You know me by now. If you don’t: Hi, I’m Kailan May. I’m socially awkward, technically unhealthy both psychologically and physiologically and pretentious up the wazoo. What may be a lesser known fact is I often play games on a harder difficulty. There’s just something oddly pleasing about dying over and over again until, by sheer luck, you punch through to victory. So, logic would suggest that Butcher excites me.
Butcher is a side-scrollin’ rooty-tooty-point-n-shooty title. Made by side-scrolling pixel-loving devs Transhuman Design of King Arthur’s Gold and Trench Run fame, this is where similarities to their previous work cease like a door being slammed. You run from the start of an area to the end with a limited amount of health, gunning all you can, trying to get to the exit.
The emphasis on that sentence is on “limited amount of health” as the game is as nostalgic as it is brutal. Each enemy has the potential to riddle your paper-thin body with enough lead to become a makeshift pencil. You also can’t heal yourself either in way of regenerating health or carry-able health-kits. Similarly, your limited supply of bullets will run out fast as you duck in and out trying to hit people without being shot.
While there is the rare pick-up, usually your main source of ammo and health comes from scavenging from the corpses you’ve made. Although you’ll need to be fast running from cover to the bodies, as after a short while the dropped ammo/health will blink away, making your chances of survival dwindle away just a bit more. Especially as the enemies have startlingly precise accuracy.
What I’m trying to say is Butcher is hard. Really hard. Really, really, really punishingly hard. You will die, and die, and die again. Each time being kicked back to the start of the level and told to do it right this time. Considering each level is about 5 to 10 minutes long, you may realize how absolutely mind-numbingly frustrating it is to start again constantly.
Maybe I’d be calmer about the difficulty if the enemy design didn’t ramp it up even further in frustrating ways. Not only enemies seem to shoot you quite reliably if you aren’t leaping around madly, but spotting them in the first place is a ballistic game of hide-and-go-seek.
You see, Transhuman Design went to the Quake school of visual design. That is industrial gray backgrounds (which fortunately eases up as the game progresses) with humanoid gray figures usually, not always, wielding guns you spot all too late. All this with a pixelated aesthetic too. If you mess up the aiming and/or accidentally prioritise the innocent weaponless civilians over soldiers, enjoy redoing that part you passed via blind luck.
To add to this, flames will be your greatest foe. Either firing flames or receiving them, they have this pesky ability to stick around longer than wanted and cutting off a significant chunk of your health for getting too near. This is a wrecking-ball-shaped inconvenience when an enemy you kill erupts into flames and either you’re accidentally too close in your bullet-hell dance or you’re struggling to pick up what they dropped without charring your body.
So when I’m being angry about having to repeat a level because I died, I never quite feel I got a fair ride. Just the expectation to die and die again as it cackles at me. “Oohh, we said the difficulty starts at hard,” it teases at me, as I resist the urge to put my foot through the screen.
“I’ll show you,” I muttered back, managing to get to the final area (“The Last City”) and giving up in 3 hours. You recognize this as rather short, especially with all the teeth-kicking Butcher achieved on me. Then, out of curiosity, I checked the achievement list. “45 minutes for a speed run time?!” I yelled. “Oh no, that’s for the expert speed-running, it’s 90 minutes if you’re a beginner at speed-running.” Needless to say, I simultaneously wanted to scream and began to see what trick it was holding up its sleeve.
Although, before I unveil the magician’s trick, I guess I may as well tackle everything else.
Fortunately, Butcher is as simplistic and as tight as needed for even an amateur of caving a wall in with one’s own head to perform surprisingly well. There isn’t that frustrating moment of “HOW DO I SHOTGUN?!” in the heat of things, nor do you accidentally slide into a pit of spikes. If you die, beyond the game’s crushing difficulty, it is generally your own damn fault.
Which, when you die, or anyone else for that matter, the game wallows in it as it sprays gore across the wall. It really releases some of my frustration and fury at dying for the 20th time to hear the pleasing screams of my foe, their torn bodies dangling from hooks. The only oddity is how you can make the walls bleed with your chainsaw. Although that just might be my character displaying his hallucinating bloodlust. Considering how story-light Butcher is and the tendency to only kill soldiers, that may not be wrong.
The final score of Butcher is a 6/10. The more I thought about the aesthetic choice, the depiction, the brutal difficulty and the tendency to start each level again, the more everything slid into place. The final crunch came that it had a speed-running element so you can compare who got through the skull-crushingly hard title the fastest.
Butcher is a nostalgic title for the days of arcades. It wants to bring you back to the days where you’d get your head stomped on over-and-over so you pump change into the machine, and then compete to see who can get through it the fastest. Except the main evolution is how you pay for the game once, and pound the wall with your head to your heart’s content until you win. Or at least until brain damage takes you.
If the idea of a soul-destroyingly hard title with nostalgia for “ye olde days of arcades” tickles your pickle, then go on ahead. I’ll be here, being a scrub lord simpleton without the required nostalgia for arcade difficulty, having fun with my box of crayons.