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October has been filled with the glow of the bright pumpkin-colored “Hunter’s Moon” and a series of tricks, treats, and terrors. What would be better than to enhance the mood with more hands-on horror and goriness?
For fans of blood and gore, but want something more interactive than Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Terrifier, you might be wanting a lineup of video games to play as the days toward Halloween dwindles away. Developed and published by Feardemic and Harvester games, Burnhouse Lane, a “spiritual sequel” to The Cat Lady, is sure to pique some interest. Burnhouse Lane is a survival action-adventure gamed filled with spooky puzzles, gory scenes, and a choose your own adventure-style narrative.
The game can be played on steam, PC, Nintendo Switch, PS4 and PS5, Xbox One, and the Xbox Series X/S.
Hospice in Hell
Play as Angie Weather, an agency nurse suffering from terminal cancer, on the verge of passing. Her partner had passed away from the same fate some time ago. They had always wanted to travel to Japan together, so Angie takes on her final job to care after George, an elder who lives on a tucked away farm, hoping to earn enough money to travel before her life ends. Players will oscillate between farm life with George and his community neighbors like sheep herder Ciaran, to a seemingly phantasmagoric town called “Burnhouse Lane.” The latter is essentially a purgatory for “sick” people.
The story is filled with antonymous themes of evil and good; of life and death; and of hope and suffering. There are seven chapters in the game, each featuring a somewhat digressive plotline, though all filled with somberness and Angie’s goal of “winning her life back.”
Having elements of choose your own adventure, players will be able to select different dialogue choices. You can play nice, force information out of others with “Mr. Gray’s charge” ability, or remain apathetic towards the universe’s dilemmas. Depending on what you choose, there will be branching additions or submissions from the narrative and an ultimate one of three endings.
The seven deadly chapters
Burnhouse Lane incorporates several styles of gameplay, including solving puzzles (there are five major ones to solve in order to complete the game), as well as instances of stealth-based combat, aiming and shooting a gun, mild platforming, but majorly the game is a point-and-click. It is a wide variety, but not to the point where the game is not sure of what it wants to be. The genres work together coherently and smoothly.
However, the mechanics feel quite sluggish. Playing as Angie feels . . . slow, as if there is a sort of horizontal gravity working against the player. Toggling through the inventory is also slow and clunky. Even when a certain scene emits a sense of urgency, pulling up the inventory destroys all semblance of that feeling.
To save the game, Angie will need to smoke a cigarette at a nearby ashtray. They appear frequently, but if you happen to miss it or just not save the game for a while, Burnhouse Lane can be rather boring to repeat. The game segments are not re-playable for enjoyment reasons. Once the puzzle is solved, there’s not more to it. Unless you want to restart and go through different dialogue options for alternate endings, Burnhouse Lane is a slog to get through all over again.
A tale of gore and grim
Burnhouse Lane‘s art style is bizarrely fascinating. The game features a visual mix of hand-drawn imagery and realistic cut-and-paste photos, giving off an eerie, strange, and satisfying surrealism. There are tons of blatant gore as well.
The game is fully voice-acted, and it sounds pretty natural. While the voiced dialogue can slow down the game, it adds more realism and immersion into the setting. The sound design was lead by micAmic and others. The music does not particularly stand out, but it will certainly give players the creeps. It is “atmospheric” to say the least.
Trapped in purgatory
There is a content warning for this title. Burnhouse Lane includes a myriad of sensitive topics ranging from violence, homicide, dementia, overindulgence, terminal illness, to suicide. It is very much not for the faint of heart.
A big issue I have with the game is that the fantastical elements do not seem to serve as a symbol for anything specifically. Each chapter has its own different story and set of characters for the most part, varying in quality. Some chapters are thought-provoking tear-jerkers, while others are kind of lazy and heavily tropey. Playing as a cancer victim hardly serves much purpose. Angie attends to George for money, and she is able to enter Burnhouse Lane due to her terminal illness. Her ultimate goal is to complete five huge tasks to mystically overcome her fated death . . . which feels almost tone deaf. There is no “magical cure” to cancer, and maybe this would not be so uncomfortable if these tasks had any allusion to Angie’s actual struggles.
Playing as a lonely, diseased, suicidal woman is intense for no clear reason, especially since all the other characters come with their own onslaught of issues. Burnhouse Lane feels like it is trying too hard to be dark and deep. It would make more sense if the storyline reflected Angie Weather’s life and problems, specifically her cancer . . . but it just doesn’t. The plotlines instead center around the typical “kill the bad guy” and emphasize the grotesqueness of fatness to an almost offensive degree.
Final thoughts
I will say that Burnhouse Lane kickstarted the spooky season for me, and I did enjoy the peculiar cast of characters, the creepy art direction, and the couple of interesting stories like the “Bloody Mary” chapter and all the interactions with Jenny. But, there were also chapters like “The Little Lamb Eats the Wolf,” which was insanely stereotypical and shallow. Pastor Rob is a psychopathic, sadistic serial predator that Angie (of all people) needs to exterminate. Oh, okay.
There are three endings, one of which is the “golden” ending. I am unsure as to why this is considered the best outcome. Without spoiling, the golden ending feels unfulfilling and hamfisted. There are bittersweet and realistic moments between characters but overall it just did not feel right. It almost undermines the deep struggles of terminal cancer and the face of death, in my opinion.
Personally, I am not too attached to Burnhouse Lane. The chapters do not flow together well, the gameplay is sluggish, and the motifs are overly off-putting. However, the visual design is something to behold and the voice-acting is a great touch. The characters are dynamic and ever-evolving and the atmosphere will certainly get players into a dark, Halloween-ready mood.
