Psycho Killer Simulator: Violence in Butcher's Creek

David Szymanski has done it again. I admire the man plenty, I even wrote about his shorter games once before for SUPERJUMP. The beloved creator of Dusk recently celebrated the release of his latest short-form game, Butcher's Creek, and I found it as wonderful and experimental as his previous works. It has all the sparkle of a Szymanski gem; the level design loops around in satisfying routes, the combat is punchy and meaty – a bloody and gory delight – and there's plenty of shlocky, B-horror-inspired, low-poly scenery to chew on.

The obvious inspiration behind Butcher's Creek is Monolith's seminal survival horror title, Condemned: Criminal Origins. The similarities are plentiful. Both are first-person horror games that focus on scavenging weapons with limited durability. Both set their melee battles in dimly lit, nightmarish, dilapidated buildings, facing off against maddened killers ready to smash your head with a sledgehammer just as willingly as you are to them.

However, I was always irked by the contextualization of violence in Condemned. Not specifically the violence itself – blaming real-life violence on video games is a tired conservative talking point, and some of my favorite games are excessively violent in their stylistic portrayals of blood and guts.

Yet, as cultural products, games are not bereft from having their violence examined and criticized. The main issue I have with Condemned is how the game forces you to kill and brutalize homeless people and addicts from a morally advantageous position.

The main reason I enjoyed Butcher's Creek more and claim it is better than the game that inspired it is because David Szymanski properly contextualizes the brutality you will be engaging in throughout your 1-2 hour playtime. If you're going to place me in frenetic, bloodied melees against psycho killers, the least you could do is admit the character I'm playing is also a bit of a freak – and explore that concept to its most ridiculous extremes.

The main issue I have with Condemned is how the game forces you to kill and brutalize homeless people and addicts from a morally advantageous position.

I need to clarify some statements before we move on.

I don't believe Condemned: Criminal Origins is shock-jock media. I don't believe it's a game made with the intent of shocking, offending, or provoking ire. I don't think the developers behind the game are reactionaries who hate drug addicts and homeless people. I don't believe the game was purposefully made to incite real-life violence against the lower classes. I believe its use of unhoused folks as enemies was an unfortunate staple of its time period in gaming. I believe the violence is properly contextualized – the context itself is the issue.

I also don't think you're a horrible person who believes in the eradication of the lowest social strata of humanity if you enjoy Criminal Origins. There's a lot to love and admire about the game. It's a cult classic for a reason.

As a horror game, it excels at cultivating a darkened, gritty atmosphere. Its core mechanics serve to heighten the terror. Weapons break, leaving you defenseless and vulnerable. Guns and ammo are scarce, making your most powerful deterrents a rarity. Even in moments of reprieve, the uneasy feeling that you could get ambushed is ever-present. It's a game that relies on few jumpscares, instead letting the atmosphere and moment-to-moment gameplay heighten the player's feelings of tension.

The problems I have with its violence are purely personal, and should not be taken as some objective moral marker; I just don't particularly enjoy playing as a cop beating on the homeless. It leaves a sour taste in my mouth, especially in the age of increased consciousness regarding police brutality and the criminalization of homelessness.

You play as Ethan Thomas, an FBI agent on the hunt for a deranged serial killer, abandoned by the police force and framed for the murder of one of his piggy brothers. You are never the aggressor in conflicts, you are actively engaging in self-defense against violent civilians, rendered mad by some cultish paranormal shenanigans. This is how Condemned contextualizes its violence, and that's exactly the issue I have.

The game paves the way for you to brutalize people under the guise of moral superiority. Your actions are justified: you are committing violence under reasonable expectations and self-defense. Yet, the violence is doled out to enemies labeled as "vagrants" and "addicts" in the game's lore and code.

This creates a bit of ludonarrative dissonance. Agent Thomas never seems shaken or disturbed by all the violence he inflicts – although he does showcase some shock when presented with the gory remains of serial killers' victims. My Brother in Christ, you are a killer too. You split the heads of vagrants with axes, you knock out enemy teeth with iron pipes. You tase them, bash them, shoot them, cut them. Jesus...Agent Thomas is a bit of a sicko. Yet, the game is never brave enough to admit this, until its very unpopular sequel came out.

I don't believe this game incites real-life violence, but the legacy of Condemned's context-of-violence is brutally felt whenever I hear someone labels it a "hobo-bashing simulator" and can inform some classist beliefs if taken in under an uncritical and reactionary mindset.

If I am engaging in violence in a game, I tend to enjoy one of two routes. Oftentimes, a game can walk both paths simultaneously:

1. Embrace violence as a spectacle amid the moral absurdity of it all. Cut the head off an enemy and watch the blood fountain rain down from his bisected neck, like in No More Heroes. Gib a demon with an explosive rocket, like in Doom. Feel the snap and crack of a gangster's neck, like in Yakuza 0.
2. Devise a commentary on violence. Make me reflect on the nature of violence and my willingness to engage with said brutality in virtual, pixelated worlds, free from real-world consequences. Hotline Miami comes to mind, as the game's aesthetics and haunting end-of-level soundscape – the drone that plays as you slowly return to your Delorian, passing by the bashed and gored remains of the Russian mafiosos you just killed – always made me feel a pang of consciousness and guilt.

With such realistic portrayals of violence and the authoritative position of the player's character, I believe Condemned fails to properly go down either route, stumbling its way through both paths. Butcher's Creek, on the other hand, goes headfirst into the first route – and boy, what a spectacle it is.

With such realistic portrayals of violence and the authoritative position of the player's character, I believe Condemned fails to properly go down either route, stumbling its way through both paths. Butcher's Creek, on the other hand, goes headfirst into the first route – and boy, what a spectacle it is.

I dredge through ramshackle shacks and ruined basements, filled with the skinned corpses and spilled entrails of innocent victims. Killers donning burlap sacks and unicorn skulls assault me at every turn. I am naked – the soles of my feet are bloody with glass shards, but I am not defenseless. I willingly grab rusty tools and smash the killers' heads. My axe-swings exert an overwhelming force and often decapitate my foes. I'm not locked in here with them: they're locked in here with me.

Butcher's Creek wastes no time presenting your character as a disturbed individual. The unnamed protagonist stumbles upon the eponymous Butcher's Creek, nestled deep in the Appalachian Mountains, to find a lair of prolific serial killers who worship a dark God, attracted by the promise of blood and gore. He is not a hero – he's looking for snuff tapes to add to his perverse collection.

The game's aesthetics and mechanics are built around cultivating the feeling that your character is just as voracious for brutality as the killers you face off against. The game is presented as a found-footage horror film, grabbed straight from a VHS camcorder – a grainy film filter showers your screen in pseud0-analog static. It's as if the Player Character has one hand on his camera and another on his rusty pipe, gleefully filming the carnage to enjoy the tape on a CRT TV afterward.

Tapes of dubious and amoral content are the lifeblood of this unnamed protagonist. Collecting the tapes strewn about serves multiple mechanical purposes, from temporarily increasing your maximum health, to unlocking special rooms containing rare and powerful weapons, and even as consumables to save your game.

When your health runs low, your character receives a second wind from photographing scenes of indiscriminate bloodshed – either take a picture of bloodied remains with your camera or find pristine polaroids depicting cruel torture to fill your health back up to the maximum.

In Butcher's Creek, your character willingly engages in violence, almost joyfully so.

One of the challenges of making any horror-focused story work is ensuring that the protagonists don't have easy answers or excuses to escape the threats that haunt them. Butcher's Creek doesn't set all its battles in ruined interiors; the characters step outside to face off in the woods, and, even wounded and naked, the Player Character never makes a run for it or even attempts an escape. He instead jaunts deeper into the dark crevices of its haunts to uncover the cult's secrets.

There's also the matter of agency. Self-determination is often stripped away from the enemies of Condemned since they are mind-manipulated by sonic emissions (as explained by the sequel, to much chagrin), which furthers their dehumanization. It seems everyone in Butcher's Creek is more than willing to dole out slashes, beatings, and torture, the Player Character included. It turns Butcher's Creek into a more honest experience – violence is not hidden under layers of moral grandstanding.

One might read these paragraphs and think that the morality of Butcher's Creek's contextualization of violence is even more perverse and sick than Condemned's, but I believe the context levels out the playing field – psycho killers versus psycho killer. You are on equal footing with your assailants, albeit outnumbered and in the nude, but morally and ethically cut from the same blood-soaked cloth.

Ultimately, Condemned portrays a more cynical viewpoint with its grittiness and depressingly grim world, whereas Butcher's Creek is more buoyant and self-aware – it overflows with levity, humor, and stylistic choices that make the whole game significantly more palatable and less gruesome than the sum of its parts.

The game's aesthetics and mechanics are built around cultivating the feeling that your character is just as voracious for brutality as the killers you face off against.

Despite its extreme representations of gore and blood, the PS1-style chunky polygons add degrees of separation to your violent actions. It's harder to take a world so seriously when it is stylized and inspired by campy horror aesthetics. It acts as an antithesis to the realistic graphics and acts of violence that Condemned portrays. Truly, Butcher's Creek is so exaggerated in its carnage, the blood-thirst so unrealistic and self-aware, it borders on comical and ridiculous (in positive ways).

You're playing as an overweight, naked fiend who can hold his own against droves of goons...the premise itself is a bit on the zany side. The anonymous protagonist presents himself less as a "too edgy for me" kind of anti-social personality and more as a ridiculous killer with unsavory desires.

The levity of its design is felt when you barefoot-kick enemy goons and they exclaim with audible curse words – every "f*ck!" filled with pain and spite. The game is janky in all the glorious ways jank offers unique aesthetic experiences in the realm of gaming. I dare you not to laugh when an enemy has to execute its wonky pathfinding, slowly taking angular steps to reach you only to be kicked into a deep pit, or not let out a little chortle when an enemy ragdolls on top of a torrent of fire, watching his body spin in the air before unceremoniously colliding with the floor.

The serial killers are so funny. You constantly find notes of people chastising others for not providing enough snuff tapes to the Dark God, anecdotes of them locking up their most loony cult members in a "Unicorn Palace", and reminding everyone to "not let those crazies out – we locked them in there for a reason!".
The funniest note I found was about a goon complaining that their burlap sack of a mask was uncomfortable and itchy, wondering why they all have to dress the same and live in such dilapidated conditions: "It's not the 70's anymore", the goon complains. A reply to his grievances is a castigation for his lack of faith.

You don't have to explore Butcher's Creek deeply to realize its deeply tongue-in-cheek nature. Maybe it's just my own desensitization of violence in media, but it's really hard to take the brutality seriously in a world where a flavor text exclaims "Fresh Blood! Nice!" when you take a picture of blood splatters to regain your health.

Yet, there are still moments of effective scares. One particular scenario sent shivers down my spine – you walk through a narrow forest path and you can hear the crunching of leaves and twigs. You are being stalked, but the enemy never ambushes. I nervously crept forward and looked back way too many times to find my pursuer non-existent.

Ultimately, Condemned is the scarier game, but comparing the two on horror alone is akin to comparing a realistic, psychological crime-thriller to a B-horror flick made on a budget.

Butcher's Creek is going to draw me into one more playthrough – I want to experience the campiness and ridiculousness of its setting and context of violence all over again. Whereas, with Condemned: Criminal Origins, I can barely get past the beginning levels as the violence on display is significantly harder to stomach.

That's the incredible accomplishment of Butcher's Creek: in its portrayal of violence, it went all-in on the spectacle, took it to its most ridiculous extremes, and delivered one of the most palatable ultra-violence simulators ever as a result. Hidden in this, under layers of guts and entrails, is an effective lesson on how to portray virtual, pixelated carnage.