Gods With Badges is the new game from Strange Scaffold, the studio behind I Am Your Beast and El Paso, Elsewhere. Announced during the Triple-I Initiative showcase on October 8, it is a narrative tactics game about a disgraced police officer navigating the line between reform and the abuses that built her reputation. The Steam page lists a 2027 release window, with Devolver Digital publishing.
You play Harrow McClellan, a former cop transferred back to her original post after the scandal that ejected her has become law enforcement legend. The game’s open hubs are set in Scarhelm, a dystopian city of the future. You patrol the streets seizing contraband, issuing tickets, and digging through back alleys for evidence. Dialogue choices, arrests, and uses of force shape how Harrow’s fellow officers, the public, and the institutions around her treat her.
Combat kicks in when a situation escalates. The game shifts to an isometric, turn-based view where you take cover, rescue hostages, and decide how much force to use. The hook is the bodycam: you can temporarily disable Harrow’s, which removes the public record of what happens next and unlocks new tactical and dialogue options. The Steam page is clear that “you, like your fellow officers, have power over life and death, and qualified legal immunity.”
Gods With Badges started life as Hard Justice, an unrealised project from strategy studio Artificer that Strange Scaffold has now rebuilt in its own style. It is also the latest entry in Project Share, which Eurogamer describes as an initiative that “encourages developers to exchange technology and explore more sustainable ways to make games.” The first Project Share deal produced Creepy Redneck Dinosaur Mansion 1: Re-Raptored. The soundtrack comes from Kris Kirk, who also scored Space Warlord Baby Trading Simulator.
Studio head Xalavier Nelson Jr. called the game “among the most ambitious things Strange Scaffold has ever undertaken” and thanked Artificer for trusting the studio with the original Hard Justice materials. Eurogamer’s review of I Am Your Beast, the studio’s prior release, awarded it four out of five stars and called it “a trim, frenetic, thoughtful shooter that stayed with me far longer than its truncated playtime.” A Triple-I Initiative YouTube premiere trailer is live now. The Steam page is open for wishlists. No console ports have been announced.
The game joins a release calendar full of 2027 dates still to be locked. It lands in a window where players are already looking at Hytale’s Cursebreaker Chapter 1 launch on October 12 and the open playtest of Cat and Paste on October 16-19. It is a different shape from the larger fall slate covered in Every Game Releasing in October 2026: The Complete List, and from the class-based combat angle it shares DNA with the Dragon’s Dogma 2: Dark Arisen expansion that just launched.
Case example of the bodycam lever in play. Picture a hostage scene in a back alley. With the bodycam on, the game records the call you make, the force you use, and the arrest you walk away with, and the institutions around you see all of it. With the bodycam off, you can execute a suspect, secure your team, and the public record of the event simply disappears. That choice sits at the centre of the design, and every other system in the game, including arrest rates, peer relationships, and Harrow’s reputation, reads against it.
Our read: Strange Scaffold’s pitch keeps the same authorial bite as I Am Your Beast, but the bodycam toggle is the real design hook. Most police sims pretend body cameras are decorative. Gods With Badges treats them as a tactical and moral lever that you choose to disable when it suits you. If the design lands, it gives Gods With Badges a way to ask a pointed question most police sims skip entirely, and it is where the game actually decides what kind of story it is.
Edited by Kerwin Stewart, Editor-in-Chief · How we report
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