Aptly Sliced and Diced

We’re big Szymanski people around these parts, so any time he drops a new title we are primed to spend a few hours seeing what the brothers’ minds have cooked up for their audiences.  For Butcher’s Creek, you take the role of a troubled loner looking to acquire rumored tapes of authentic snuff near the town of Butcher’s Creek, Pennsylvania.  The tides turn quickly on you when you’re ambushed by a group of sadistic killers and plunged into a world where you must fight back with whatever weapons you can find to avoid becoming another victim on their tapes.

If you’ve played Condemned: Criminal Origins, you have a leg up here on how to play.  Butcher’s Creek revolves around first-person melee combat, but with a pick-up-and-fight array of weaponry: hammers, pipes, 2x4s, pliers, and several others.  Each weapon has a swing and a block and comes with a predetermined level of condition (how many hits you can get), damage (how hard those hits are), and speed (how fast those hits come out) that changes with each weapon.  Some weapons have specific stats where you can’t block, your attack cannot be blocked, or maybe the weapon won’t stagger since it’s fast or it has long reach. These are applied to the weapons that you and your enemies use, so it’s best to keep track of what you can and can’t block as it may be used against you.

You’ll navigate tight derelict corridors, which makes fights claustrophobic with little room for error.  While offense will get you through scenarios, you have an array of defensive fallbacks to help you survive these scenarios.  Blocking will replenish your stamina to allow for more offense, kicks will provide you needed space for tactics, and if you ever find yourself without a weapon, pick up a box or a bucket and launch it at your foe for damage.  Just be careful where you think is and isn’t safe, as your hitbox is deceptively big and you will get hit from places you felt were more than safe.  The issues of being, as the killers call you, “a fatass.”  It’s not a bad idea to find a save point and practice a little to dilute potential frustrations later in the game.

Save points are handled by the ever-applicable Snuff Tape, scattered amongst each level and permanently used to save your progress.  Tapes are also linked to increasing your max health. You were looking for these after all, and the more you hold the higher your health bar increases.  Tapes are also used to unlock specific doors riddled with goodies like better weapons, polaroids of previous murders which replenish your health, and potentially another tape or two to hold onto.  While Butcher’s Creek is short, there are some stressful points where you may want the extra health and see how far you can stretch saves, which is a fun way to provide a risk/reward angle to continually heighten the tension.

The actual plot of Butcher’s Creek is particularly ho-hum as someone who has not played Squirrel Stapler or The Pony Factory (editor’s note: I have played both, and BC expands on their setting without requiring prior familiarity), but the scattered notes from the group of serial killers had me chuckling at some of the ridiculousness of internal struggles between certain ranks and tiers of people who kill on tape.  Level design as said before is tight but putting a wall between you and the opposition is not safe: on multiple occasions I was hit for half my health from an enemy who had seen me and just swiped me with a hammer through a wall, which is increasingly frustrating with designed lack of points to heal and longer stretches between saves when you reach the final third of the game.

I still had a fun time navigating the seedy undergrounds and teeing off on murderers with my trusty hammer. For a couple hours of runtime, the tight combat and tension-filled ambience never overstays its welcome.  It could use some elbow grease to buff out some of the more problematic areas, but the foundations and main focus of melee combat in Butcher’s Creek will easily carry you through your snuff-collecting adventure.

7/10