The Haunted Hoard: Slayaway Camp: Butcher’s Cut (Switch)

Slayaway Camp: Butcher’s Cut is a puzzle game themed around the slasher films of the 1980s, and while thoughtful puzzle-solving sounds like it wouldn’t mesh well with the carnage and brutality of the horror genre, it comes together quite nicely once you swap some ideas around. Rather than breaking blocks or collecting tokens, the puzzles here are about getting a killer to the victims without scaring them off or getting done in yourself, Slayaway Camp: Butcher’s Cut able to provide the bloody mayhem and the mind-bending tests in equal measure.

 

Slayaway Camp: Butcher’s Cut presents itself as a series of fictional horror movies from the 1980s that take some clear inspiration from the Friday the 13th series of film. Rather than having Jason Voorhees though, the primary killer here is the masked madman Skullface, but he’s not the only killer on a rampage. Across the ten main movies you’ll be presented some tongue-in-cheek homages to slasher films, a few focused on Skullface killing campers at the eponymous camp but the other Slayaway Camp films take the action to different locations like an amusement park or school. Some amusingly tenuous connection is often made to the camp if you read the back of the VHS boxes before playing the levels, but this also means some stages might have you playing as a killer clown or shark mutant instead of the stocky serial killer you start with. You can take any killer back to previous levels or to the bonus puzzles though and some of the unlockables are additional killers as well, but they all function similarly so it is more about the aesthetic than any advantages when it comes to who you pick.

Aesthetics are definitely a major consideration in Slayaway Camp: Butcher’s Cut, the game’s compact cuboid characters helping to ease the murdering rampage you’ll find yourself on by being silly and simple. There are plenty of little moments that try to set up that the campers you’re after are almost too dumb to live, falling for obvious traps or oblivious to the obvious violence going on around them, and since there is little actual story to be found they function mostly as pieces of the puzzles you’re solving but with some big reactive faces so they can work well with the game’s macabre sense of humor.

 

In a normal level of Slayaway Camp: Butcher’s Cut, characters and objects will be arranged on a grid you view either from a tilted perspective or above if you so wish. Your killer will be placed at a specific point and need to reach and kill every victim in the area, but you can only move up, down, left, or right, and every movement will cause you to slide as far as you possibly can in that direction. If you hit into a person you’ll immediately kill them, but if you end up right next to them you might instead scare them and send them fleeing off to slide in a different direction. Some levels have exits they can bolt towards you need to make sure you don’t scare them towards, but even reaching campers is sometimes difficult in itself, the player needing to figure out how to slide Skullface so he hits the right walls and can navigate his way to every person without getting stuck. There is an undo feature that lets you reverse as many actions as needed in case you do need to dial back a puzzle after a mistake, and while your interaction will always boil down to simply moving your killer in one of four directions, Slayaway Camp: Butcher’s Cut does a good job at rolling out additional considerations by adding to what can be found in a level.

 

As you head through the different films, different ideas begin to emerge. Killing a cat on film is a no-no so you have to make sure to avoid them, Skullface needs to make sure he doesn’t croak himself so sliding him into a fire or pit will cause an instant loss, phones can be used to lure characters to different locations, and various objects can be knocked over that might seal off certain routes or even make new ones so you need to figure out when to mess with them to better plan out your path to all the victims. Cops and SWAT teams arise fairly early on as people you don’t need to kill but can actually turn the tables on you, and in a cute touch, if you do end up dying in a level, the game will start playing the credits because, after all, you are the villain of these films so your demise should conceivably be the end. You can of course dial things back to try again with ease, and the cops and SWAT teams end up being important tools for area denial that make your evaluation of how you need to move more layered. Perhaps the most important part of the gradual rollout of new variables and hazards is that Slayaway Camp: Butcher’s Cut never really feels like it gets annoyingly complex. In puzzle games in this vein it’s not uncommon for later levels to start favoring incredibly elaborate sets of movements where each action must be exactly right to finish the stage properly, but some levels here can be completed with multiple methods and even the extra films based on holidays or some amusing interpretations of Hell don’t derive their difficulty from needing to think tens of moves in advance. Even when the game isn’t introducing new mechanics you’ll still find quite a few levels that can go quickly before one that might stumps you arise, giving a refreshing mix of difficulty levels so you’re less likely to give up and move on.

The comedic horror factors into how the levels play out as well. Normally when you’re killing a camper, it will be a pretty quick interaction, but sometimes the game will focus in on a short scene that shows off a more creative kill. These quick killing scenes can take on plenty of different forms, some rather expected like stabbing someone with a knife or chopping them with an axe, many rather silly like calling your victim on the phone only to hurl it through their head, and some outright outlandish like the killer inviting someone to skydive only to cut the strings on their parachute. Gorepacks can be bought to add more variety to these quick and flashy kills, so whether you’re decapitating someone with a paper cutter or hurling an enormous Easter Egg onto their head, waiting to see if it’s a kill type you haven’t seen before makes these deaths worth watching even if they break you out of the puzzle solving for a second. The last kill of a level is turned into a minigame as well, the player needing to time a button press right or you won’t kill the target despite still clearing the stage. The reward for doing it right is some coins for buying Gorepacks and killers and there’s a whole video tape where you just do these kill scenes as long as you can manage if you want to earn more cash for the extras, so thankfully it’s not too punishing if you slip up and you’re not kept from buying the goodies too much if you want to see them before you clear every puzzle on offer.

 

There are quite a lot of puzzles on offer though, most tapes holding a little over 10 puzzles at least and then you’ll unlock Deleted Scenes and NC-17 versions that retool layouts to be new and more difficult challenges. NC-17 is where the game stores some of its more demanding challenges, ensuring there are those tough levels for people who are into the puzzle style, but thankfully it’s not all confined to there and some of the normal levels require a good eye to figure out the logic needed to succeed. If you are struggling though, there is a hint system with two possible hint types. The first one is a quick sentence or two meant to draw your attention to something or get you started, but the second hint is just to show the entire solution and then you’re left to act it out yourself after. You pay coins to view the hints but they give you a choice between a nudge in the right direction and essentially skipping the stage, Slayaway Camp: Butcher’s Cut seemingly more interested in letting you have fun with the puzzles rather than holding you back from the rest of its content just because something isn’t clicking in the current design.

THE VERDICT: The cartoony killing puzzles of Slayaway Camp: Butcher’s Cut are fun parodies of familiar slasher tropes on top of providing a good mix of quick stages you can figure out easily enough and ones that require you to think and experiment a bit longer to earn that final kill scene. Keeping the levels small keeps them manageable and a consistent rollout of new variables makes the play more than sliding your killer around the grid until things line up right. A smart approach to hints and a lenient rewind system encourage the player to test out ideas while avoiding frustrating scenarios when they are stumped, and the silly kills are quick but amusing way to wrap up a stage before quickly moving onto another.

 

And so, I give Slayaway Camp: Butcher’s Cut for Nintendo Switch…

A GOOD rating. Slayaway Camp: Butcher’s Cut never gets too in-depth which does mean a few levels breeze past, but that difficulty balance also helps keep the game moving along at a nice pace so you can quickly move onto new mechanics that start to build up towards more involved solutions. There’s not much to fault; it’s a very simple game to control while still having enough engaging puzzle solving that it is worth playing for its level design alone. The presentation is certainly a fun way of contextualizing it though, from the increasingly over the top ways Skullface comes up with to creatively end a camper to the many loving allusions to slasher films it all comes together nicely under the cartoonish and exaggerated style quite well. There’s certainly room to grow and keep adding ideas, the game never pushing its amount of variables too far in one puzzle but still feeling like the puzzles could be more satisfying if more actions like ringing the phones cropped up with greater frequency so things wouldn’t lean too heavily on simply moving the killer back and forth. It doesn’t lose its energy though and has a few good safeguards in place to keep things from getting too slow or cerebral, Slayaway Camp: Butcher’s Cut making sure that even though it embraces the cheap thrills of overly bloody horror, the puzzle design is entertaining enough that it doesn’t feel odd juxtaposed next to those creative kills.

 

While you won’t find Jason Voorhees sliding across a camp to stomp a camper to paste here, Skullface’s murder puzzles are a light-hearted approach to horror that works well within the format it establishes. It doesn’t go so far that it loses it charm and it still has enough ideas on how to populate the stages with new considerations so that it doesn’t get too repetitive, Slayaway Camp: Butcher’s Cut a fun fit for its smart puzzling but certainly shining even more if you come to it for the gruesome goofiness. Whether it’s ripping someone’s heart out or somehow folding their body into a bloody origami crane, the humorous horror works as a motivator to keep clearing levels so you can see where its ideas head next.