#34 - Happy's Humble Burger Farm

That farmer dude is super creepy!

Happy's Humble Burger Farm is a game about working in a fast food restaurant, with all the standard horrors that come with a job like that.  The game opens with a couple surgeons chatting as they install a "Reality Fabrication chip" into your brain.

More morphine!  I'm waking up, doc!

You're then walked through the steps of cooking and assembling a burger, then bagging it and delivering it to customers.  With the added warning that making a mistake will summon Happy, the mascot cow, who will pursue you until you feed her a burger with a rotten patty.  She only moves if you're not looking at her, so keep your eyes on her while making her burger...

I’ll be honest, just going over training on how to properly cook and assemble a burger brought back PTSD from my teen years… 😭

You then wake up in your bedroom, with the goal of getting to work for your first night shift (you only work night shifts).  The game defaults to a "VHS filter" over your screen, making everything a little fuzzy and staticky, but you can change it to some other filter in the settings, or turn it off completely. I personally preferred to play it clear, without the blurry imagery.

I experienced enough "VHS filter" in my childhood through the '80s

You'll be working the night shift at Happy's Humble Burger Farm, alongside the manager Toe.  But Toe's brain has been turned to mush from all the experiments done to him, so he only mumbles incomprehensibly while standing over the grill.  Like in real life, you need to do all the work yourself because your manager is completely useless.

Toe, the brain-dead manager.  Typical of a night shift job flipping burgers.

As you explore and find more cassette tapes with audio logs, you learn that all employees of this restaurant have basically been test subjects for some sort of experiment.  But all of them either went missing or insane.  Toe is still hanging by a thread, but he's a shell of a human being at this point.  And you appear to be the latest subject, who still (somewhat) retains their sanity.

This mascot is seriously obsessed with death...

Remember this farmer dude?  All the various restaurant mascots have large plaster statues scattered around the dining area of the restaurant and will throw out a few catch phrases if you click on them.  The farmer, though, speaks with a horrifying deep demon voice and only speaks of death, murder, homicide, etc.

Also, he's the only mascot who moves.  When you're not looking, he'll move back and forth around his corner of the restaurant.  It's unnerving when he's facing the door, then you walk past and look back and he's suddenly right next to you, staring into your soul. (See first screenshot)

Then there's the weird fry guys.  I have no idea what these guys' deal is, but occasionally, the music will turn creepy and then one of these guys will just spawn randomly and scuttle across the restaurant floors for a minute.

Definitely gave me a WTF moment the first several times these guys scampered by me!

As the game advances, more of the town between your apartment and the restaurant will open up for you to explore.  There's this interesting "Steal & Sell" shop, which I guess implies you can steal things from your work to sell them for a profit here.

You can tell this is an edgy shop because of the goth girl hanging out on the counter.

Then there's a coffee shop with a live band playing in the front window.  Drinking coffee before a shift will speed up your burger-making process, so make sure to load up on that java!

I'd listen to this band

Finally, there's this Happy's Humble Burger Farm warehouse under construction that opens up after a truck crashes through the fence.  Be careful exploring within, though, because there's a massive pig inside that attacks you if you disturb him.  He throws something green at you (snot bombs?) while these creepy mannequin-like people stumble toward you and explode.

Goddamn living mannequins.  So creepy!

I'm not sure what to do here, but there's a burger station to one side, so I wonder if I can satiate him by feeding him burgers.  It's a little hard to assemble burgers while constantly under attack, though.  I was trapped in this building and struggled to make any progress, so that's where I left off for the night.

You might notice that I don't have any screenshots of Happy herself.  That's because I used to work in a couple fast food restaurants as a teenager, and also spent 20 years in the military where attention to detail was paramount to keeping people alive.  So I didn't make a single mistake making burgers, even with all the custom orders people requested, and Happy never made an appearance during my gameplay.  Although that giant pig kind of cut my gameplay short.

When the game starts, there's a loading screen where someone logs into a computer with a username and password.  When you get a game over, it shows a BSOD (Blue Screen of Death).  So maybe part of the experiment is that this is all a simulation?  You're not actually at a restaurant?  I dunno; I'll have to play through the whole game to figure out what's actually going on.

BSOD due to "Dangerous Thinking." Hmm...