Slayaway Camp: Butcher’s Cut

Genre: Puzzle

Players: 1

.

Review:

(Note: This game is included in the Indie Puzzle Bundle Vol. 1, along with Glass Masquerade, Letter Quest Remastered, and Pipe Push Paradise. It is also in the Indie Darling Bundle Vol. 2 along with Bleed 2 and The Aquatic Adventure of the Last Human, as well as the Blood and Guts Bundle along with Slain: Back From Hell and Super Blood Hockey.)

Slayaway Camp is a sliding block puzzle game disguised as a cutesy tribute to classic slasher flicks. The core gameplay is much like those ice block puzzles in Zelda games where movement in a direction keeps going until hitting a wall, but everything is in the trappings of slasher flicks – the block you’re moving is the serial killer, which must touch a series of other blocks (victims to slaughter) before making it to an exit (an evil-infused pentagram).

As presentations go, this has to be one of the more inventive ways to hide what is really a pretty straightforward puzzle game. Everything is stylized, so even though there’s plenty of guts and gore on display, it’s the guts and gore of cartoony block people, but from the various intros to each new “film” to the level titles themselves to the various ways the victims get offed, it’s clear that the makers of this game really love films in the genre.

The gameplay does mix things up some, too, introducing new elements and pushing the player to really look at the level to pick the correct path. There was a lot of care put into this part of the game.

Surprisingly, the part that really could have used more effort was the actual kill scenes. If you’re teasing the visceral thrill of a gruesome murder, you’re already dulling the impact by doing it with blocky characters, but there are so few of these that they start repeating quickly, and very few of them seem as truly inventive as scenes from the film that inspired the game. And this repetition kinda’ breaks the fun illusion, and it just goes back to, “oh, this is just a sliding block puzzle game”, and these cutscenes just become a frustration keeping you from the game, which is a pity.

Still, as block puzzles games go, I really appreciate that this game really tried something different, and fans of the horror genre might find this to be an amusing time waster, at least for a little while.

tl;dr – Slayaway Camp: Butcher’s Cut is a sliding block puzzle game disguised as a slasher film tribute, and although it gets repetitive before long, it’s still likely to make fans of slasher films crack a smile.

Grade: C

^{You can support eShopperReviews on Patreon! Please click HERE to become a Sponsor!}