There’s VHS grain, hammers and grime in the new game from Dusk designer David Szymanski. Butcher’s Creek is inspired by Manhunt and Condemned.
Released in 2018, Dusk was arguably “the best shooter the 90s never produced,” as our review put it at the time. Now, that game’s designer, David Szymanksi, is back with another project steeped in a much darker kind of nostalgia.
Where Dusk paid homage to the likes of Doom and Quake, Butcher’s Creek is a first-person horror action game inspired by the grime, sleaze and violence of 2000s titles like Manhunt and Condemned: Criminal Origins.
Szymanski says as much on the project’s recently-added Steam page (via Rock Paper Shotgun), which also tells us that the game is set in November 1993, and makes it clear that fans of, say, Kirby’s Epic Yarn should probably look away now. Here’s a synopsis:
A troubled loner with a hunger for cinematic gore finds himself on the other side of the camera when rumors of authentic snuff videotapes lead him to an abandoned cabin near Butcher’s Creek, Pennsylvania. What starts as illicit urban exploration quickly becomes a fight for survival when he’s captured by a gang of sadistic killers. Now his only option is to pick up a box cutter, a hammer, a pickaxe, or whatever else is at hand, and unleash a little video violence of his own.
The Steam page also shows off some early images from the game, which reveal that the whole experience will look as though it’s shot on grainy VHS tape, while the environments – a muddy mix of abandoned cabins and dingy basements – also recall the controversial games that inspired it.
Manhunt, developed by Rockstar North, was released in November 2003 (exactly a decade after Butcher’s Creek is set) to both solid reviews and considerable controversy for its violence and snuff video premise. Manhunt 2 (2007) was even more controversial, with the game initially rejected by the BBFC and banned entirely in some countries, including Germany and New Zealand.
Butcher’s Creek looks as though it’ll go for a similarly Daily Mail-bating approach as Rockstar’s old games. One feature listed on Steam reads, “Photograph gruesome murder scenes to fulfil your dark pseudo-sexual desires and regain lost health.” Lovely!
Whether audiences – and tabloid newspapers – are as shockable today as they were in the 2000s remains to be seen. Butcher’s Creek is due out in 2024.
