Life Eater
In early 2024, I had just moved to Maryland fresh off of my 2nd ever layoff, and 2nd layoff of 2023 — a notably bad year for the games industry. I was fortunate enough to have connections that landed me some work; notably with Strange Scaffold. I was given the chance to jump into Unreal and do content design for Life Eater, a fantasy-horror kidnapping simulator.
The Game
The game is played on a timeline, where peoples’ general schedules are represented by blocks of time. Those blocks can be uncovered by clicking on them and selecting an action, which raises your suspicion meter and loses you some time. The Downtime actions allow you to sacrifice time to lower your suspicion meter and gain ANonymity points, which let you perform actions for zero suspicion.
Pink blocks like the above can be further investigated, showing either a random block or a specifically-linked one.
Once you uncover enough of a target’s timeline, and you’re sure they’re who you’re looking for, you can abduct them. This brings you to the ritual screen, where you must use the information you’ve gathered to remove the correct organs to please Zimforth.
The Design
The first step was to see what was possible with the editor. I had two major tools available to me: bespoke targets, and archetypal targets.
Bespoke targets require every single detail of their schedule to be manually placed. Archetypal targets have parameters like when they sleep and how long, general AM and PM activities, how long they work for, etc.
The first three levels were largely using archetypal targets, so my first instinct was to create a level using only archetypal targets. After two of them, this turned out to be a monumental amount of work, so I pivoted to archetypal while using these bespoke segments as larger milestones in the game. For the halfway point, there was Year 5.
When I was younger, my aunt developed ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) and was eventually fully paralyzed, while my uncle did everything in his power to keep her alive. By the time she was taken off life support, she had been brain dead for an entire year. I cannot imagine the nightmare that she experienced up to that point, and the relief we all felt knowing that her suffering was over had a tinge of guilt to it. This level reflects a lot of those feelings, albeit through the lens of someone with much more flexible morals.
Ronald is bedridden, unable to move, and all of his 30-minute time blocks are him sleeping. His wife Donna and caretaker Jane are constantly monitoring him — a sign of Donna’s devotion to be sure. Uncovering Ronald’s blocks one at a time reveal that not only is he sleeping and unarmed, but he is not alone.
Up to this point, characters in Life Eater have no relation to each other, or if they do, it’s very much in passing. I wanted to create a focus point where players would have to deliberately use their time to investigate those who weren’t their target, because let’s face it, you won’t learn much by watching a dead man sleep.
When creating these levels, I added colored blocks in order to create narrative links to others. In the case of bespoke targets, these are usually pink blocks to start, with them settling at the new color to provide narrative cohesion. Sometimes, like in the case of this exorcism/prayer combo, they’re red herrings.
The solution is fairly straightforward though. Most of the days are the same — a tribute to the monotony of my visits with my aunt. Go there, watch her breathe, watch IV bags be replaced, etc. Caring for a relative who cannot care for themselves (especially a vegetative one) has a sort of all-consuming, horrific monotony to it. By looking at the breaks in the schedule, you find areas where Donna and Jane are disrupted.
Following this thread of actions eventually leads you to a day where Donna falls on her daily walk and has to call Jane, who leaves the house to look for Donna, leaving Ronald alone for a single 30-minute time block where he can be killed.
Other scenarios include a band where you have to kill their stand-in musician, a group of roommates where you have to kill siblings, a party where someone is bringing roofies, and more. All of these scenarios have you invade the lives and privacy of these people in order to determine who deserves to die at the hand of a god you’re not even really sure exists.
It was fun to approach storytelling this way, and even more so to do so fairly divorced from the larger narrative of Ralph and Johnny. These self-contained vignettes of normal peoples’ lives viewed through the lens of a remorseful killer make for a perspective I don’t see often in media. If you’re interested, Life Eater is on Steam.