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 Selacois 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 …