Happy’s Humble Burger Farm can be compared to a book with its cover as a ‘Cooking Simulator’ illustrated all over it, but the real horror begins as soon as you start turning the pages.
Note from the Author: I am super excited to bring you this review because I personally loathe horror games from the bottom of my heart: my brain overthinks dark plots which result in nightmares and sleepless nights. And I picked up this game thinking it’s an actual Cooking Simulator game.
The game was originally released for the PC, Xbox Series X and PlayStation 4/5 and is now all set to release on the Nintendo Switch, on April 7, 2022.
Let’s explore what’s truly happening at this Burger Joint.
You’re Hired
The game starts with a blurry cinematic of you undergoing surgery trying to overhear what the surgeons are trying to say, and soon you pass out into absolute darkness until you finally find yourself in the middle of nowhere learning to make burgers. The screen has a retro filter the entire time which feels like the radioactive effects from the Half-Life games. And this environment is definitely very strange for a cooking simulator.
Just after you complete the tutorial, a hidden pitch-black creature appears and now you have to calm it down by feeding it a corrupted burger, but the catch is you can’t take your eyes off it. This is where I felt the joy-cons are not the best of the choice to deal with this situation as compared to a KBM.
Soon after, you find yourself in an apartment, followed by a communicator where your boss gives you a good first-day scrum call. You meet your friend and the only neighbor who closely resembles the neighbor from the original Plants vs Zombies. Your neighbor also works with you at the burger restaurant, however, you can never understand what he is speaking.
Fast forward to you entering the restaurant with many mascots and a jukebox, but a very weird kitchen where you have to take orders and make burgers as customers request. You clock in, fire up the appliances and start doing a great job as a fast worker, completing orders one by one, and earning money. The only trouble is, every time you deliver a wrong order, things turn green and very scary. And once again, I find this very strange for a cooking simulator game.
Soon after it turns out a monster named happy will hunt you down every time you mess up orders. She will try to consume you until you fight her off with Rotten Meat or get devoured by her. And this is the point where I yeeted my Switch away to my dad’s room and started to chant the Hanuman Chalisa to keep myself safe!
After two days of cooldown, and research, it turns out, Happy’s Humble Burger Farm is not just a cooking Simulator game: it is a game about escaping a very dark corporate experiment, where your brain is being controlled and you are being forced to work non-stop and ripped away of all your memories. But that’s not everything. The real trouble is that due to certain events by these corporate giants, mysterious creatures from deep within the world have now been awakened to kill humanity, and they have claimed the form of all the Mascots, but their darker/zombie version.
TLDR: Run.
A Great Port but Hard to Control
Happy’s Humble Burger Farm has been delivered to the Switch with maximum effort. The game felt smooth the entire time and you can barely make out the graphical differences. The optimization is great and runs flawlessly docked or handheld. For a game that had to be delivered for all platforms, the developers have absolutely put in all efforts which are directly reflected in the game.
The joy-cons however personally feel way harder than a keyboard mouse while playing the game. Especially while picking up tiny objects or trying to push a button or open a door, the controls felt out of the place and I often couldn’t aim right. This however could’ve been easily fixed by a light aim assist or assistive interaction, and overall the UX of the game felt never connected to me.
VERDICT
Happy’s Humble Burger Farm is a dark, cooking-themed, psychotic game with a very deep plot and storyline. The game almost tricks you into making you fall prey to the plot but once you break the loop, things get even darker, horrifying and strange. The game is filled with lore, and backstories to make you understand how you ended up here and has a perfect setting and visual filter for it. The game however has a clunky user experience and the controls could’ve been mapped better.
While the port works seamlessly smooth, the joy-cons do not have any assistive interaction making it super hard to make burgers in intense situations.
FINAL RATING: RECOMMENDED