Slayaway Camp: Butcher's Cut

I have this habit of binge watching horror films. I'll start out with Rosemary's Baby, move on to Pontypool, and by the end of the night I will have finished off all five Final Destinations. That's how it was playing Slayaway Camp, the PC and mobile hit that is only just now finding its way to home consoles. I went in figuring it would be a simple concept I would quickly grow tired of, but then I spent the rest of the night murdering my way through hundreds of horny teens. Let me tell you, Jason Voorhees has nothing on me.

What we have here is a slick little puzzle game that is a love letter to the cheesy horror films of the VHS era. You play the masked madman at the center of Slayaway Camp, a fictional horror series that mocks movies like Friday the 13th, Halloween and, of course, Sleepaway Camp. The object is to kill all of the unsuspecting campers, evade law enforcement, and make it to the end of the film for a chance to slay again in one of the increasingly over-the-top sequels.

The action takes place on a bite-sized map that kind of resembles a board game. Instead of freely walking around, we can only push the serial killer in one of four directions. He'll slide along the path until he hits an obstacle, be it a wall, chair or one of the campers you're looking to rip to shreds. This unusual mechanic forces you to think about how you're going to interact with the board and set up obstacles in order to successfully murder everybody and make it to the exit. This starts simple, but some of these levels will leave you trying every combination in order to make it out alive.

The game is good about adding new challenges as we make our way through all ten Slayaway Camp movies. The local police will begin to show up, forcing us to rethink how we're going to walk around the stages without getting shot. You'll eventually run into electrified fences and lit campfires, two obstacles that will not only kill the campers, but also our murderous hero. The game also has us interacting with the backgrounds, like when we turn off the lights, topple bookcases and make phone calls from inside the house.

A lot of the charm comes from the different movies, each with their own dramatically-read trailers. What starts out as a simple summer camp killing quickly turns into an office massacre, a slasher film set in a high school and a very special Christmas-themed spectacular. And it's not just an axe-wielding lunatic these teenagers need to be concerned about, because you'll even take control of a killer shark in a Jaws rip-off. There are more than 60 different characters to choose from, including quite a few familiar faces from famous horror films of the 1970s, 80s and 90s.

Of course, what kind of slasher series would it be without gore? Thankfully, Slayaway Camp is loaded with all kinds of bloody and disgusting kills. In fact, this game comes with more than 90 of these animations, which includes everything from the gross to the silly to the absurd. Half of the fun of this game is seeing how these different killers are going to murder their prey. The fact that all this is done on characters that look like they were plucked out of Minecraft makes the whole thing that much more amusing.

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This brand new Butcher's Cut brings all ten Slayaway Camp movies to the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, along with some of the extra content, like My Gory Valentine, HellCamp, Supernatural Forces and Santa's Slay. In all, there are more than three hundred puzzles to solve, which ended up taking me several hours to massacre my way through. And if you don't want to solve puzzles and instead focus on quick time kills, then marathon your way through the appropriately named Faces of Killed 3, a mini-game where you do little more than hit the button at the right time.

Slayaway Camp is a simple game that benefits from a target rich horror theme and well-executed gameplay. The game is good about keeping you in control, even when all you're doing is sliding the killer around the room. No matter how many times you mess up, we're always able to rewind time step-by-step. The game is also good about giving us useful hints when we get stuck, though it will cost you. Best of all, the game feels great when using a gamepad. Everything is mapped to different buttons and the D-pad makes the experience fast and painless.

Normally when I play games, I have an easy time nailing down the design decisions that annoy me. That's not the case here. For what it's trying to do, Slayaway Camp gets almost nothing wrong. Sure, you could argue that the game gets a little repetitive and the levels starts to blur together after a while, but the new settings and obstacles go a long way to keep the experience fresh. I can imagine people who don't like cheesy horror films or puzzles games not liking this as much as me, but I had a killer time.