A fast-food shift that goes wrong
Happy's Humble Burger Cult is a first-person cooking horror game from Scythe Dev Team, and it's a direct successor to Happy's Humble Burger Farm. You and up to three friends get hired by the Paragon Corporation to take part in an experiment, which in practice means running a fast-food restaurant: grill burgers, fry sides, pour drinks, work the register, pack up the orders and keep the customers satisfied. Every shift is timed and comes with a quota you need to hit. The cooking itself is physics-based, so the kitchen stays busy and messy even before anything supernatural happens.
Playing it with your crew
The game supports online co-op for 1 to 4 players, and the whole shift runs on cooperation. Someone has to work the grill, someone the register, someone the drinks and sides, and someone has to close up shop when it's time to go. Hitting the quota together is the whole point of the run, and splitting jobs efficiently is what separates a smooth evening from a backed-up counter. Across the game there are six restaurants, each with its own set of menu items, so the work changes as you move through them.
The mascot is hunting you
Each shift is a ticking clock, and the kitchen eventually loses. When the simulation collapses, Asset Joy breaks containment and starts hunting the crew. The team then has one chance to escape. There's a wrinkle on top of that: the game listens to your microphones. Saying the wrong word alerts Asset Joy to where you are, while saying a specific incantation warps the kitchen to your advantage. Part of the game is learning what you can safely say aloud and what you should never mention while she's loose.
Runs that differ from each other
More than 35 modifiers keep runs from feeling the same. Rush Hour floods you with extra customers, which means more money and more chaos. Profanity Policy punishes the team every time somebody swears on the mic. Midmaxxing scrambles the appliances' cooking temperatures. On top of the modifiers, there's character customization so your crew doesn't all look identical.
Making your money count
Cash you earn only matters if you get out alive with it. Once extracted, you can spend it on boosters, feed it into the ascension ritual to push the story forward, or gamble it on harder contracts for larger payouts. There's also a lobby area with mini-games to hang out in between shifts. The whole thing belongs to the Scythe Studios Universe and digs further into the Paragon Corporation's reality-warping simulation, so it pays to have played Happy's Humble Burger Farm, though this chapter stands on its own as a run to survive.