Happy’s Humble Burger Farm Review (Xbox, PlayStation & PC)

Happy’s Humble Burger Farm is an advocate for the weird and wonderful, the disturbing and the haggard. It takes just five minutes, in fact, to learn that it isn’t an ordinary burger-flipping cooking sim, but rather, an eerie and awfully unpleasant psychological horror with a fast food twist. The core mechanics might be of a similar nature—to grill patties and to add heaps of fries into a fryer before serving meals to customers, for example—but Happy’s Humble Burger Farm isn’t exactly what you would call a slice-of-life culinary sport. Rather, it’s a ferocious blood sport that requires you to think on your feet and act on impulse, not just for the sake of quelling a few ravenous stomaches, but for the sake of keeping the internal demons at bay and, more importantly, the portly heifer from testing you limb from limb.

To call Happy’s Humble Burger Farm a depressing game might be a little unfair. Though, to be fair, you can see what we’re talking about here. With thanks to its grainy aesthetic and dank atmosphere (and not to mention its painfully grotesque characters), it does immediately strike you as being a place of unspoken hostility. There may be smiles all around, but if the game is anything at all, it isn’t a “happy” experience — or at least not in the conventional sense of the word. It’s dark, dull, and appallingly dismal. And yet, with all due respect, that’s precisely what makes it so darn appealing.

The point behind Happy’s Humble Burger Farm isn’t to establish a restaurant that’s a cut above the rest, but rather, to work in a generic fast food chain during the twilight shift and survive whatever curveballs it hurls at you. Oh, you are not a hero, and you cannot fashion melee weapons out of sesame seed buns. No, you simply exist in a confined working environment, and your only purpose is to serve food to impatient customers each night. Like Overcooked, but with a few more consequences to juggle if you fail to make ends meet. Well, sort of.

Frankly, you shouldn’t be fooled into thinking that Happy’s Humble Burger Farm is a peaceful game. Oh, there is a catch here: the longer you make people wait, and the more orders that you misplace over the course of each shift, the angrier the mascots of the fast food chain become. In other words, if you slip up, then you will hear about it. The world and all of its set pieces become distorted, and the hallucinations begin to intensify. A cow, or some other smiling animal that operates as the smoking barrel for your sheer lack of competence, sprouts up from beneath the woodwork, and before long a small restaurant turns into a violent fever dream that you simply cannot escape from. There’s a little more to it than that, but you get the idea. Flip burgers, or pay the price, basically.

While most of the game takes place within the burger joint, it does provide you with a trail of breadcrumbs to follow between shifts. For instance, before you take the path to your workplace, you have the chance to explore a network of apartment blocks and rooms, all of which house their own share of unusual properties and characters. A chef, for example, who murmurs and roams the corridors, sometimes in your direction, other times in an unpredictable manner. It doesn’t add much to the overall experience I’ll admit, but it sets the tone, and honestly, that tone is horrifying.

As far as cooking and the general act of preparing meals go, Happy’s Humble Burger Farm  doesn’t deviate all that much from an ordinary fast food sim. Similar to what you might have seen before, it tasks you with adding items—patties, fries, and seasoning, for example—to kitchen appliances, and bagging orders to serve customers on the other side of a counter. As you progress through the nights, however, these orders eventually become a little tougher to keep tabs on. Granted, it never becomes a pain in the backside, but with more customers to serve and even trickier builds to compile, it can feel awfully daunting at times. But then, that’s sort of the point. Frankly, if the world isn’t constantly on the verge of meshing reality with fever dreams, then you probably aren’t playing it properly.

Let it be said that, if you are looking for a great story, then you might want to place your spatula in another kitchen cabinet. Sure enough, Happy’s Humble Burger Farm does have a plot, but, like Five Nights at Freddy’s, it tucks it in between each shift that you take on, either in small passages of text or in little Easter Eggs that you can find in and around the restaurant. For the most part, though, the game is all about taking each night as they come, and working to keep a head above water whilst keeping reality from crumbling.

Aside from cooking, you also have a couple of odd jobs that need doing here. For example, if the lights go out, then you need to reactivate the power. Also, if you spot a fire, then you must extinguish it. And then there are the other tasks, such as pawning items at the local store, collecting audio logs, and attempting the in-game Endless Mode, which allows you to test your mettle in a procedurally generated environment, for example. Granted, there isn’t much here that alters a familiar formula. That said, the game does provide a good deal of substance, with a ton of randomized chase sequences, environmental hazards, and orders that can keep you on your toes for a handful of hours.

Of course, you shouldn’t expect a perfect game here, much less one that has the capability of harboring a stellar soundtrack or a flawless visual style. Think of it as a love letter to PSX horror, complete with all of the janky animations and pixelated characters. That, in short, is what Happy’s Humble Burger Farm proudly represents. It might not be pretty, but it’s certainly eerie.

Verdict

Happy’s Humble Burger Farm balances eeriness with uncertainty in a disturbingly dismal culinary world in which grotesque tastebuds and grim hallucinations collide to create a hauntingly beautiful, albeit dull and oftentimes predictable cooking experience. It might not do enough to quell your cravings for a full-fat storyline, but it does fill a hole in your stomach with its intense atmosphere and claustrophobic nature. For that, I’d say that it’s worth the price tag. Plus, it’s a lot cheaper than a burger and fries at a local high street fast food restaurant — so there’s that.