Life Eater

Strange Scaffold · Apr 16, 2024

Mature

About

Life Eater is an horror fantasy kidnapping simulator. Play as a modern-day druid living in suburbia, holding down a dead-end job to pay for your true vocation: conducting the annual ritual that keeps the world from ending. To delay the end of the world, you must sacrifice a number of specific - but vaguely-described - human beings every year. Use a video editing-inspired interface to discover the story of your victims' lives, one schedule block at a time. Pry into the most intimate details of your targets' schedules, and when the time is right: abduct them before the authorities can find your lair. Time is short and your list of names is long. Choose your options wisely... and pray that the dark god you serve is even real

Trailers & screenshots

Scores by platform

PC

Critic 6.8 (6 critics) · Gamer 8.3

Critic reviews

Destructoid
Zoey Handley · Apr 17, 2024
5.5
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.
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But Why Tho?
Matt Sowinski · Apr 16, 2024
6.0
Life Eater takes an interesting premise but loses itself in monotony.
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Checkpoint Gaming
Charlie Kelly · Apr 16, 2024
6.5
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.
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Screen Rant
Rob Gordon · Apr 16, 2024
7.0
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.
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TheGamer
Ben Sledge · Apr 16, 2024
8.0
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.
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NME
Andy Brown · Apr 16, 2024
8.0
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.
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