The creator of Dusk and Iron Lung is making a gruesome but surprisingly funny horror game about beating killer cultists with lead pipes and 2x4s

pcgamer.com:

I'm always down for a David Szymanski joint. The Dusk and Iron Lung dev has a real way with making games that feel good, no matter the genre⁠—really tactile weapons and interactions, great sound design, just a general attention to detail⁠—and his games always have an anarchic sense of humor that I really dig. Szymanski's next game, Butcher's Creek, feels like another winner. It's a melee combat-focused first person horror game where you square off against torture cultists in rural Appalachia.

Like so many indies, it's reviving a genre or idea that the big dogs Nintendon't anymore. If Selaco is an indie celebration of Monolith's F.E.A.R., Butcher's Creek is taking another look at the studio's other horror hit, Condemned: Criminal Origins. Condemned is a game where you're an FBI agent framed for murder, so you have to fend off hobos with improvised weapons and get menaced by paranormal entities in the hopes of clearing your name.

Butcher's Creek trades Condemned's platonic ideal, Fox News wet dream of a run down American inner city for some classico rural isolation. You play as some manner of Scum Bag who's come out to the boonies in search of VHS snuff films and gory polaroids⁠—to sell to the highest bidder? For his own edification? Either way, the cannibal cult stuff couldn't happen to a nicer guy, and Billy Butcher's Creek quickly finds himself squaring off against a gang of nasty boys.

There's a really great, jarring contrast between the sense of horror and sense of humor here. The atmosphere is thick and oppressive: rustling nighttime forests and stark torture chambers in run-down, repurposed industrial interiors that remind me of Silent Hill 2 or Manhunt. The GoldSrc-Source cusp graphical fidelity is heightened by a fuzzy camcorder screen effect, sort of like how Unrecord really impressed us all with its body cam presentation. Maybe the true path to videogame realism is just making your screen worse? Much to consider.

All that sickening ambience just built and