Squirrel Stapler

Developer: David Szymanski | Publisher: David Szymanski | Release Date: 11 September 2023 | Genre: Horror / Hunting Simulator | Website: N/A | Purchase: Steam

There are plenty of videogame premises that require several paragraphs to properly explain. Squirrel Stapler is not one of them. You are a lonely man living in a cabin in the woods with your beloved. Unfortunately, your beloved is a dismembered, rotting corpse nailed to the wall, and the flies have made her ugly. Fortunately, the protagonist has devised an entirely reasonable solution to this problem. Squirrels are beautiful, so he will hunt squirrels and staple their corpses onto hers until she becomes beautiful too. There is only one complication. Something in the forest has declared, “Thou shalt not staple squirrels.” Oh, and God is coming in five days.

Originally created by DUSK and Iron Lung developer David Szymanski for Dread X Collection 2, Squirrel Stapler was released separately in 2023 with additional content and quality-of-life improvements. The developer describes it as a horror hunting simulator satirising low-budget edutainment games, combining pitch-black humour with increasingly absurd horror.

It is also one of the creepiest games we have played with such a deliberately stupid premise. The basic structure could hardly be simpler. The game takes place across five days, each beginning at the cabin. You head into the surrounding forest with a bolt-action rifle, hunt the required number of squirrels, return home, staple them to your beloved, and go to sleep.

On the first day, you need five ordinary squirrels. From the second day onward, the daily quota expands to include five normal squirrels and one much larger squirrel. That is essentially the entire primary objective. There are no complicated puzzles, crafting systems, skill trees, or sprawling quest chains. You hunt squirrels and bring them home.

The actual hunting requires considerably more patience than simply walking through the forest shooting anything that moves. Running makes noise and can frighten squirrels before you see them, while crouching and hiding among vegetation makes it easier to approach them unnoticed. The rifle has a scope for longer shots, and sound is an important part of locating prey because squirrels can often be heard before they are spotted.

The rifle itself is intentionally cumbersome. It is bolt-action and must be cycled between shots, while ammunition is limited. Ammo pickups scattered around the forest replenish your supply, and there are also health pickups for recovering after encounters with… well, you’ll see.

Early on, hunting feels almost mundane. That is precisely why the horror works. The forest is quiet. The objectives are basic. The graphics look like something from an old PlayStation-era hunting game. You creep between trees listening for squirrels, occasionally consult your map, line up a shot, and continue searching. Then things start becoming wrong. Squirrel Stapler becomes more and more creepy as the five days progress. Strange occurrences begin invading what initially resembles a deliberately cheap hunting simulator. The important thing is how gradually this happens. The game does not immediately throw a giant monster into the forest and tell you to run. Instead, it allows the uneasiness to build around the normal hunting routine.

Something scratches against the cabin during the night. Tracks appear outside. The corpse does not always remain where you left it. Notes become increasingly disturbing. The forest begins feeling less empty. And every morning brings you one day closer to whatever “God” actually means. It creates a wonderful contrast between absurdity and genuine dread. The premise of stapling squirrels to a corpse is so ridiculous that it should be impossible to take seriously, yet wandering through those woods later in the game becomes genuinely uncomfortable.

The intentionally crude presentation contributes enormously to that feeling. Visually, Squirrel Stapler resembles a forgotten low-budget PC or PlayStation-era hunting game. Trees are simple, textures are low resolution, models have low polygon counts, and animations are deliberately stiff.  There is something inherently unsettling about horror rendered through old, crude graphics. Your imagination has to fill in details that a modern high-resolution model would show explicitly, and the stiff character models make unnatural creatures look even more unnatural.

The forest itself is not especially large despite Steam describing it as a “large nonlinear map.” In practice, it is compact enough that after exploring for a while, landmarks become familiar and navigating between important locations becomes relatively easy. For such a short game, it’s not a bad design choice. You revisit the same forest on all five days, so an enormous map would have turned the simple hunting objectives into a chore. Instead, the familiarity becomes part of the horror. You gradually learn where everything should be, making it much easier to notice when something has changed.

A map can be opened at any time to help with orientation, and it becomes particularly useful when looking for optional content. There is quite a bit more to discover than the main squirrel quotas initially suggest. Various notes are scattered around the forest, including supposedly educational squirrel facts. These become increasingly unhinged as the days pass. One eventually discusses the apparent speed at which squirrels can debone a human male, which is exactly the sort of useful wildlife information we expect from a reputable hunting simulator.

There are also two continuing stories that update as the days progress. One location contains a bizarre tale about an artist, while another contains reports documenting increasingly worrying activity in the area. Returning to these places each day reveals another part of their respective stories. These notes are completely optional to the basic squirrel-stapling operation, but they are worth seeking out. They provide some of the game’s best dark humour while simultaneously making the forest feel considerably more sinister.

The standalone version also introduces geocaches. There is one cache to find on each of the five days, with the map providing clues to the area where each should appear. Finding all five unlocks the GIANT SQUIRRELS mode as well as its associated achievement.

We enjoyed having these to search for because the basic daily objectives are so simple. Without the notes, geocaches, and other strange locations, there would be little reason to properly explore the forest rather than simply hunting the quota and immediately returning home.

There are other oddities hidden around the map too. Energy drinks temporarily double movement speed, while the Shady Shack allows you to “commit sins,” an activity the game wisely refuses to explain in any sensible detail. Both were additions made specifically for the standalone release.

The five-day structure is short enough that the repetitive objectives never completely wear out their welcome. Because, mechanically, they absolutely are repetitive. Every day fundamentally asks you to do the same thing. Walk through the same forest. Find squirrels. Shoot squirrels. Find the larger squirrel. Return to the cabin. The escalating horror is doing most of the work to keep that loop interesting.

If Squirrel Stapler lasted five or six hours, I suspect the hunting would become painfully tedious. Squirrels can be difficult to spot against the environment, and wandering around waiting to hear one becomes less entertaining once you have already explored most of the map.

Fortunately, it typically takes less than an hour for a normal run. The standalone extras and achievement hunting can extend that, but this remains a very small game. Combat against the more aggressive creatures also adds some pressure without turning the game into a conventional FPS. Health matters once the forest starts fighting back. This creates an interesting tension. The rifle is perfectly adequate for hunting a squirrel that does not know you are there. It feels considerably less adequate when something large is charging directly towards you.

Controls are straightforward first-person fare. You can walk, run, crouch, aim through the scope, fire, consult the map, and use the squirrel call. The standalone edition also added full controller support and proper control rebinding alongside improved UI and tutorials. Mouse aiming naturally works particularly well when trying to place precise shots on tiny squirrels partially obscured by foliage.

Sound design deserves particular praise because it carries much of the horror. The standalone version specifically expanded the forest soundscape, and that additional environmental audio is important in a game where listening is part of hunting. Squirrel noises can reveal prey before you see it, while later threats announce themselves through much less comforting sounds.  The result is that walking through an apparently empty forest never feels entirely safe. That is remarkably effective horror design for something mechanically so basic.

The soundtrack is used sparingly compared with the environmental audio, allowing the forest itself to establish most of the atmosphere. When the game does become more overtly theatrical, particularly towards the finale, the audio escalates appropriately.

And the finale is worth experiencing without having it spoiled. The game spends all five days reminding you that God is coming. Eventually, God comes. That is all anyone should know beforehand.

Replay value is understandably limited once the five days and all eight achievements have been completed. The central mystery loses much of its impact when you already know how the horror escalates, and the hunting itself is not deep enough to support endless repeated campaigns. GIANT SQUIRRELS mode at least provides an amusing unlock for players who found all five geocaches, giving completionists something tangible beyond the achievement itself. But Squirrel Stapler is ultimately designed as a compact horror experience rather than something intended to occupy dozens of hours.

It reminds us somewhat of the best short-form horror games where the mechanics themselves are almost deliberately boring because normality is necessary before anything abnormal can become frightening. There is also something of Cabela’s old hunting games filtered through the kind of deliberately ugly retro horror aesthetic that has become increasingly popular among indie developers.

Considering this comes from the same developer as DUSK, Iron Lung and Chop Goblins, the restraint is particularly interesting. Szymanski clearly knows how to make fast, aggressive action, but Squirrel Stapler instead asks the player to move slowly, listen, and become increasingly uncomfortable. The ridiculous concept almost acts as camouflage. We expected something stupid. We got something stupid. It just happened to also be genuinely creepy.