There’s an unusual number of horror cooking games, and a non-insignificant number are about turning people into food. Neat. Count me in.

For Meat Grinder, the food of the day is hot dogs. You can hide a lot in a hot dog, so it makes sense that human would fit right in. After all, hot dogs are filled with what is essentially the garbage parts of the carcass, and humans are just pure garbage. Let’s get on with the review!

HOW THE SAUSAGE IS MADE

I love it when a game introduces itself with a ride in a vehicle. Half-Life famously had the monorail sequence, Meat Grinder sits you in a bus going through the countryside. It’s nice. Even when a creepy guy starts talking to you.

Upon reaching your newly purchased restaurant, your butcher abruptly jacks up the price of meat, which means your margins will be sliced thin. The aforementioned creepy guy – a man with a penchant for teleporting – has an idea for you: go to the graveyard, dig up a dude, and turn him into meat filling. Who knows how long they’ve been buried, and they’ve certainly been embalmed, but whatever. Throw some secret spices in there and no one will know. Cooking it kills the bacteria and parasites, right? It’ll be fine.

So, I’m generally okay with turning virtual people into food. Whatever. They’re all going to feed the virtual worms and virtual soil anyway. It seems odd that the player character has absolutely no qualms. You have the ability to show some trepidation through dialogue choices, but there’s heavy-handed insinuations that your virtual self has experience in butchering people. But, anyway, we’ll get to that.

CUTTING BOARDS AND HANGING HOOKS

The game itself is rather predictable. You grind meat into hot dogs, grill them, throw them on buns, maybe add sauce, or perhaps the person want fries, and you serve them. There are a lot of tasks for you to do at the grill, but weirdly, I don’t think there’s actually any challenge. I never saw a customer lose patience, and there isn’t a day/night cycle asking you to fit in as many orders as you can before the day is done. You can just take your time.

Likewise, running the restaurant is straightforward. You have to sweep and pick up trash, or people will complain, but, like, they’ll just wait there while you do it. That’s appropriate, since you can only carry one item at a time, and each piece of trash counts as one item. There aren’t many restaurant upgrades, you can’t customize anything aside from the establishment’s name, and there are few ways to increase profit.

Which would be fine if the focus was on the narrative. As much as I enjoy flinging virtual meat, I get it when it’s just a device to move a story along. Unfortunately, Meat Grinder’s narrative is horrendous. And it’s not horrendous in a nonsensical way. It doesn’t try to tell a unique story that gets lost along the way. It’s horrendous because it takes the most obvious approach and goes directly for it.

DON’T LOOK DOWN, SHOVE IT IN YOUR MOUTH

It’s really disorienting, I actually had no idea that it was going to suddenly end. I want to talk about exactly what I mean, so I’m going to spoil some stuff. Here we go.

Spoiler alert.

After a few nights of the creepy guy showing up, you wake up one evening and there’s empty bottles of “schizophrenia medication” on a nearby table. So… Okay…

You’re then introduced to a game mechanic where you can make bespoke sauces out of strange ingredients found around town. Cool, I guess. At this point, I’ve run out of graves to dig up, and I can’t figure out how to open the second gate in the graveyard. I had expected that, eventually, the teleporting guy will fork over the key.

That doesn’t happen; no key is forthcoming. Instead, you wake up, like, the next evening and there are newspaper articles littered around that heavily suggest that the creepy guy is the ghost of your character’s dad, who they killed and butchered. They also dug up their child’s grave and were arrested. They went to a psychiatric hospital, but escaped when it burnt down.

So, ignoring the use of a real mental illness as the sole way of explaining a character’s dark past and present actions, there are a tonne of things that don’t make sense. Giving the game credit, you’re maybe intended to just let it slide with the explanation that it’s all psychosis; that the character’s perceptions aren’t accurate. And that’s just plot plaster. Like, the whole plot is shortcuts. It’s all just the garbage parts of the carcass.

And then the credits roll. Seriously. Expository newspaper articles and then credits.

THE WORMS AND TREES

This wouldn’t be so bad if the narrative was merely intended to function as a tutorial, but the gameplay is too shallow to work as the core of the experience. You can only upgrade so far, so, rather quickly, money is just made for its own sake. You get a drink machine and a deep fryer, and then you’ve essentially hit the zenith. It doesn’t lead anywhere further.

What I find amusing is that the prices of items – the economy – makes it so that using non-human meat is completely viable. You could just not dig up graves. A bit of creative design would have greatly enhanced things. Like, for example, if keeping things afloat with regular meat was incredibly difficult, but human meat gradually caused you to lose your grip on reality. So, you have to serve as many customers as possible as efficiently as can be done in order to prevent a descent into full madness. That would be interesting, but…

MYSTERY MEAT

I hate to call any game “lazy,” but it really feels like Meat Grinder does the barest minimum. It does the barest minimum well enough, but I’d rather play an ambitious game that fails than a game that fails because it isn’t ambitious. There’s so much you could do with this foundation, and none of it is attempted.

Meat Grinder’s gameplay isn’t enough to support the narrative, and the narrative isn’t enough to support the gameplay. The unfortunate part is that, with a little effort, either would be fine enough to stand on their own. And it isn’t difficult to imagine either being more than fine. Turning people into hot dogs is always a good time, but doing that, tacking on a transparent-thin story, and then calling it a day, isn’t appetizing. There’s very little meat on this bun. For that matter, there’s very little bun.

3/10

This review was conducted using a pre-release Steam version of the game. It was provided by the developer’s PR.