The Beast Inside
A horror game that tells two stories a century apart
The year is 1979, and Adam and his wife Emma have moved to a house deep in the countryside, which is your first clue that The Beast Inside is, yes, a horror game. Nothing good ever happens in isolated rural houses. Adam is a CIA cryptanalyst working on cracking a Soviet code that could alter the course of the Cold War, and he needs a quiet place to do it. In the opening their car pulls up to the new home—a grand colonial house surrounded by woodland—and your first job is moving in. A stack of boxes on the porch needs to be relocated, giving you an early taste of the game’s physics. Like Amnesia before it, you can open drawers, stack boxes, throw objects, and generally make a mess, which gives the world a feeling of richness and interactivity.
For a horror game made by a small team, the production values are surprisingly lavish. Photogrammetry has been used to give the world a photorealistic look, and while it’s a little uninspiring in terms of art direction, with not much personality, the fidelity is impressive. The dialogue is a little unconvincing, too, which is likely because English isn’t the developers’ first language.
While moving the last of the boxes, Adam spots a loose floorboard in the attic, which reveals an old box containing a diary written in 1864. When he reads it I’m magically whisked back a century to when a man called Nicolas lived in the house, and the game takes a sudden, dark turn. It’s the dead of night, and the house doesn’t look quite as inviting as it did earlier. And there seems to be someone, or something, in there with me.
Polish developer MovieGames says the mysteries explored in this time period will have a direct connection to Adam’s life in the ’70s, and it’ll be interesting to see how the story spans the decades. Movies such as Shutter Island and Memento are cited as inspiration, so Adam and Nicolas might not be the most reliable of narrators.
Sneak show
After exploring the house, finding snippets of story that reveal a little about Nicolas, a man searching for his missing father, my demo ends with a figure swinging an axe and, presumably, killing me. But in the final game you’ll be able to avoid enemies using stealth and fight back. Hopefully combat is a rare occurrence, because too much of it can really ruin a horror game.
Over 2,000 people pledged $65,000 on Kickstarter to help make TheBeast Inside, which is due for release sometime in 2019. The demo is lean, and doesn’t give you a taste of much beyond some exploration and puzzling, but I like what I’ve seen so far. I’m a sucker for stories that take place across multiple time periods, and I’m keen to learn more about how Adam and Nicolas’ lives will interlink.
Movies such as Shutter Island and Memento are cited as inspiration