It’s been quite some time since Happy’s Humble Burger Farm was some cute little horror indie beta that was making the rounds on YouTube. After gaining traction with The Game Theorists, Markiplier, and more, Happy’s was picked up to be released by tinyBuild. Yes, that lovely publisher behind other strange games that the same channels love, like Hello Neighbor/Hello Guest, and Hello Puppet. Showing the true horror behind the fast food industry (okay, not really), Happy’s is an incredibly weird game, but that’s okay.

Happy’s Humble Burger Farm has changed a lot from when it was in beta, but not so much in terms of gameplay, graphics, or any of the noticeable traits. Honestly, if you simply looked at the beta, you would assume you were getting the exact same game. Instead, it’s much more akin to Hello Neighbor. The beta was a kick off point, but everything has changed. Remember how, in Hello Neighbor, the neighbor’s house was pretty basic, and then built up? Well that’s kind of what happened here as well.

To give a brief idea, you’re an employee of Happy’s Humble Burger Farm, a pretty simple fast food place that you’ll have nightmares about working in, as proven with the start of the game. Weird things happen in the restaurant, and around the city you live in. Working the night shift, you walk from your apartment to the restaurant for your night shift. There’s a bus, but that would be too convenient, and it would give you a reason to ignore the main bits of the story. Through the night, some weird things happen, lights turn off, doors open/close. Basically all you’re tasked to do is handle a few nightly chores and serve customers until the end of your shift. Simple enough.

Pretty quickly, things go wrong, though: you will have to fight a giant mutated pig thing, talk to disembodied heads, and deal with more horrors that apparently no one else sees throughout your shift. Weird shadow men that turn off your grill because they think it’s funny, and things that explode and send your patties flying. Pretty normal stuff. Basically, the idea is, this is a weird indie “horror” game that certainly doesn’t fall under scary though, not even the jump scares. It’s just insanely weird.

Being a TinyBuild game comes with certain standards, it seems. First off, the game definitely does not look good. Games like Undertale, Cuphead, and Celeste also fall under the banner of indie game, and obviously those games are not huge, high fidelity, AAA title level graphics like Horizon or Halo Infinite. Happy’s Humble Burger Farm, though, is simply not good looking. At all. It’s rough to look at, both in a technical and artistic standpoint. The character designs are not smooth at all, the cheeks and head are very pointy which just looks really weird.

There is minimal sound in Happy’s. Characters do not sound great, they don’t talk, they just make minimal noises, outside of the disembodied head. This disembodied head, for some damn reason, talks, but the quality of recording for the voice is absolutely not ideal. That said, it’s better than the groans and moans from other characters, where the gain is turned way too high and the microphones used were clearly peaking, and somehow no one noticed.

Long story short, Happy’s Humble Burger Farm is a very strange game that got weirder ever since its initial beta phase. It may have gotten weirder, but it simply didn’t get better. The visual quality is a mess, just simply does not look good. The audio quality is even worse, a huge lack of music and voice work, but what little of it is in here is awful; someone seems to have cranked things as much as they could have and thought that would just simply work. This game might have been hyped beyond belief by streamers, but this is one game you should avoid.

Graphics: 2.5 The graphics are rough. This essentially looks like the rough draft of a game in its alpha stage, not the final product.	Gameplay: 3.0 The game works, for the most part. It’s just simply not interesting or innovative. Complete a night, a new thing shows up to be annoying.
Sound: 1.5 “Ooooo” is pretty much the only noise characters make, outside of the disembodied head that has full dialogue. It’s a bit jarring to have no one to talk to, then someone throwing full pages of lore at you.	Fun Factor: 3.0 Happy’s isn’t broken. It’s just not interesting, not well built, and has no real intuitive reason to make you return to the game. There was minimal desire to go back and finish the story, it felt like a chore.
Final Verdict: 2.5

Happy’s Humble Burger Farm is available now on Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series S, Xbox Series X.

Reviewed on Xbox Series X.

A copy of Happy’s Humble Burger Farm was provided by the publisher.