Notizie

Happy’s Humble Burger Farm finds the fear in fast food

S
Steven Nguyen Scaife
2 ott 2023
Happy’s Humble Burger Farm unfolds in one of the most harrowing environments to ever grace the horror genre: a fast food restaurant. Viewed through a first-person fuzzy VHS filter, the game finds you working the night shift for a seemingly normal restaurant, its lobby populated by smiling statues of barnyard mascots. They’re the face of not only a vast merchandising empire, but also a series of unscrupulous corporate experiments; unraveling this elaborate mythos is one of the game's chief pleasures. With TV cartoons, radio interviews, and an illustrated employee manual, Scythe Development Team has taken great care to shade in the edges of this strange reality.

Initially, the mascots are just decoration for the drudgery of restaurant work, an endless dashing back and forth from the freezer to reheat food in your understaffed kitchen. First and foremost, the game is a surprisingly involved approximation of customer service, capturing the frantic rush of filling orders under time pressure. You’re initially trusted only with the basic sandwiches, but even these leave room for error: don’t cook a patty too long on the grill, don’t leave it out too long, and don’t add any of the ingredients that a customer dislikes. And if you fail, that's where the horror comes in: Happy the Humble Heifer drags you into a dark parallel realm where you must prepare a burger for her before she kills you.

As the game goes on, you have to juggle more items and tasks. Shakes, soft drinks, and hot dogs are added to the menu, and you’ll get alerts to catch a live rat or clean a toilet in the bathroom where all the identical-looking customers disappear with their to-go bags. Happy’s Humble Burger Farm is quite upfront about the fact that you’re stuck in a malfunctioning simulation, throwing all sorts of spooky obstacles at you on top of this drudgery. Some are mere irritations, like lights or appliances mysteriously turning off—however, the skittering and exploding humanoids you must avoid while continuing to work are a lot more bothersome. After all, when you're working fast food, there's no time to cower in fear. The horrors become one more symptom of a subpar work environment, not so far removed from the occasional rat running amok.
Happy S Humble Burger Farm Finds The Fear In Fast Food
There’s even a world beyond the restaurant, as you start each day in a crummy apartment that’s just far enough away from your job to be inconvenient. There are shops to buy cosmetics and (eventually) crafting materials to hack keypads or blow holes in walls to help you escape from the nightmare. And up close, you’ll discover that some objects are two-dimensional standees or that other apartments are half-constructed, like a set the audience is never meant to see.

Eventually, you find the dens of the Burger Farm mascots, each brought to ghastly life in twisted new forms. But even here, the game features no traditional combat. The only way to fend off these abominations is with the very skill you’ve honed for the entire game: your ability to prepare food under pressure. In Happy’s Humble Burger Farm, you’re quite literally cooking for your life.

Happy's Humble Burger Farm is available on the Epic Games Store.