, while Harding is more upbeat, occasionally outright trollish. This is reflected in their vocal performances: while both are voiced by Xalavier Nelson Jr., he gives James a husky almost-whisper much like his inspiration, and Harding a more expressive, chipper tone.
  • James was an Occult Detective who spent most of his adult life investigating the supernatural (and some dating it); Harding was an agent of the US government in a far more grounded setting.
  • Both are incredibly traumatized and consider themselves to have screwed up in the past, but James' trauma stems from Draculae's Domestic Abuse, his regret is largely centered around his drug habit and how he enabled her, and he mostly expresses it through Mangst, with occasional flashes of Not So Stoic, while Harding is a Shell-Shocked Veteran who regrets the Dirty Business he did in service to the COI, and he's far more openly emotional, keeping a diary and outright having a panic attack at one point.
  • James is a normal human (mostly, anyway) wielding Wooden Stakes and a Hyperspace Arsenal of guns; Harding's physical ability borders on Charles Atlas Superpower, and his weapon of choice is mostly his bare hands and feet or whatever he can steal from the COI.
• Defied Trope: The whole plot of this game revolves around Harding defying One Last Job. He won't do it. They can't make him. And he is going to pile as many dead bodies as he has to in order to force them to back off.
• Detrimental Determination: Zig Zagged. Burkin sends a lot of COI soldiers after Harding, by his own admission millions of dollars' worth of the agency's budget, as the "or else" of An Offer You Can't Refuse that Harding annihilates with ease. It takes roughy three figures of dead soldiers for Burkin to accept that hunting Harding has become too expensive and pulls stakes.
• Dude, Where's My Respect?: The COI is well aware of Harding's talents, but part of the reason they're in this mess in the first place is because they keep bringing him back for "one last job" that inevitably turns out to only be the job before the next "last job". They've done this at least five times, according to him.
• Eagleland: A definite undercurrent of "the boorish". Burkin tries to appeal to Harding's patriotism but Harding makes clear that he missions he has done for COI the last few times Burkin played this card were to get rid of obstacles to the country's greed, not go protect it.
• Enemy Chatter: Sometimes, you can hear the COI operatives chatting before you make the first strike.
• Exploding Barrels: They're here, and as usual, they're a good way of wiping out multiple enemies in an instant.
• Finishing Stomp: Enemies who are laid out but not dead can be finished with a stomp to the head.
• Gameplay and Story Integration: About two-thirds through the game, a misstep by Harding leads to an old wound re-opening, causing him to bleed severely until he's able to patch it up a few levels later. This translates into the gameplay as a bleeding status effect that steadily drains his health.
• Gameplay Grading: At the end of every level, you get graded anywhere from D to S.
• Gangsta Style: Guns are not like this by default, and the player is able to fire normally from the hip. However, in lieu of traditional iron sights, all weapons are instead held Center-Axis Relock when the "Aim" button is pressed, preserving momentum while also increasing enemy clarity to the player. This even extends to the sniper rifle, and the related gameplay tip below means the game is all aware of this trope.
  "Scopes are for cowards. Alphonse is not a coward."
• Goomba Stomp: You can kill enemies by leaping onto them from a high place.
• Government Agency of Fiction: The COI is a transparent stand-in for the CIA.
• Graceful Loser: At the end of the game, when Burkin finally calls off his men he still tries to maintain a sense of civility about the whole thing to at least maintain some dignity. He even goes as far as to personally erase every last record of Harding's existence and actively lying to the resulting subcommittee, all too well aware at this point that those higher up the food chain than him would just send him back in if Harding could be found again.
• Irony: The countless military resources sent after Harding don't come close to putting him on death's door. What does? His own stomping grounds, as a consequence of a misplaced step that leads to him taking a nasty fall that reopens an old wound.
• Kick the Dog: This bloodbath happens because one of the soldiers of the COI retrieval team coming to find Harding decided to shoot a bird. Comparisons to Daisy the puppy soon followed.
• Know When to Fold 'Em: After Harding has killed countless soldiers and caused millions of dollars in damages to military equipment, Burkin is forced to call everything off and pull his forces back since Harding is now quite literally not worth the trouble.
• Limited Loadout: You only have two weapon slots. The first slot is for melee weapons and guns, the second one is for uncommon, one-use weapons like Beartraps or an RPG.
• Minimalist Cast: In conjunction with the unique text-and-voiceover-only cutscenes (most of the time), the cast is kept to an absolute minimum in the main story mode with only three characters - Harding, Byron and Burkin - notably, the latter two never interact with each other on-screen. Other mooks make their appearances from time to time, but are just as quickly put down by Harding. This is however downplayed during the actual gameplay itself, with enemy radio chatter constantly commenting on Harding's actions, and outright averted for the Support Group epilogue, which follows a group of traumatized survivors who had survived encounters with Harding.
• The Mole: A COI operative named Byron Ford feeds Harding information in exchange for his life being spared.
• Mook Horror Show: The game is all about Harding delivering one so nasty that his resignation will be accepted. The Support Group update revolves around some of said mooks telling each other their "barely-survived-meeting-Harding" horror story.
• Musical Nod: The song that Harding plays over the COI's frequency in the cutscene before White Noise is "Ghostin' the Mainframe" from El Paso, Elsewhere.
• Nobody Poops: Its aversion is Played for Laughs with one Mook conversation early in the game: one COI agent suggests that another take a bathroom break while he stands guard, saying he hasn't seen his partner do his business all day, but the other guy insists that Harding will get him if he goes to the bathroom, and he doesn't want to die shitting himself. This ironically saves one of the Support Group; Harding just flew right past the outhouse he was in but massacred the rest of his squad.
  COI Agent: ...You need to piss, Alan.
• One-Hit Polykill: You can wipe out several enemies with one sniper bullet if you line things up correctly.
• One Last Job: Harding took this before the events of the game... or rather, a whole bunch of "last jobs," with one line implying that he and Burkin have done the "One Last Job" song and dance at least five times. They did a lot to sour his relationship to the COI. When he's called up at the start of the game for another "One Last Job" Harding isn't having it, especially since he's been keeping up with the news and has good reason to suspect the job is less "Saving Lives" and more "Securing Strategic Oil Reserves". Then one of the operatives sent after him callously kills a bird, causing Harding's resentment to boil over. Thus Harding decides if it takes slaughtering every COI agent sent after him to get them to stop, then he'll do it.
• Rage Breaking Point: Harding's years of resentment towards the COI is let loose when one of the operatives decides to kill a bird on a whim, while talking about them bringing Harding in for yet another One Last Job.
• Resignations Not Accepted:
  • Even after Harding kills a bunch of his men, Burkin still tries to force him into doing the bidding of the COI because Harding is just that good at what they need him to do. It's not until the latter half of the game that he gives up and tries to kill Harding.
  • Byron also implies later while explaining why he'll be piloting an attack helicopter to try and kill Harding that this is standard policy for the COI, and that desertion would mean harm to his wife and daughter.
  • In the the end it is averted with extreme prejudice. Burkin not only accepts Harding's resignation (alongside the mile-high pile of corpses Harding made to force him to) but makes sure to purge all information on Harding from COI so nobody in the higher levels of the organization gets the idea of continuing the hunt (and toss Burkin into that fray as cannon fodder).
• Retired Badass: Harding...on paper. In practice, he's been forced out of retirement an awful lot of times, and now he's hellbent on making it stick.
• Scary Stinging Swarm: You can kill enemies by shooting a bee hive. The swarm of bees is deadly enough to cause the head of an enemy explode.
• Sequel Hook: While the game ends with Burkin calling off the COI's assault on Harding and taking every measure he can to make sure his forest goes undisturbed, he warns that others might seek out Harding, either for revenge or to prove themselves.
• Shell-Shocked Veteran:
  • Harding has some deep-seated guilt over the dirty jobs he's performed for the COI, which is a big part of why he's killing their operatives with no hesitation.
  • The Support Group of the titular DLC are all survivors of Harding who take turns sharing stories of how he ripped their squads apart and gave them all deep-seated trauma.
• Short-Range Shotgun: While a shotgun blast is able to kill enemies instantly (even if they were armored), the shotgun in this game has a short effective range. It will fail to deal any damage if the targets are far away.
• Shout-Out: The Rage Breaking Point being the death of an innocent animal and Alphonse wielding the guns he steals using the Center Axis Relock method brings to mind the John Wick franchise.
• Smug Snake: Some of the COI operatives are way too confident about going up against the nigh-inhuman operator you're playing as. For example, the one from Tete-a-Tete's cutscene mocks and taunts Harding and thinks their numbers advantage makes it only a matter of time before they suffocate him, only for her mark to show up when she tells him to come out and retort with a Double Tap, much to her short-lived horror.
• Throw-Away Guns: The guns in this game can't be reloaded at all. Once you used up all the bullets, you have to get a new weapon.
• Throwing Your Gun at the Enemy: Harding can toss guns at his enemies, which not only stuns them but causes their own guns to fly towards him for him to grab.
• Tranquil Fury:
  • When the COI Agents kill the bird Harding had been following, he vows to make life annoying for any other agents in the area until such time as they leave him alone.
  • Pushed to a logical conclusion when Burkin elects to blow up his house. The sheer calm menace in his tone as he makes clear his intentions to wipe out every agent in the forest until Burkin either runs out or leaves. It's a major point that, at the end of the cutscene, BURKIN is the one who ends the call, not Harding.
• Troll: Harding isn't above messing with the COI agents before he takes them out. A prime example would be when he hijacks the COI's radio frequency... to play music over it. Then, when a field commander realizes his soldiers aren't just fucking around on their phones:
  Harding: That would mean that Harding has the new encryption codes.
  COI Agent: That would mean that Harding has the new — oh, fuck!
• Un-person: The ending of the Support Group levels has Burkin tell the agents assembled that Harding doesn't exist, not anymore; having personally scrubbed every last record of his existence, informing them that he will be saying as such to a subcommittee, and threatening his subordinates into silence over the matter via their families.
• Unreliable Narrator: Though the base game is told from Harding's perspective and stays relatively grounded, the Support Group update told from the perspective of a group of COI agents depicts Harding seemingly performing feats that should be straight up physically impossible for even a near-superhuman like him.
• The War Sequence: A few levels in the game break from the typical time-attack format by having a massive wave of COI agents for Harding to fend off, with a progress bar appearing on the right side of the screen and the level being scored on style points accrued instead of time taken.
• We Used to Be Friends: Burkin brings up the fact that he and Harding used to be fairly close before the events of the game, but Harding is decidedly unenthused about rekindling that friendship.

"I'm what the COI made me. And I'm not going back."