“Butcher’s Creek” is David Szymanski’s newest addition to his catalog of retro-style video games that fans hankered for since the demo’s release. This jaunt through the Appalachian Mountains of its titular town is attractive for its idea of realistic survival-action horror among a clan of serial killers. While it’s not the best game under Szymanski’s belt, it’s still an experience worth risking your neck for.
You control a weirdo with a knack for cinematic gore who goes too far for his fix by entering rural Pennsylvanian territory inhabited by twisted masked murderers. After getting captured, he escapes before he’s forced to play victim.
Szymanski knows how to craft a disturbing world. He promised brooding, mature rural horror, and you got it at its muddiest. It’s visually stylized like a found footage movie on VHS, specifically a snuff film from the victim’s perspective.
You’ll mostly wade through sites of disturbing torture-porn littered by corpses that have been skinned or mutilated for snuff. Sometimes you’ll be in a sawmill’s basement, other times it’s in a cavern or a two-story house. Dark ambience and eerie natural sounds covering these areas are as sharp as the torturers’ tools, too.
It’s all viewed through a HUD comparable to a camera’s recording screen where your vitals replace the camera’s battery life. The cherry on top is how receiving a killing blow cuts to a blue “Be kind, rewind” screen. Thus, this is your survival playing out before your eyes. “Butcher’s Creek” wants you to feel estranged.
Traversing the countryside results in frequent run-ins with the killers. These instances are reminiscent of when slasher movie characters use everything they run past to their advantage.
Combat is mostly in close proximity since you’ll use tools like shovels, box cutters, and sledgehammers to beat foes. Each weapon has its own damage, speed, and durability. Halfway in, you’ll see limitations in weapon variation, but the level of violence you enact on these menaces questionably only goes as high as decapitation despite the bloody premise.
Luckily, there’s other ways to keep the wolves at bay. You can toss objects at foes when you can’t find a weapon, and it’s satisfying when it’s something like an explosive oil canister. Additionally, you can kick enemies and knock them into hazards like pits, spinning sawblades, or pools of acid.
The game’s harsh demeanor is also evident in the psychos. They are unnerving, more-so because they are humans like you. On hit, they’ll aggressively curse you out or grunt something like, “Aw, my teeth!”
Engaging against multiple people is challenging, but sometimes the programming derails. Killers might get stuck, their pathfinding may glitch, or they’ll walk off completely.
Some of their hits even registered weirdly toward me. I’ve been smacked through a doorframe and a staircase despite how they couldn’t have realistically occurred.
Health in “Butcher’s Creek” is strangely unique. Photographing gore with your Polaroid regenerates health points. You can collect VHS tapes that increase your health capacity, but they also open locked doors and save your game. This would make for hard decisions to be made if they weren’t as abundant.
“Butcher’s Creek” also cleverly delivers its narrative. Instead of control-stealing exposition, you’ll understand this horror-show through letters by the clan’s sickos. Their ramblings reveal their communion’s details, raising fear about what’s in store for you. After all, why wouldn’t you be concerned about a place serial killers call the “Fairy Castle”?
This dread, coupled with the atmosphere, compensates for the scarcity of scares. Although, what few there are work well.
Unfortunately, “Butcher’s Creek” takes a turn in its final act when its genre unsatisfyingly shifts to supernatural occult horror while trying to link it to Szymanski’s bite-sized games “Squirrel Stapler” and “The Pony Factory.” Many of Szymanski’s games overall follow this suit from the get-go, so if you were sold purely on a slasher tribute, you’ll be disappointed. Regardless, its big reveal doesn’t reach the hype that its foreshadowing built.
If you favor gameplay, you’ll still be disappointed knowing this game is short. It took two hours for me to complete on normal difficulty, one hour on a second playthrough on its hardest difficulty, and doesn’t really have replayability.
RATING:
“Butcher’s Creek” isn’t Szymanski’s magnum opus, but it’s a great return to horror. This slaughterhouse of a hack-and-slash game has many great ideas. If only it had more content, better combat, and some bugs fixed, it would be a must-own- maybe even worth an arm and a leg to play.