When I was in my early 20s and broke, attending university, I took the only job I could find: Subway. Much of DESTROYER BURGER is directly based on that experience, though I should probably specify that that place was unnaturally clean for a fast food place. The strange customers, the front desk/kitchen division, and soul-crushing night shifts are all completely true to life, however.

Much of DESTROYER BURGER's general feel and delivery relies on a feeling of normalcy. Nothing that happens in the game is odd for the occupants of that universe. That's one thing I've grown increasingly to hate in contemporary Hollywood, especially Marvel movies: those characters feel out of place since they seem to be completely aware of the absurdity around them. “Well, that just happened.” No one in DESTROYER BURGER ever notices anything. Nobody ever becomes a better person.

Though the game takes place exclusively around a fast-food restaurant, it's important to note much of its satire targets late-stage capitalism and corporate hypocrisy in general. The restaurant chain itself is obsessed with death and harming life, heavily implied by the name of its products: the titular Destroyer burger, the combo Chicken Extinction, and the staple side dish Heartstopper Fries, and countless others. Just like real-world large corporations, DESTROYER BURGER is only concerned with profit, but unlike most companies, they actively revel in the death and destruction they cause. In that way, they are akin to the legendary Heart Attack Grill.

As funny and ironic as it feels to me now, DESTROYER BURGER was originally conceived as a hastily done video game we were supposed to have finished within two weekends' worth of work. Five years later, it didn't quite pan out that way. Originally, the gameplay concept was “Papers, Please where you serve multiple people instead of just one”. But it doesn't really bear much resemblance to that now.

In DESTROYER BURGER, you always have a shift or two, working the front desk and/or the kitchen. At the front desk, you directly interact with customers. In the kitchen, you primarily assemble burgers. The chief difference between the two is that in the desk you are always multi-tasking, whereas in the kitchen you focus on following recipes and building up those burger stocks. As one might expect, both of these become more complicated as the game continues. There will be special conditions, complicated combos, more advanced products and even bosses during the course of the game. So far we have four different campaigns in the game, and there might be more if we have time to implement them.

Another big part of the gameplay is the metagame: the free time. Just like in every video game ever made after the 2010s, there is a kind of skill tree: the Perky Business app. This feature was specifically designed to allow the player to make parts of the game easier that they disliked. A concrete example: you find yourself always running out of Heartstopper Fries. So you pick Supreme Packing Fist, which makes each fries batch last longer. That's just one of the 37 perks available. And that's not even getting into the furniture, drugs and cars you can buy, all for that sweet, sweet rush of dopamine that can take you through the day. Well, at least to the next day.

These challenges are seemingly never-ending. New products, new special conditions and harder shifts keep mounting up. Working in fast food also accrues a constant existential debt that must be paid, whether through ibuprofen, alcohol or affordable crappy Norwegian furniture.

Oh boy, so many. The terrible quality of the food - mostly the fact that nearly all of it is frozen and just quickly re-heated for your ostensible enjoyment - is evident everywhere. The DESTROYER BURGER corporation claims to treasure its employees and customers, but both are treated with open disdain, even outright hostility. Fast food advertisements also often feature very attractive, successful people, who you know would never eat at a place like this unless you gave them millions of dollars. Britney Spears, Kendall Jenner and Michael Jordan come to mind, just to name a few.

Funnily enough, the DESTROYER BURGER restaurant chain has a pretty effective and memorable branding scheme of its own. The red & yellow colors are everywhere, and you will come across the official slogan - “Destroy Your Day!” - until it is permanently imprinted in your frontal lobe. Destructo himself is also the quintessential fast food mascot: mysterious, has a unique look, and is seemingly everywhere you least expect him. One of my favorite commercials in the game is one supposedly from the 50s that implies that vegetarians are not real men. For some reason, I find these kinds of jokes really funny. Full disclaimer: I've been a vegetarian for nearly two decades. The 1950s and its boring and restrictive hypernormativity continue to be ripe grounds for satire, as well. Someone might want to tell that to Bethesda when they next work on the latest Fallout game, maybe this time around they will look up the word “satire”. By the next title, they might even grasp it.

There is a certain balance of terror. Sometimes I've rejected some ideas because they simply feel wrong for the universe. There is now a kind of established lore in the game, as it's been in development for so long. The most important thing is that no one within that world can see the absurdity of it. Once you have characters that become self-aware in that sense, that IP is ruined. It happened to the Simpsons and South Park, and many others. Once the only place where you can go is self-awareness of your own formula, it is time to stop, even if they're willing to give you the kind of money to reconstruct Casa Bonita and/or recruit and train a small personal army to crush your enemies.

It's also very important to me that not even I am completely sure at some times what is going on in the universe of DESTROYER BURGER. I'm quite confident that this is how Monty Python operated as well. They couldn't possibly tell you what the funniest joke in the world was. The fact is, they didn't know, and that wasn't the point. The point was the absurdity of that entire concept of there being the funniest joke in the world and its potential uses. It's meant to baffle you if you attempt some kind of deep analysis. And let me tell you, I have some experience with deep literary analysis - I have a master's degree in literary theory. My thesis examined a Chris Ware comic book - Building Stories - through a feminist lens. A completely unrelated fact is that I had trouble finding work after graduation.

I generally believe that it's okay to make fun of anything. I wouldn't go for personal insults unless a person is a highly public and powerful figure. For some people, I feel no empathy at all, but this group of people is highly select: bastards who have hurt thousands or even millions of people with their selfish and outrageously evil actions, like Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin. That being said, I also mock plenty of other celebrities but in a far less mean-spirited fashion.

I think the goal of humor is to be actually funny. Shocking, I know. I think it's perfectly okay (and even desirable) to also make statements with your comedy, but even when making those statements, you must be funny. So sometimes I have cut things from the game that say something I want to say since they are unfunny. You can clearly see this editorial process fail in some of the later seasons of South Park. They become whiny and preachy, more concerned with their supposed moral high ground than their actual job: being funny. I have also made the conscious decision to avoid making jokes about trans people in this game. Not because I think there's necessarily anything wrong with making trans jokes, but because I do not want to be associated with people who make those jokes. Many who do are either terrible right-wing comics who attempt to disguise their lack of talent by mocking a group that gets easy laughs for them, or they are former masters of the craft who declined to the point where they can no longer make actually profound statements. Dave Chappelle comes to mind, a ground-breaking master who fell off the deep end and brought out fascist man-baby Elon Musk at the end of one of his shows. They not like us, they not like us, they not like us.

Yes.

So far it's been quite positive. A few bugs have sprung up, a few balance issues have been discovered, and there have been some ideas on how to take the game further. Right now the game is essentially completed, but lacking polish. So this kind of feedback is very much expected. Since most of our time has been spent implementing features, refining the presentation and adding content, this kind of player feedback is invaluable.

One person described the game as addictive, another complimented the metagame system of free time and another said he found it legitimately funny (the greatest of praise coming from a stoic Finnish person). Let me be very clear: this game is still a work in progress. It would be very odd if anyone considered it perfect at this point. But it is nearing completion, and our testers have recognized that it is in a very complete state already.

Honestly, I do not. I wouldn't go so far as to say that people's opinions wouldn't be impacted by what they experience, but I am not so full of myself - and let me tell you, I am plenty full of myself - that I would think playing this game is some kind of religious experience. Well, maybe the experience of becoming disillusioned with your religion at times. But at the core, I don't think the game tells you anything you don't already know. Everyone knows that fast food is bad for you, everyone knows large corporations despise you, and nobody wants to work a McJob. These are not revelations.

I don't think DESTROYER BURGER honestly is shocking or political enough to strike that kind of deep change in a person. But hey, prove me wrong! It's meant to be a silly, fun little game. In the end, I would never describe it as a serious political statement. Well, maybe an unserious political statement.