Butcher's Creek

Butcher's Creek is a 2025 first-person melee survival horror game developed and published by David Szymanski.^[1] The player controls an unnamed loner on a search for videotapes, which leads him to an abandoned cabin near the titular town of Butcher’s Creek, Pennsylvania. The game is heavily inspired by the horror games Manhunt (2003) and Condemned: Criminal Origins (2005).^[2] The game was released for Windows on January 23, 2025.

Butcher's Creek takes place in the autumn of 1993, with the player controlling a unnamed loner who is obsessed with cinematic gore, and is seeking "authentic snuff videotapes", and attempts to make contact with the mysterious group that produces them, but no one answers. During his quest, he eventually arrives at an abandoned cabin near the fictional town of Butcher’s Creek, Pennsylvania, in a remote, decaying corner of the Appalachian Forest.

He is then knocked unconscious by a mysterious antagonist who swings a rusty shovel into the back of his head, and is captured and set upon a "gang of sadistic killers".^[3] The player then must fight for survival by using various melee weapons, such as box cutters and hammers, to defend himself against the killers, and uses a camera to document the violence, while also unveiling mysterious cult activities.^[4]

On July 21, 2023, the game was announced on Steam, along with screenshots from the game.^[3] The pre-release gameplay trailer was released on August 28, 2024, with the demo of game being released on October 11 of that year.^[5] The full game was officially released on Steam on January 23, 2025.^[6]

Dominic Tarason of PC Gamer says Butcher's Creek is "the sort of short, low-fi and pointedly horrible experience that [Szymanski] is increasingly known for." Tarason also states that the "horror adventures of movie length or less" are "long enough to get under your skin and have you turning them over in your head for a while."^[7] Sean Shuman of Horror Geek Life rated the game with 3.5 out of 5 stars, saying that while it "may not have met all my (admittedly unfair) expectations", he admits that "it’ll remind me that there’s still a devoted audience for the kind of edgy and unpleasant terror seemingly left behind in the 2000s."^[4]

Artemis Octavio of SuperJump highly praised the game, saying the "accomplishment" of Butcher's Creek is "in its portrayal of violence, it went all-in on the spectacle, took it to its most ridiculous extremes, and delivered one of the most palatable ultra-violence simulators ever as a result."^[8] Chris Plante of Polygon praises Szymanski for how he "created something intentionally anachronistic as a piece of art, a throwback to when games existed as much to entertain as to provoke the ire of institutions, whether they be the government, retailers, or arts publications."^[9]