Camp Sunshine (PC) review "Cabin fever"

Media like Camp Sunshine attempts to both scare and shock. It first targets younger audiences by corrupting safe and adorable things, like stuffed animals and cartoons. This is nothing new for the genre, really. Just look at what “Jaws” did for going for a swim on a hot summer's day... Sunshine seeks to do the same thing for both summer camps—a concept that has been done to death, and yet it's still welcome—and cartoony, anthropomorphic animal mascots. I'm sure you can work out what this means for the villain, as he is a dude in a teddy bear costume hacking people to bits. His opponent in this piece is a young boy named Jez, whose mother sends him to a summer camp to meet other kids.

And of course, he does meet kids all over the camp.

Literally all over the camp...

And therein lies the shock. Where the antagonist targets younger audiences by subverting the things they find inviting, the piles of bodies target the older folks—especially parents—by confirming the notion that our progeny are never entirely safe, and that they can suffer grisly, gory fates. Sunshine leans hard into this idea without flinching or balking. While you may not have witnessed the carnage while playing, the aftermath is still difficult to process, all to the game's credit.

Jez discovers this halfway through his first night's sleep. He awakens to find blood all over his cabin, body parts strewn about the campus, and the aforementioned antagonist known as the Serial Slasher running around with a crimson-stained knife. Somehow, he's managed to slaughter most of the camp, children and counselors alike. Since Jez isn't exactly armed to the teeth with weaponry, his immediate line of defense is to run...



Evasion makes up a fair part of this experience. Any time the Serial Slasher appears, you should reasonably move in the opposite direction. The thing is you can escape him in most instances by just moseying at a normal pace. Now and then, though, you bump into a situation where you must turn up your movement speed, depleting your finite stamina. Thankfully, it restores as you rest (read: leave yourself vulnerable) or if you chug an energy drink, which are limited throughout the campaign.

Honestly, there aren't many cases where the Serial Slasher can easily catch up to you. If you run afoul of him on the outside, he's easy to outmaneuver. However, his most frequent appearances occur indoors if you linger in one building too long. Even then, all you need to do is exit the building and he'll disappear. And yes, that absolutely means you can avoid meeting him by repeatedly exiting any cabin after a handful of seconds, then returning to scour it again. Honestly, this mechanic leaves the Slasher feeling all but toothless. Sure, there are moments where he can catch you if you're not careful, but caution is so easy to exercise that you need not fear much.

Jez can't escape forever, though, so he'll need to find a way to stop the Slasher for good. Since summer camps don't exactly have weapon racks or armories, he'll need to scour the grounds for clues that will aid him in his quest. Here's the thing: he's not your average bear. The guy can teleport, and he loves to appear in closed spaces like cabins. Since ordinary combat doesn't seem to faze magical horror villains much, Jez's strategy consists of rifling through every dresser, box, garbage can, or cadaver he crosses, hoping to locate an item that might come handy. In some cases, he finds food for health restoration, batteries for his flashlight, or an energy drink, some of which he takes off corpses.



However, the true objective here is locating twenty necessary items to complete the affair. Half of this collection consists of journal pages, which you find by completing various tasks for survivors around the camp. For instance, one man is stuck in a trapdoor and requires his toolbox from his shed, which just happens to be located in the middle of dark, creepy forest maze. In another room, a spoiled camper complains about the lack of heating, disregarding completely the spatters of blood and piles of severed parts all over the place. Nabbing the dude's tools and getting the boiler room restarted nets you a couple journal pages.

Though most of these activities are contrived busywork, they fill a void at least decently. Best of all, each page rewards you with a cutscene delving into the Serial Slasher's backstory. These moments don't merely come up as a matter of filler, either. Each segment details a key piece of the killer's history necessary to stop him via magical ritual. Because how else do you stop a murderer with supernatural abilities except by supernatural means?

My only gripe about some of the items needed to collect comes from the overuse of fetch quests, such as the previously discussed toolbox segment. Aside from the tools, there's also a dog looking for a treat, a man demanding eight white flowers to homebrew mace, and a guy who's lost his glasses. Because of these events and a (commendable) lack of linearity, you end up simply wandering around campus and checking damn near every container. Oh, and there are keys needed to open doors, too, so you occasionally fetch items all so you can fetch other items.



As you might imagine, this one is rife with callbacks to older works of horror. Laudably, Sunshine doesn't barrage you with horror references, keeping its shout-outs to a minimum. Many of them are blatant, such as Freddy's hat and sweater hanging on a hook in a boiler room, the “Puppet Master” puppets chilling in one of the cabins, or a throwback to “Twin Peaks” during a particular cinematic scene. Others aren't quite so straightforward, but remain easy to spot if you're familiar with the genre. A bullied child with deformities at a summer camp? That sounds an awful lot like “Friday the 13th.” Someone in a bear costume (or even just a cartoony bear character in general) killing people? That's a two-fer, harking back to Five Nights at Freddy's and the '80s slasher “Girls Nite Out.”

Ultimately, Camp Sunshine proves to be a merely decent top-down horror title. Few things about it stand out as obscene or terrible, but it really doesn't kick into high gear often. Sure, it's got a couple of legitimately tense moments, like one where you navigate the tight corridors of a cabin while someone in the darkness whispers for help, only for the voice to be cut short by a slashed throat just before you approach the person. However, even during the hairiest moments, you never really feel at a disadvantage. Escaping the killer is simple work, and all the tasks required to finally stop him come across as obligatory tasks. Its campaign only runs about two to three hours long, though, so getting through it doesn't require a massive undertaking. Still, you can do both better and worse than spending those hours checking this title out, and it's remains worthwhile for lovers of slasher media at very least.

Staff review by Joseph Shaffer (October 10, 2026) Rumor has it that Joe is not actually a man, but a machine that likes video games, horror movies, and long walks on the beach. His/Its first contribution to HonestGamers was a review of Breath of Fire III.