So a couple of years ago my friends and I were on a trip to California. About halfway through our trip we all decided to stop and get a quick bite to eat before continuing on our journey. We were right by a rest stop that we’ve stopped at before but this time things turned out differently. When we arrived the building was open but it was empty inside save from someone sitting in one of the booths. He stated to us that all of the employees walked out and it was just him. That interaction left an impact on me since it was so unsettling. I had forgotten about this for a while until I started to play Happy’s Humble Burger Farm, a recent release from the Arizona-based Scythe Dev Team. This horror themed fast food job sim is something that I’ve been following since its early beta stages but never had a chance to fully experience until its recent full release.
Happy’s Humble Burger Farm is currently available on every major platform, so regardless of your preferred platform, you can enjoy this game! For this review, I was using the PlayStation 4 version so I can only really tell my experience with that version. What I had experienced during my time at Happy’s Humble Burger Farm is the same feeling that I had at that empty fast food restaurant. Make sure your work uniform is clean and you have comfy shoes on since you might not survive the rush.
Happy’s Humble Burger Farm opens with the player waking up in their apartment with simple instructions, “make sure your uniform is clean and head into your shift at Happy’s Humble Burger Farm.” The night is already starting to go bad because the bus is broken so you have to walk all the way to work. The city is cold and seems almost fake but whatever, but you just need to get to work. Being one of your first nights you are only responsible for making burgers and taking orders. It’s a little tough but it’s honest work. You finish for the day and head back. The next day you come back and gain even more responsibilities; however, weird things start happening both at the restaurant and the city that are not what they seem. Now and again you are reminded that messing up has grave consequences. There is a lot more that happens, however I’m not going to spoil the mystery because it kept me going after each night of servicing customers.
A very strong aspect of this tile is that its main gameplay loop is pretty simple: go to work / explore the city, complete your shift, go home / explore the city. While it’s a pretty simple loop, due to the stress, it makes a simple 4 min shift seem like hours. There is a steady progression of new mechanics that adds to the player that increases the difficulty each night on shift, but it never seems too much. The plot takes twists and turns all over the place, and if you’re someone that is more into the creepy simulation other than the overall story there is an endless mode. You just have to get one of the game’s endings to unlock it. While making orders never seemed too much to handle there were certain parts of the game that threw just a little too much at you and took me a long time to get past. It felt satisfying getting past it and I felt revitalized to attempt to find the mystery of this cursed restaurant.
Now I’ve found myself gravitating towards games with this certain dark and eerie feel. It’s a pretty unique look that not a lot of indie horror games take. The closest game that I can compare Happy’s Humble Burger Farm to design-wise is probably another one of my favorite horror games, Paratopic. It’s a little hard to explain because the majority of what makes this game eerie to me is the look of the other people in this world and how they interact with each other. Everything seems artificial and fake. There’s a reason for it, which I won’t go into, but it helps keep the player immersed in the experience.
There were a couple of glitches that I have found while playing the game that was annoying but didn’t ruin the experience. The glitch that happened to me the most was when I would complete a challenge during my shift but the game wouldn’t register that I completed it and gave me an infraction. Most of the time it would be my first infraction, but there were some times where it would be the final infraction. There’s not necessarily that big of a penalty of getting a game over, so failing to me didn’t seem like an end-all be-all.
Overall I very much enjoyed my time with Happy’s Humble Burger Farm more than I thought I would. It provided a nice experience that killed a couple of hours and allows me to revisit if I want to come back for the endless mode. Happy’s Humble Burger Farm can be purchased on almost every major platform and is currently out now. I highly recommend this game.
