Happy's Humble Burger Farm Review

For those that don't know, Happy's Humble Burger Farm is a game where you play a restaurant sim mixed with horror, as the animatronic version of a cow is your boss — Happy — and will get very angry and kill you if you mess up too much. It also has a story mode that you can play outside of the restaurant sim to find out more about what happened in the world. 

When I first started playing this game I didn't know it had a story, I thought it was some sort of nightmarish version of Overcooked that was aiming to be a mix of funny and scary. If I hadn't set off to find the upgrade coins I might've just ended up making a whole different review.

In Happy's Humble Burger Farm, you have two different ways to play: the chaotic restaurant sim with a crazy cow for a boss or the story mode, which slowly unravels what the hell is even happening and why Happy is in such a terrible mood.

The chaotic restaurant gameplay is pretty fun. The explanation of the how-tos aren't very in-depth, but you can logic your way through after a few rounds. My wife and I actually thought that the game was pretty forgiving throughout the first time because it was introducing the mechanics slowly and it wasn't that difficult to survive the shift, however things do become a bit more hectic as time goes on. 

As far as restaurant chaos sims goes, the mode was pretty good. You have to deliver the proper order before the time limit or you get a strike, and once you're more accustomed to the game, random events start being introduced which interrupt your flow of cooking, like the toilet clogging or having to take out the trash. Happy is also not that difficult to appease once you start learning a trick or two. If it proves to be a bit much, the game offers some upgrades you can get through coins that are hidden throughout the world if it proves to be a bit much. 

The story mode introduces bosses, collectibles, and — obviously — story. The game excels at making every boss very different and enjoyable in their own way whilst also remaining in the genre of horror and stress. Another thing I quite enjoyed about story mode was the puzzle elements of having to find what to do next, especially when the game very rarely holds your hand. My wife and I spent hours and hours trying to find our way around the story mode and it's something that we both think is lacking in games; the sense of adventure and the feeling of reward after finally finding your way around is probably one of the biggest reasons I liked this game. 

The bosses were all different, as I stated earlier, but there was this one boss that I really hated, and his name is Charlie. He's a chicken animatronic and honestly, there was a lot wrong with him. First off, I don't know if it's a bug or just bad game development, but as my wife so eloquently put it: “Charlie's vision range went from bat to eagle.” This guy passed by us several times at an angle in which I was surprised he didn't see us but then sometimes we'd be almost a whole country away from him and he'd get triggered and charge at us like, and I quote her again, “a very pissed off chocobo”. This caused us to eventually just give up with stealth and try outrunning him instead, which taught us that Charlie won't catch up to you and his damage is laughable. 

The “hardest” part of his entire segment was that the game has a bad habit of not updating the objective — which gets you stuck throughout several parts of the game. So when we finally killed the boss it continued to say "contain him" which confused us because his charred body was there, dead and contained. Thinking this was a bug, we went through the whole segment twice more before, in a desperate attempt to not ditch the game, we tried clicking random doors until we found the exit. Apparently, we had already finished with him and just had to leave the area. 

Now, I'm not usually a horror game player because I'm quite the coward and usually end up giving up. I have a pretty atrocious sense of direction too, so when something is chasing me and I am running away in terror, I get lost a lot and sometimes even hard-stuck on parts. Because of this and my overall inability to handle the tension of a possible jump scare, I tend to just avoid them like one should avoid the plague. Happy's Humble Burger Farm had me jumping a few times throughout the game and I really enjoyed the level of terror it held during the early stages because it was neither too much to be overwhelming nor too little to be laughable. Unfortunately, as it went on, the fact that the game doesn't take itself seriously began to wear off my fear until it became a puzzle game with strange and misplaced horror elements.

And this is the biggest downfall of Happy's Humble Burger Farm: It doesn't take itself seriously at all. It feels like the game doesn't really know what it wants to be and even though I played for 12 hours, I still never felt like it knew. Happy's Humble Burger Farm tries to be a scary game with the jump scares, monsters, and eerie story, but then it also does ridiculous things like making you fight an angry, bent-over cow that wants to murder you for getting a burger order wrong. 

I've never touched a Five Nights At Freddy's game and what I know of the franchise is very little. I wonder if perhaps because the game uses animatronics and is a famous horror series, that Happy's Humble Burger Farm thought it could do the same. Maybe it's just my wife and I — maybe we just won't be able to take you seriously if you're trying to scare us through cows and chickens. 

Another downfall of this game is the sheer amount of bugs. We spent four hours on the last stretch of the game because the penultimate boss kept bugging over and over. We considered giving up because we couldn't figure out what was going wrong until my wife just exited the area with the aforementioned poultry and fixed it, and although the other bugs we encountered weren't as game-breaking as that, they were annoying enough to make the game feel tedious. Among those bugs was the bag in and of itself, which is unfortunate because it's such an important feature. 

I felt like Happy's Humble Burger Farm kept me fluctuating between really wanting the game to be great, and me really wanting the game to be over. The bugs, the awkward and ill-fitting music, the lack of interesting story, forgettable enemies, and slow walking sometimes had me at the edge of my seat; not because I was scared, but because I just wanted to leave.

On the other hand, the collectibles were enjoyable to hunt down, the bosses were surprisingly fun, the lack of handholding made it very pleasant to explore, the lack of predictable jump scares was respectable, and the save points were very intuitive. 

I just wish it had put a bit more effort to take itself seriously or fully commit to the ridiculousness of it all. Despite all the bugs and mildly irritating walk speed, I did enjoy my time with the game and if you're into the whole Five Nights At Freddy's scene, you could give this a try at a discount.