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I’m always down for a David Szymanski joint. The Dusk and Iron Lung dev has a real way with making games that feel good, no matter the genre—really tactile weapons and interactions, great sound design, just a general attention to detail—and his games always have an anarchic sense of humor that I really dig. Szymanski’s next game, Butcher’s Creek, feels like another winner. It’s a melee combat-focused first person horror game where you square off against torture cultists in rural Appalachia.
Like so many indies, it’s reviving a genre or idea that the big dogs Nintendon’t anymore. If Selaco is an indie celebration of Monolith’s F.E.A.R., Butcher’s Creek is taking another look at the studio’s other horror hit, Condemned: Criminal Origins. Condemned is a game where you’re an FBI agent framed for murder, so you have to fend off hobos with improvised weapons and get menaced by paranormal entities in the hopes of clearing your name.
Butcher’s Creek trades Condemned’s platonic ideal, Fox News wet dream of a run down American inner city for some classico rural isolation. You play as some manner of Scum Bag who’s come out to the boonies in search of VHS snuff films and gory polaroids—to sell to the highest bidder? For his own edification? Either way, the cannibal cult stuff couldn’t happen to a nicer guy, and Billy Butcher’s Creek quickly finds himself squaring off against a gang of nasty boys.
There’s a really great, jarring contrast between the sense of horror and sense of humor here. The atmosphere is thick and oppressive: rustling nighttime forests and stark torture chambers in run-down, repurposed industrial interiors that remind me of Silent Hill 2 or Manhunt. The GoldSrc-Source cusp graphical fidelity is heightened by a fuzzy camcorder screen effect, sort of like how Unrecord really impressed us all with its body cam presentation. Maybe the true path to videogame realism is just making your screen worse? Much to consider.
All that sickening ambience just built and built, and then I found some of the cult’s workplace correspondence: Apparently these guys trade loose leaf notes like interoffice emails, letting you read all about their little squabbles and complaints. A psycho axe murderer named Gary writes, “Like, why do we all have to wear these same outfits? Surgical gloves and a burlap hood are really uncomfortable when you’re hacking limbs off and working up a sweat.” Another note gushes about the opportunity to finally work with “The Port City Manhood Masher,” with the Masher in question replying in a curt request that they try to stay professional.
I quite enjoyed the melee combat as well, though I think it needs some refining ahead of the game’s planned January release. Mostly, I just wish these cult guys were more aggressive: They’d often hesitate or hang back in a way that left me a little too much breathing room, and I found that doing the old Elder Scrolls shuffle of “step forward, attack, step back” was more effective than trying to parry. Comboing a melee attack into a Duke Nukem kick into another melee attack always felt fantastic though, and the intro sequence presented in the demo is likely the easiest part of the game.
I’m pretty much sold: I felt stressed and unnerved playing Butcher’s Creek’s demo, a tension the game satisfyingly relieves with its humor and the “fuck yeah” feeling of winning a melee brawl. You can check out the Butcher’s Creek demo and wishlist the game over on Steam.
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Kurt Indovina
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