Happy's Humble Burger Farm

About Happy's Humble Burger Farm

Happy's Humble Burger Farm is a horror game by Scythe Dev Team, published by tinyBuild and released on December 3, 2021 for PC, PlayStation and Xbox, with the Switch version following on April 7, 2022. It mixes a restaurant job with a mystery about the burger chain, the company Obscura Biotech and your own existence.

Most of a shift is cooking. Customers order Happy's Deluxe, Fantastic Fowl and Poppin' Pork sandwiches, fries and salmon nuggets, and you grill patties, run the fryers and fill the drinks to match, with the menu booklet showing each recipe. Fires, rubbish and rats interrupt the work. A wrong order or a slow one counts as an infraction, and three of them upset Happy the Humble Heifer, the chain's cartoon cow.

The horror is in that rule and in the mascots. Happy and her Barnyard Buds smile from the menus, the posters and a stage in the dining room, and their other forms are fleshy, grinning things in red-lit corridors and rusty warehouses. Destructoid's review points out the twist that most of these encounters are won by cooking: you build the sandwich while the world tries to kill you.

Between shifts you go home and out into the streets of New Elysian City, where audio logs, research pages, radio shows and flyers piece together what is going on, and the Steal 'n' Sell buys what you find. There is no day and night clock, so you can push the story as far as it lets you before the next shift. Destructoid found it more darkly funny than frightening, a satire of a corporation that values workers only for their speed, and found the challenge mild.

Critics were split: OpenCritic's top critic average is 69, with praise for the atmosphere and the mystery and complaints about a repetitive routine and, on Switch, clumsy controls in the menus. Steam players rate it Very Positive. Finishing the story unlocks an endless mode that is only the cooking, and a sequel, Happy's Humble Burger Cult, is sold with it on Steam. It suits players who like job-simulator horror and mascot horror in the vein of Five Nights at Freddy's, with a city to explore between shifts.

How to play Happy's Humble Burger Farm

1. Buy it on Steam, GOG or itch.io for Windows, or on PlayStation, Xbox or the Nintendo eShop.
2. Start Story Mode and begin your first night shift.
3. Read each order and cook it: grill the patties, fry the sides and pour the drinks, checking the menu booklet for each recipe.
4. Serve customers correctly and on time to avoid infractions, and deal with fires, trash and rats.
5. After work, explore New Elysian City, collect audio logs and research pages, and sell what you find at the Steal 'n' Sell.
6. Go back to work when you are ready: each shift moves the story on and pays for supplies and upgrades.

Tips

• Keep the restaurant's menu open while you learn the recipes; it lists the steps for each item.
• Cook extra patties, fries and nuggets when the line is quiet, as the menu's own note says, so orders do not pile up.
• Upgrade the restaurant as soon as you can afford it; the store says upgrades make the job easier.
• Stock up on supplies before you push the story on; Destructoid found that a little preparation makes most dangers easy.
• Listen to the radio and read the flyers around town if you want the whole story; you can escape without them, but they explain what is going on.

Questions