What do you get when you cross Condemned with Manhunt? The answer is Butcher’s Creek, the latest short game from Dusk developer David Szymanski. The game only lasts two hours but still manages to make quite the impression, as it has a similar feel to Dusk and Squirrel Stapler, albeit mostly grimier than either of those. The game makes the most of its short runtime with ever-present dread and some surprisingly creative ideas that made me want to come back for more on a higher difficulty after beating the game the first time.
Butcher’s Creek puts players in the shoes (well, briefly) of a man heading to the titular town to find tapes of snuff films. That’s certainly one of the wilder premises I’ve seen for a horror game, that’s for sure. After letting himself into a room where a video camera is pointed at a chair and floor covered with blood, he’s knocked out, only to wake up naked in a cage as the next prospective victim for a sort of cult organization that makes the snuff films the protagonist came searching for in the first place. There’s not a lot of story here, though, although findable notes drip-feed you information on what’s going on.
The notes themselves reminded me a lot of the ones in Szymanski’s game Squirrel Stapler. They’re very well-written and some of them are quite dread-inducing. What I wasn’t expecting, however, was for them to be funny a lot of the time too. The cultists often leave notes for each other that they write as if they’re standard work emails, only the work is mutilation. There’s even a particularly inept cultist that the others occasionally deride, which I found highly amusing. Notes also sometimes offer clues as to how to progress, so anyone who skips them is going to eventually find themselves at a loss.
Butcher’s Creek is a first-person melee combat game that features about a dozen breakable weapons. You can only carry one at a time, but objects in the environment can also be thrown at enemies. Weapons have different speeds and do different amounts of damage. You can parry with weapons, but the length of the parry window varies based on how slow the weapon is. There are five enemy types, including men with burlap sacks on their head and others wearing welder’s helmets that prevent you from landing hits on their noggins. There’s even a kick that’s used to briefly stun enemies (although they can still parry you during their stuns,) kick objects at them, or knock them into pits or traps.
Your character has a stamina meter that’s depleted when you run or attack. If it runs out, all you’re able to do is walk, and there are some quirks to the way stamina regenerates. If you continue moving after you run out, stamina can’t regenerate, but it starts to regenerate if you stop moving for a split second, only to start again. Enemies very often parry you, which, alongside landing blows, degrades your weapon. This isn’t really something to worry much about on the game’s normal difficulty, but you’ll need to pay more attention on hard, as enemies parrying can end up causing a weapon to break much earlier.
The way around this is, of course, is to parry their attacks. Enemies can’t parry after you parry them, so you can get a hit in without worrying about extra weapon degradation. Just in case you assumed this would make Butcher’s Creek too easy, it’s important to note that enemies vary their attack wind-up animations. Sometimes their wind-up is brief, other times it’s lengthened in order to pull their punches. There’s no way of knowing which it’s going to be, so actually parrying enemies 100% of the time isn’t practical. Again, this really only matters on hard, as you don’t want to break your weapon for you to scramble to find another one before enemies beat you death.
On top of this is the game’s interconnected save and health functions, which are incredibly original ideas. The aforementioned snuff tapes favour heavily into Butcher’s Creek‘s gameplay. You’ll routinely find tapes while you’re exploring and they function similarly to ink ribbons in classic Resident Evil. You need to use tapes on televisions in order to save. However, tapes also raise your maximum health. With zero tapes, you’re locked at half health, but at 10 your health is maxed out. Therefore, if you save all the time, you can find yourself with less maximum health, which is incredibly dangerous, especially on hard.
The other part of the equation is healing, which is connected to your camera. You either need to take a photo of a bloody scene or find a polaroid of one to heal. Finding tapes will also heal a tiny bit of health as well. I didn’t actually discover this until my second playthrough, but you can take pictures of blood from enemies you’ve just attacked to get a bit of health back too, which absolutely comes in handy on hard mode. The entire health system in Butcher’s Creek is fantastic and I’m surprised that the dev created something so novel for a two hour game.
The level design in Butcher’s Creek is creepy and often claustrophobic. You’ll find yourself in a fair amount of dark buildings with tight corridors, but there are some breaks from this. You don’t have a map, but the signposting is mostly very clear and it’s hard to get lost. You’ll often be looking for keys or items to open the path forward, with enemies repopulating areas after you find something important. One aspect I really didn’t like is how sometimes enemies will stand in locations where you’re almost certain to get hit if you don’t know they’re there. Enemies can straight-up hit you through walls and I fell victim to this more than once.
Other than those foibles, I greatly enjoyed playing through Butcher’s Creek. It often had me unnerved and uncomfortable and, even though I wish the melee combat included multi-hit combos, the back-and-forth elements of the combat are an important part of its game flow. Despite its short length, the game is very much worth playing, even if it left me hungry for more after the credits rolled. If you’re fond of the dev’s other work, this one is a must-play. I’d just love to see it be expanded upon in the future.
Butcher's Creek: Butcher's Creek doesn't last long, but still feels very well considered and makes terrific use of its content. – Andrew Farrell
