Life Eater is a ‘horror fantasy kidnapping simulator’ and several of those words should trouble you.
There’s nothing I like more in games than snooping around. Give me a computer to hack, a window to peek through, a conversation to eavesdrop on, and I’m happy as a clam. When I heard there was an entire game called Life Eater about observing my neighbors and learning their routines and habits, I was definitely ready to become an amateur private investigator.
One teeny tiny caveat to the fun snoopery at hand is that Life Eater is ‘horror fantasy kidnapping simulator’ and the reason I’m spying on my neighbors is so I can determine the best time to abduct them so I can break their bones, cut out their internal organs, and stab them in the heart.
Don’t judge me just yet. I’m a desperate, haunted loner (ahem, in the game) who follows the orders of a mysterious “lord of the earth” who keeps telling me the world is going to end unless I annually brutally murder and ceremonially eviscerate somebody. So, really, if you think about it, kidnapping someone and tearing out their intestines is all for a good cause.
I’m given a target to observe, an amount of time to spend spying on them (60 hours until the world ends, for example), and a timeline broken into segments that represents their daily activities, which start out as blanks. To reveal one of these segments, I choose an action that costs me time and suspicion. Maybe I read their mail, which is low risk and quick, but it might not reveal anything.
