Slayaway Camp: Butcher's Cut

This is another recent sale acquisition where I bought the game for easy challenge points initially but it then came up as my randomly selected ‘next to play’ game.

Slayaway Camp is a puzzle game with a funny twist. You are a killer, generally based on movies such as Jason and Halloween, and you have to navigate through maps, killing people and then finding the exit. Most puzzles have a set amount of moves you can use to kill the victims and escape so while, it’s a slasher in appearance, it’s a pure puzzle game at heart.

You essentially play through a series of these slasher puzzles to unlock the next set of puzzles. Once you complete these, you open the next one for a total of eight sets of puzzles. It’s quite forgiving here as to unlock the next set, you only have to complete the last puzzle in the set. Some of the puzzles are ridiculously difficult and take a lot of trial and error to resolve. Then they throw cats into the equation which makes it harder as you have to kill the targets but not the cats – because everyone loves cats.

In addition to the puzzles, there are a few mini games that unlock too. I only played one of these as only one had achievements tied to it but more on that later.

Looks wise, it’s gone for a Minecraft style appearance with block characters in appearance and animation. There’s nothing wrong with this but if they wanted to have made a higher certificate game, they could have made it more realistic and therefore more gruesome.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 50 Achievements

Back up to the traditional 50 achievements for this one. As I mentioned above, some of the puzzles are really complicated and can result in getting into a position where you can’t actually finish them. There are several guides online to get through the tougher ones, including video and text which greatly help if you get stuck.

Achievements wise you don’t actually need to complete a whole lot of puzzles to get all of them. Simply completing the last puzzle in each set will get you an achievement for each. There are also achievements earned along the way for killing victims in certain ways. None of these are secret so its case of working out which level you get your specific death scenes in and killing away.

Outside of what you can do in the main game are grindy achievements, of which there are three. Throughout the levels, there are cops who you don’t need to kill but you can. There’s an achievement for killing 30 of them and this can be done in one of the deleted scenes where two cops appear. This is small grind compared to the victims who you need to kill 666 of for two achievements – there’s another one for 100 victims. This will obviously take some time but there is another deleted scene where you can kill four victims in a few seconds so it’s not as grindy as some other games.

The hardest achievement to get is for playing one of the mini games called Faces of Killed 3. This game involves pressing A when a fast-moving cursor moves into a kill zone and you have to do this 25 times in a row. At the beginning it’s easy as the kill zone is large but it gets progressively smaller until at the end, it’s a matter of pressing A when you think the cursor will be in the kill zone as by the time you see it enter, it’ll be too late. I always took this approach and continuously fell short of the target so maybe it’s just me. It took me about an hour and a half of playing to get this achievement – almost as long as it took me to grind out the victim kills.

While you’ve been doing all of the above, you will have been amassing coins to spend in the in-game shop. Incidentally, the fact it took me such a long time to clear Faces of Killed 3, meant that I had a lot of coins. There are several things in the shop to buy that will unlock achievements and there are two ways to go about this. The first is to play the game a lot and gather loads of coins. The second is to abuse cloud saves to unlock achievements, delete the console save, relaunch the game and buy another item. I got bored of playing Faces of Killed 3 when I was 6,000 coins short of the target so I abused the save system to get these last three items. Having to have done that for all of them would have been more soul destroying than playing the game though.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Slayaway Camp: Butcher’s Cut is a fun little puzzle game for a single playthrough. The puzzles don’t have much replay value and it suffers from the same trial and error-based approach that most puzzle games suffer from. The killer style was a unique twist which was both funny and enjoyable.

I would recommend it to fans of the puzzle genre but it’s overpriced at £13.59 so it’s most definitely sale material.