Video Game / Happy's Humble Burger Farm

Serve customers and maintain the Happy's Humble Burger Farm restaurant alone on the overnight.

Happy's Humble Burger Farm is a survival horror/simulation game developed by Scythe Dev Team and published by tinyBuild and released on December 3, 2021 for Steam and game consoles. It is the sequel to Happy's Humble Burger Barn, which was released on April 1, 2020, but is effectively an expanded remake of the first game's concept, while also tying into the greater universe shared by Scythe Dev Team's games.

In the game, the player has just been hired as the night-shift manager at Happy's Humble Burger Farm, a fast-food restaurant in the middle of a haunted wood. The player must work to take orders, prepare and cook the food, and then serve it. If the player messes up too much, the creatures that haunt the woods will enter the restaurant and begin to haunt it, and the player must find a way to drive the creatures away. At the end of their shift every day, the player must also find a way to leave the restaurant and get home safely.

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Happy's Humble Burger Farm contains examples of:

• Action Bomb: AI Bombers will slowly lurch towards you and explode if they get close enough. They will knock away any ingredients you have cooking at a prep station or grill.
• Admiring the Abomination: Dr. Grimm became fascinated with the monstrous mascots and ordered his researchers to contain and study them. Predictably, it leads to the Obscura staff getting massacred.
• Alternate History: Earth is known as Scythe in the game, and it has different countries that became a single world government.
• Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: Attack of the 50-foot undead mascots.
• Augmented Reality: New Elysium City is revealed to be this. It is an underground, large scale replica of a city with some elements and details being provided by the compliance chip implanted into the skulls of test subjects. Once the player character manages to fry his own chip, the virtual elements begin to erode or disappear completely, revealing that the buildings' interiors are just plain sets made out of wood.
• Back from the Dead: The restaurant's previous mascots are haunting the Burger Farm at night and will stop at nothing to attack the player if they get angry.
• Benevolent A.I.: Vic, a disembodied head of a mass produced robot that you discover in a hidden room. He aids the player through their attempt to escape the simulation, providing them with exposition and hints about where to go next or what to do, some information about the company behind all the going-ons and reveals that he was brought to life by another human who also sought the means to escape. Once the entire simulation begins to fall apart, Vic shuts down, but not before giving some parting words to the player.
• Berserk Button: Asset Joy thinks of herself as the boss of the restaurant, and unfortunately for the player, she's a pretty abusive one who gets extremely angry if employees don't take their job seriously. Be late for work and she'll drag you there, and screw up during a shift will have her chase you with murderous intent.
• Big Bad: The titular Happy is the main antagonist of the game, as the mascot of the restaurant the player works for.
• Bittersweet Ending: The protagonist regains his memories as Intrepid Reporter Ryder and escapes, ready to tell the world what Obscura Biotech has been doing, but Asset Joy has also escaped and is likely to be a menace upon the world.
• Burger Fool: Played for Horror. You're a poor wage slaving in a run-down fast-food restaurant haunted by Eldritch Abominations... and the hourly wage sucks.
• Cerebus Syndrome: The in-universe Happy the Humble Heifer cartoon started off as just a regular Saturday-morning kids' show, bringing the population a bit of much needed levity after the Scythean War. Until series creator Tex decided to end the series by having the main antagonist gruesomely butcher Happy and her friends, seemingly following the wishes of his son Chuck, who was set to take over the series after his retirement. Chuck then proceeded to make his own reboot of the show as dark and experimental as possible, with the target audience being teens and adults rather than children, and yet it might still be a hit with children that see the deeper meaning.
• Cloudcuckoolander: Toe, the protagonist's next-door neighbor and co-worker is this with a dash of Manchild. He runs to and from work with his arms in front as if he's driving a car, cannot form even simple words beyond mumbling, and his apartment is full of Burger Farm collectibles and big cardboard cutouts of BF mascots. If you listen to the tape in his apartment, it's revealed that he wasn't always like this. Vic explains that Obscura Biotech's compliance chip that was surgically implanted in him was the culprit, as it causes degradation of an individual's mental faculties over time.
• Continuity Nod: The original game's Burger Barn restaurant/testing chamber can be reached in exploration of the sewers, and features prominently in the flashback to the player's capture by Obscura.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: As stated above, Dr. Grimm as the CEO of Paragon Inc. falls straight into this. He has set his sights on turning the entire world into an ultra-capitalist, borderline fascist "utopia" where people are conditioned through Augmented Reality to become obedient consumers, and world governments would answer to him.
• Eldritch Abomination: The monstrous mascots turn out to be primordial creatures from deep within the planet awakened by the nuke dropped on Durri-Jongo. They took over the animatronics from darker Chuck-era episodes of the Happy cartoon specifically to strike fear into their prey.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Even the amoral Obscura researchers knew that trying to contain the mascot monsters was a very bad idea. Unfortunately, they couldn't exactly refuse as the order to contain them came from Dr. Grimm himself.
• Evil, Inc.: Paragon Inc., or more precisely Obscura Biotech, falls straight into this trope; some of the posters and notes found through the game reveal that their end goal is to create a corporate monopoly where "free thought" becomes "taxed thought", world governments would answer directly to them, and working class is conditioned into complacency and obedience towards their corporate masters. And then there's the fact they were kidnapping tourists to be used in experiments to create previously mentioned "capitalist utopia" by implanting compliance chips into their heads (which would eventually erode their mental faculties, as visible by the condition of the protagonist's coworker), dabbled in horrific biological experiments in order to create beings called "Assets" (a fusion of organism and the Burger Farm mascots) …even their own staff wasn't safe. One of the tapes found in the game reveals that any staff members killed by one of these "Assets" had all records of their employment at Obscura wiped clean as if they never existed, and not even their families were informed of their demise. The staff was also heavily regulated and monitored, being forbidden from discussing certain topics or even consuming specific media.
• Face Death with Dignity: Vic takes his death pretty well near the final stretch of the game. He calmly states that he's about to shut down as if he were talking about needing a quick nap, emphasizing that he may not wake up and says his goodbyes to the player.
• Foreshadowing: Early on in the game during standard daily routine of making orders for the customers at Burger Farm, on some occasions the player will be experiencing very brief visual glitches and distortions. This is because almost everything around the player is Augmented Reality projected into their mind via a compliance chip. Once said chip is fried near the endgame, all that's left are props made out of wood.
• Greater-Scope Villain: Dr. Zaine Grimm, CEO of Paragon Inc. While the player never meets him face to face, he's often mentioned in recordings, notes and newspaper articles and is revealed to have masterminded everything that led to the events of the game; kidnapping of tourists to be used as test subjects for simulation of his capitalist utopia, bio-engineering that created the deadly living mascots of Burger Farm, and dropping the nuke on Durri-Jongo island.
• Jumping Off the Slippery Slope: There are multiple people who claim that Dr. Grimm was once a good man who only wanted to separate mankind from their violent inclinations to prevent further wars from breaking out on Scythe. Unfortunately, partnering up with Obscura Biotech to further his own research into human conditioning caused his ethics to steadily decline until his goals changed from freeing the world of conflict to controlling the masses.
• Made of Explodium: The Burger Bomb is made by combining a clock with a beef burger patty. Also if you pick up the Roomba it inexplicably explodes if you try to put it back down on the ground.
• Motor Mouth: Vic is quite chatty for a disembodied robot head, and almost never shuts up if you stay in his room to listen his ramblings. He finally shuts down and dies once the entire simulation begins falling apart, but not before saying goodbye to the player and asking that they keep him in their memories.
• Mundane Made Awesome: Not much can make cooking fast food more awesome than by gathering the ingredients while being rushed down by murderous robots and abominations and turning the tables by poisoning the beasts with toxic burgers.
• Mythology Gag: Early demos of the game had a drivable car that the player could use to get to work and around the city, much like the original Burger Barn game. Later removed during said demo releases for various reasons, references to it remain in some ingame documents, with references made for its ability to smash the Burger Farm's windows (an antic common in several YouTuber playthroughs of the demo)
• Named After Someone Famous: The producers of the Happy's cartoon are named Tex and Chuck, after the famous Looney Tunes directors Tex Avery and Chuck Jones.
• Nuke 'em: The fate of the native inhabitants of Durri-Jongo. After they rebelled against Paragon's exploitation of their land, Dr. Grimm saw it fit to order a nuke be dropped onto the island to silence them. The nuke wound up awakening something much worse deep within the planet.
• Red Herring: One of the cassette tapes talks about a man named Maverick Cooper and while there's some hints that he could be E42's true identity. It's ultimately revealed in the finale that E42 isn't acually Maverick, but a friend of his named Ryder Heitzman.
• Shout-Out: Plenty.
  • Many of the loading screen messages are references to memes from other games.
    The burger is a lie.
    You were almost a Happy sandwich.
    Hey! Cook! Listen!
    Praise the bun!
    I used to be a chef like you, until I took a burger to the knee.
    The right ingredient on the wrong patty can make all the difference in the sandwich.
    COWS: ALL YOUR BURGER ARE BELONG TO US.
    Petey used patty bomb...it's super effective!
  • The door to Toe's room says, "Don't open. Sleep inside"
  • Interacting with the mascots in the lobby will get them to say quotes, many of which are also references.
    Petey: I can't believe the farmer's son used to call me "Pig Chungus". What a dork!
    Petey: I don't care what you wild boars say. You said, "That'll do pig" in a condescending tone! Don't patronize me!
    Petey: This whole, "All animals are equal but some are more equal" nonsense sounds like total bullcrap to me!
    Sammy: It's time to kick fin, and chew zooplankton, and I'm all outta zooplankton / Hail to the fish, baby!^note Yes, Sammy is voiced by Jon St. John, so these lines were completely made for him.
    Sammy: "Take me to the river! Drop me in the water! Y'know?
• Sinister Scythe: Asset Farmer carries around a big bloody sickle, one of the cassette tapes mentions how he decapitated three guards in one swing.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Sandwich: Just consider ALL that food you have to cook and ALL those beverages you have to pour while working at Happy's. It's all being purchased by a mob of automatons who aren't even human enough to actually consume any of it.
• Too Hungry to Be Polite: The monsters really wolf down their food once they get it and it's been properly prepared.
• Torso with a View: After you're done feeding Asset Peter, the three rotten burgers you fed him cause his stomach to suddenly blow up, revealing a massive hole you can walk through to see a room behind him.
• Weaksauce Weakness: The assets are Eldritch Abominations that have massive kill counts of scientists and trained soldiers, but a few of these assets can be beaten by a hypnotized fast food employee cooking and feeding them fast food. Special mentions to Asset Peter, who is fed three rotten burgers, which blows a massive hole in his stomach.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Dr. Grimm started out as this, looking into simulation research and behavioral conditioning in order to keep another war from breaking out on Scythe. Key word is started out. His intentions became more sinister and less benevolent after partnering with Obscura Biotech.
• Workplace Horror: The core gameplay involves you working at the Burger Farm and serving up customers. Infractions on the job runs the risk of Asset Joy chasing you around the workplace trying to turn you into tomorrow's meat product.

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