Nightmare On Steam Street: Popcap Founder's Slayaway Camp Gets A Deluxe Edition
"adorable voxel murderer"
Slayaway Camp [official site] is a block-based, 80s slasher film-inspired puzzle-murder game from one of the guys who oversaw Popcap during its Peggle/Plants vs Zombies/Bookworm Adventures imperial phase. Popcap co-founder Jason Kapalka teamed up with Ido Yehieli, of the excellent micro-roguelike Cardinal Quest games, for this Vorhees'n'Myerslike starring an "adorable voxel murderer." They also recruited Mass Effect VO-man Mark Meer (no relation as far as I know, but if he says otherwise then I absolutely will not refuse it) to lend his Shepherdian tones to it.
Our Adam was very taken with the free version on Kongregate, and now it's just pitched up as a paid 'deluxe' edition on Steam, with ads and f2p frippery excised, better graphics and more gore. But how many killings does it have?
Slayaway Camp could be described as a casual puzzler wearing the torn and bleeding skin of the Manhunt games, but keeping things comical and cartoonish rather than actually abjectly horrifying. If you've ever had dark fantasies about pushing Minecraft-folk into woodchippers, here you go.
It stars a masked gentleman calling himself 'Skullface', who decides a lovely way to pass the time would be to slaughter holidaying teens across a couple of hundred 80s slasher flick-inspired levels.
You can still play the standard version on Kongregate for no pennies, but the Steam-based deluxe edition offers "extra skins, gore-packs, soundtrack, and the masked murderer’s poetry audiobook of 'die-kus'" in addition to graphics settings and a download if you want to chuck a few quid its way. It's 25% off, down to £4.43/$6.65 for the next five days.