Mad Murder’s Mystery Pie Shop

Mad Murder’s Mystery Pie Shop is a first-person horror shooter where players work in a sinister pie shop. The gameplay involves finding ingredients, throwing them into the oven to cook pies, and then serving these pies to the customers of Mad Murder’s establishment. Set in an unsettling dream world with additional levels, the game creates a tense atmosphere as players navigate this mysterious and potentially dangerous culinary environment.

Mad Murder’s Mystery Pie Shop: A Culinary Descent into Unreal Engine Horror

In the vast, often indistinguishable sea of indie horror titles that flood digital storefronts, a game emerges not with a whisper, but with the unsettling squelch of an unidentifiable ingredient being tossed into a oven. Mad Murder’s Mystery Pie Shop, a 2022 first-person shooter from the enigmatic Bry Guy Studios, is a bizarre and unsettling confection—a game that uses the mundane terror of service industry employment as a foundation for a surreal and combat-heavy nightmare. It is a title that defies easy categorization, a short, sharp shock of a game that has, against all odds, carved out a small but fervent cult following.

Development History & Context

The Vision of Bry Guy Studios

Bry Guy Studios presents itself as a classic one-person or micro-indie operation, a developer operating in the shadows of the gaming industry’s underbelly. The studio’s output, as evidenced by its other mentioned titles like BloodPit: Skelton II, suggests a fascination with low-poly aesthetics, surreal narratives, and high-concept action housed within janky but ambitious frameworks. Their vision appears to be one of pure, unadulterated concept execution, often prioritizing a compellingly weird idea over technical polish.

Technological Framework and Constraints

Crucially, Mad Murder’s Mystery Pie Shop was not built on a dated engine from its release year of 1998, but on the modern, powerful Unreal Engine 4, complete with the PhysX physics engine. This technological context is essential to understanding the game’s identity. It is not a product of technical limitation due to era-appropriate hardware, but a stylistic choice. The developer leveraged a high-end engine to create a very specific, lo-fi aesthetic, perhaps to enhance the game’s unsettling, dream-like (or nightmare-like) quality. The stated minimum requirements—an AMD FX-9830P processor and Radeon RX 460 graphics card—place it as a accessible title for lower-end modern PCs, a strategic move for a niche game seeking any audience it can find.

The 2022 Gaming Landscape

Released on April 11, 2022, the game entered a market saturated with indie horror. It was the era of viral Five Nights at Freddy’s clones and countless Slender Man descendants. Mad Murder’s genius, however, was in its pitch-perfect synthesis of two seemingly incompatible genres: the comfy management sim and the high-octane first-person shooter. It wasn’t just about hiding from monsters; it was about fulfilling customer orders while being attacked by them, a premise that tapped into the universal, Kafkaesque anxiety of trying to do your job under impossible pressure.

Narrative & Thematic Deep Dive

A Chilling Welcome to the Team

The narrative is delivered through a brilliantly sinister introductory blurb from the eponymous proprietor, Mr. Mad Murder. His greeting is a masterpiece of corporate doublespeak layered over palpable menace: “Welcome new employees!… My name is Mad! you can call me Mr. Murder (Shakes your hand professionally establishing a business relationship).” This immediately sets a tone of unsettling familiarity, where threats of “immediate termination” for “slacking off” carry a horrifyingly literal weight.

Plot: The Gruesome Loop

The player assumes the role of a new hire at this disquieting establishment. The objective is deceptively simple: locate the mysterious “ingredients” for Mr. Murder’s pies, cook them in the oven, and deliver the finished product to customers waiting outside a compound. However, the shop is a permeable hellscape. The stress of the job manifests physically, as “many employees get their minds infected during their shift durations.” This infection births “foul creatures” that now roam the premises, intent on stopping you. The core narrative is thus a cyclical, week-long struggle for survival and productivity, a commentary on the dehumanizing grind of service work where the protagonist’s own fractured psyche becomes the primary antagonist.

Themes: Capitalism, Cannibalism, and Madness

Beneath its violent gameplay lies a rich thematic tapestry:
* The Horror of Modern Employment: The game is a potent allegory for the crushing pressure of performative labor. The “small machine” that ensures speed is a panopticon-like tool of control, and “termination” is the ultimate failure state in a system that views workers as disposable.
* The Source of the Secret Recipe: The game’s mature content description—”Violence and Cannibalism”—heavily implies the horrifying truth about the pie ingredients. The employees are quite literally processing themselves and each other, a grim metaphor for how industries consume the very people that power them.
* Psychological Fragmentation: The “infected minds” of the employees giving form to monsters suggests that the horrors you battle are externalized manifestations of stress, anxiety, and burnout. You aren’t just fighting for your job; you’re fighting against your own unraveling sanity.

Gameplay Mechanics & Systems

The Core Loop: Bake or Be Baked

The gameplay is a frantic juggling act between two primary objectives:
1. The Management Simulator: Players must scavenge the environment for ingredients, which are likely items of a dubious nature found scattered around the compound. These must be collected and transported to an oven for baking, with a timer—either explicit or implied by impatient customers—constantly looming.
2. The First-Person Shooter: The scavenging and baking process is continuously interrupted by attacks from the “foul creatures.” The game demands players engage in combat, presumably with a variety of weapons, to clear paths, defend the kitchen area, or simply survive long enough to complete an order.

Innovation and Jank

This fusion is the game’s most innovative and defining feature. It creates a unique form of pressure where the mundane anxiety of a ticking clock is compounded by the visceral terror of a monster lunging from the shadows. The post-launch updates that added Steam Achievements and fixed a critical bug where the “game closes before reaching 7 days” indicate a developer attentive to delivering a complete, if short, experience. The mention of a “New Dream world Properly Integrated” in a September 2022 patch suggests an additional layer of surreal, psychological gameplay that was initially bugged, expanding the scope of the horror beyond the core pie-baking loop.

UI and Progression

Details on the user interface and character progression are sparse, but the premise suggests a minimalistic UI focused on objective markers (find ingredient X, deliver pie Y) and a combat HUD. Progression is likely linear and loop-based, with the goal being to simply survive all seven days of the work week, with the “dream world” acting as a separate, perhaps more narrative-driven, level.

World-Building, Art & Sound

Aesthetics of the Absurd

Built in Unreal Engine 4, the game’s world is a study in dissonance. One can imagine the clean, bright textures of a commercial kitchen clashing violently with the dark, bloody, and distorted visuals of the monster-infested compound and the surreal “dream world.” The use of a modern engine to create a purposefully jarring and low-poly look for the creatures contributes significantly to the uncanny valley effect, making them feel wrong and out of place.

Sound Design: The Symphony of Stress

While specific audio details are unavailable, the intended experience is clear. The soundscape would likely be a carefully crafted mix of:
* Mundane Sounds: The hum of industrial ovens, the ticking of a clock, the distant murmur of waiting customers.
* Horror Cues: Sudden, screeching stings when creatures appear, grotesque squelching and tearing sounds during combat, and a low, droning ambient soundtrack that fuels a sense of dread.
* Mr. Murder’s Voice: The potential for intermittent, garbled intercom messages from the owner would be a masterstroke of oppressive atmosphere, a constant reminder of the watching, judging presence of management.

Reception & Legacy

Cult Acclaim and Critical Obscurity

Upon its release, Mad Murder’s Mystery Pie Shop flew almost entirely under the radar of mainstream gaming press. It exists in a space dominated by user-driven platforms like Steam. There, it found its audience. With 12 user reviews on Steam, it holds a “Positive” rating, with a Steambase Player Score of 92/100. This indicates that those who did take a chance on this bizarre title were overwhelmingly pleased with their purchase. One early player on the Steam forums captured the spirit of its discovery perfectly: “I think I may be the first person to have found this game, it fascinates me, I need to play it.”

A Lasting Influence

The game’s legacy is not one of massive sales or industry awards, but of pure, uncompromising concept. It stands as a testament to the creative freedom of the digital distribution era, where a game about baking cannibalistic pies while fighting psychological monsters can not only exist but thrive in a small corner of the market. It presaged a minor trend of “horror job simulators” and remains a quintessential example of a “cult hit”—obscure, strange, and passionately loved by the few who understand its peculiar vision.

Conclusion

Mad Murder’s Mystery Pie Shop is not a game for everyone. It is short, undoubtedly rough around the edges, and operates on a wavelength of horror so specific it borders on absurdism. Yet, it is this fearless commitment to its own bizarre concept that makes it a noteworthy artifact in indie gaming history. It is a game that understands the inherent terror of a deadline and the visceral fear of a monster, and it melds them into a experience that is as stressful as it is darkly hilarious. It is a deliciously disturbing pie of a game—one made with questionable ingredients, baked under immense pressure, and served with a side of unforgettable, nightmare-fuel madness. For adventurers weary of conventional horror, it remains a hidden, gruesome treat waiting to be discovered.