Butcher's Creek

Spoilers ahead, you've been warned. Butcher's Creek does a lot more right than it does wrong, which is why I recommend it. The combat feels punchy and reactive. Despite its simplicity, it remains fun to engage in throughout the entirety of the game. The various areas you explore are crafted well with just the right amount of gore and grime for the setting. There's enough enemy types to keep you on your toes, and enough weapons to make slaughtering them interesting. Butcher's Creek, all in all, is an excellent experience all the way to the end. But that's just the thing. The game is really good --- until the end. The ending is abrupt; comes with zero climax and/or pomp and circumstance. I was hoping for a boss battle of sorts, or at least a challenging group of enemies, but it seems once you reach The Watcher, that's the end. You're shown a sequence of bright flashing lights and fractured jump cuts of what I can only presume is the aforementioned Watcher, and then bam. Credits. It isn't the wrong thing to do, but it isn't exactly something I appreciated or expected, especially considering you're given the strongest weapon in the game in the last five minutes to, well, use in the last five minutes. It outgrows its usefulness quite fast. This wouldn't bother me as much if The Watcher hadn't been hyped up so much previously through documents you can find and read. However, this wasn't big enough of a thing for me to leave a negative review, because this game is truly a good experience. My qualms are purely limited to artistic direction, and I have nothing bad to say about the core gameplay loop itself.