You are in a crowded street, but you’ve never felt more alone. You are being tracked by a creature that has copied you perfectly, and while you don’t know what it ultimately wants, you know this – if you don’t kill it first, it will kill you and replace you. Welcome to It Has My Face.
It Has My Face is a genre unto itself: a first-person stealth and deduction game. You are thrust into a compact open world, often with nothing but a mirror, and must procure a weapon and be on the lookout for your identical clone, who will kill you if you don’t kill it first.
They Are Out There
This gives It Has My Face an atmosphere of paranoia, as the other NPCs aren’t just passive bystanders. The crowd moves from area to area, simulating a busy city centre. Some NPCs will approach you, sometimes asking for change, other times saying that they were just talking to you over there.
Your appearance will randomise with each match. There are plenty of hairstyles, clothing combinations, and colour coordination options, so much so that I was never the same person twice.
Weapons could be found in attaché cases littered about the map and varied from melee to ranged firearms. Each of these weapons had limited uses and varied in lethality. The gun and knife, for example, were one-shot kills but would break after a single use. Dynamite was equally lethal but took time to ignite and could backfire. On the other end of the spectrum, the bat took several swings to kill the clone, but it was more durable. Your clone was always armed with a knife, so getting into close range was always a gamble.
There Are Watching
You can also lure the clone and use some of the environment to make your kill. Crates dangle, waiting to be dropped. Automatic turrets can be programmed, or you could simply lure them into a corridor of acid. Each map is procedurally generated and can contain a number of hazards. Or, to your detriment, can generate maps with mixed visibility or restrictive movement with steam vents and pools of water.
After each game, an experience bar would fill up, giving you currency. Losing a match would sacrifice some XP earned. The more games you win in a streak, the more the experience bar fills exponentially, but breaking a streak would cause you to lose exponentially more. You couldn’t get reset to zero, though, as there was a lockout on how much experience you would lose, which also increased with wins—just not rising as quickly as the XP. With matches also not lasting longer than five minutes, it doesn’t take long to re-earn any lost progress.
When you fill the experience bar, you progress to the next chapter of the story. You are transported to a lab, which is your home base, and the story is delivered piecemeal via memos, recordings, and dialogue. It is here that you can also spend currency to upgrade yourself and your weapons.
And It Has My Face
With each chapter, the world will change, increasing the challenge. Security guards will appear and can chase you if they see you armed. The clones will start picking up the weapons from the cases. Additional hitmen will start to hunt you, among other things. Successful win streaks will also unlock mutators—maybe you start with a weapon, but there are no pickups. Acid rain could fall, meaning you have to stay under cover. Mutators will reset on a failure, so if you do get an unfavorable combination, it never holds you back for long.
While there are no sweeping orchestral tracks, the music they do use is appropriate. We have a soft, ominous score that sells the oppressive atmosphere. This is a grimdark, filthy industrial world where no one is your friend, and the music helps sell the world. While NPCs and story characters do speak, there are no voiced lines—just the familiar 8-bit beeping when someone is talking.
The environments are fully 3D rendered, albeit with a retro-inspired graphical overhaul. The character models are simple 2D sprites that have very few frames of animation and bob up and down when they walk. The only real animations come in the form of weapon attacks and the more bizarre creatures in this world.
Get Them Before They Get You
In terms of accessibility, It Has My Face is easily playable on either mouse and keyboard or controller, and controls can easily be rebound. There were some options to turn off head bobbing and change the font if you have trouble reading the pixelated font. No colour-blind options were available, but there was a relaxed mode which prevented any experience loss on a fail state.
Being in early access, the current build at the time of writing isn’t complete. The main campaign has six out of a possible eight chapters finished, an endless mode, and a prototype PvP mode available. What is available, though, is impressive and extremely atmospheric, with plenty of content for the entry price.
It Has My Face is weird, tense, and occasionally brilliant. It leans hard into its concept and mostly sticks the landing, offering a genuinely unsettling mix of stealth and deduction that constantly keeps you guessing. The lo-fi visuals and minimal storytelling won’t be for everyone, but they do a great job of building atmosphere. Even in early access, there’s a solid chunk of content here, and the paranoia-fuelled gameplay loop is surprisingly addictive. If the devs stick the landing with the final chapters and polish the rough edges, this could end up being something special. For now, this is a game to keep a close eye on. Or better yet, play now—before your clone does.
Developer: NightByte Games
Publisher: Behaviour Interactive Inc.
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