The resurgence of demos on Steam in recent years leaves no shortage of experiences available for the great price of free. I wouldn’t normally go for a game that’s horror (or even horror-adjacent) but if I’ve got an hour to kill and a demo premise piques my interest, I’m going to indulge.

Sure, sometimes things are underwhelming and you get 30 mins of playtime out of it, but other times you’re blown out of the water.

I played It Has My Face this morning and the demo left me feeling genuine excitement for the full release, despite the horror/tension elements being a key aspect of the game.

“47, THAT…is your clone”

The base idea of It Has My Face is you’re in a minimalist level (Think Quake or CS: Source style levels) filled with NPCs. The pixel art style means these NPCs cast distinctive silhouettes, with spiky hair or a shawl or lack of shirt all standing out in the pixelated outlines rummaging around the map.

Your mission is to find the NPC that looks exactly like you, and kill it.

That’s essentially the whole game, but the level designs, NPC behaviour, psychological effects and gameplay mutators make this seemingly simple task an absolute handful (in a good way).

A Round of IHMF In a Nutshell

You spawn in. The room is pretty dark and there’s already 4 NPCs on screen. One of them, if you’re unlucky, is already your clone.

You press TAB to open your mirror. After all, your objective is to kill the NPC that looks exactly like you, a mirror is the best way to work out who that is.

While glancing at the mirror you need to start moving. It’s still dark where you spawned, and NPCs have started to shuffle in and out of the room.

You see some pixels moving with strange purpose towards you and take in as much as you can from the mirror to make sure they aren’t going to end your run in the first 10 seconds.

Grey “old-timey” hair, no beard, blue shirt, open mid-riff, pink shorts.

The NPC approaching is a blonde with a shawl, you start looking over everyone else.

“Are you a monster too?” the Blonde NPC says, helpfully getting in your face and obscuring the doorway.

That’s 2 NPCs in the room you didn’t see enter.

You sidestep, and try to take in any grey hair in the sea of pixel people at the doorway. If the doorway is clear, you can leave this darker room and start exploring more freely.

With no grey hair spotted, you sprint out the door and up to the surface, pushing past more NPCs as you do. You don’t have time to head-to-toe all of them, you just focus on the few you’re going to come into body contact with and make sure they aren’t the clone.

Upstairs, you scan a more open area with a building in the middle. NPC density is more manageable here, but you only look around once before heading into the building.

See, this whole time you haven’t had a weapon. You don’t spawn with one. If you had spotted the clone in the spawn room or slope up, you’d have had to keep a beady eye on them and avoid them rather than simply ending the level then and there.

Inside the building is a briefcase, and you hold E to open it. The camera pans down to the floor, leaving just enough peripheral vision to know if someone approaches, but not know if they’re the clone.

After the tense few seconds opening the box, you flip the camera back up and spin, taking in any NPCs that wriggled their way into the builiding.

You’re safe, there’s only one way in, and you’re armed.

You got a Pistol from the case. The pistol allows instant ranged kills, but takes a couple of seconds to aim (Oh, and only has one shot). The pistol is also illegal, so any Officers that see you draw (Not just carry) the weapon will be onto you.

You’ve got through the first 45 seconds of the game.

Now you check the mirror again, making sure you can ID your target without it. When the time comes, you need to be on Pistol duty, not deliberating over your mirror.

You step out and take 30 seconds to people-watch in the open area. You don’t see your target.

NPCs tend to stick to certain areas until something changes. That could be you killing an NPC, an Officer apprehending someone, or an environmental change like a trap. As the map is all quiet, you need to go exploring.

You’re pretty certain the clone wasn’t in the starting area, so you head another way. This room has steam vents and pipes which block vision once very 10 seconds or so, and you make sure to move in segments, from one blurting steam valve to the next.

You see grey haired people with beards, grey haired people with no beard but blue shorts, grey haired people with –

Suddenly, the edges of your screen turn purple and you see a grey “old-timey” haircut, beardless, blue top with open midriff and pink shorts. Your heart skips a beat as they’re looking right at you, but in the same moment you see another NPC even closer

Grey “old-timey” hair, no beard, blue shirt, open mid-riff, pink shorts.

You start backing away and even turn to sprint, but from the billowing smoke you see another.

Grey “old-timey” hair, no beard, blue shirt, open mid-riff, pink shorts.

They can’t all be the clone. There’s only one. You work out this must be an ability the clone has, and that these NPCs must be harmless. But, one of them won’t be.

In the 5 seconds the ability is active you prioritise staying away, but without knowing which of the apparent clones is real you back into more NPCs than you avoid. Luckily, your linear progress through the area pays off and the ability ends.

Now, in the sea of what was just all duplicates, there’s only one left.

Grey “old-timey” hair, no beard, blue shirt, open mid-riff, pink shorts.

You draw your weapon and line up the shot, the NPC turns and pulls a knife, you fire.

The clone explodes into a red mist and the screen darkens.

Assassination

Clean Kill

Time Bonus

You see a Chapter progress bar reach 27%, and a button labelled:

“Next Target”

We Live and We Learn

These matches are only ever a few minutes long, and yet evoke all the planning, learning and deliberation that a game like Hitman does. It’s all sped-up and has to be processed in a matter of seconds, but decisions over where to go, where to look, and when to strike are all constantly being made just the same as the bigger-budget assassination games.

It Has My Face could have stopped there and it would be a great game, well executed. But, it does do more than provide a base experience. Each assassination progresses the story Chapter, and you lose all progress if you die.

This creates a rising tension as you get closer to the next Chapter (which you can’t “lose” from failing a mission, these are permanent progression points) and become more paranoid about the tiny slip-up that could result in a clone knifing you.

The array of weapons and gameplay options can’t be upgraded in the demo, but there’s some progression elements there too in the full game.

Ultimately, having this “breakpoint” style progression where you can be one target away from “safety” absolutely plays into the moment-to-moment gameplay and enhances the tension so well. Not many games find harmony between their meta-progression and their moment-to-moment experiences, but It Has My Face achieves it beautifully.

All The Little Things

There’s so much happening in a few seconds of gameplay of It Has My Face, that even my little play-by-play above doesn’t cover all the thought processes you’ll have. You’ll be checking your mirror, moving, checking officers, finding weapons…

But, you’ll also be met with mutators, clone abilities and even clone behaviours. For example, one time my clone had short hair and an eye-patch, a red shirt and black shorts.

He used the ability that makes the entire map look like me (Well, us…) and when it ended the only red shirt and black shorts NPC left was in the room, facing away. I couldn’t see the eyepatch.

No matter what I did, what angle I took, he would not look at me. I was pretty sure it was the target, but the little change in AI to tell the clone to never look at me really made me doubt it. As I stepped closer behind him and he got into a corner, still never turning around, I knew if I stepped closer he’d 180 and knife me. I couldn’t technically be sure he was the target, as I’d not seen the eyepatch, but I knew.

I shot the guy and won the level. But the change of pace, the off-putting movement to the corner and subtle difference in behaviour is what’s going to make the targets in this game pop. I can imagine some will bee-line for you and some will never look at you, I even had one who had a protector. Someone kept jumping in-front of my clone saying “I won’t let you kill him” when I was preparing my attacks!

The short rounds, varied behaviour, different weapons and rising tension of chapter progress makes It Has My Face a masterclass in bringing psychological horror to a new genre.

Go Wishlist the hell out of this game: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2538290/It_Has_My_Face_Demo/