Hell Butcher

Hell Butcher Review

Pragmatic Play shatters its “mainstream” image and mold with the release of Hell Butcher, a slot game that trades the studio's usual candy-coated or mythological escapades for a plunge into the darkest corners of the abyss. The loading screen shows a head slowly being dragged by a razor-sharp blade at the end of a chain, leaving a bloody trail. Beheadings are the core mechanic of this game, and it gets even more horrifying when you see how terrified the poor souls chained in the pits of hell are, awaiting their less than fortunate destiny.

Hell Butcher plays out on a 6x6 grid with a Cluster Pays win system, meaning you win when symbols land adjacent, vertically and/or horizontally, anywhere on the grid. The paytable displays a cauldron filled with eyeballs, a stabbed heart, a skull with brains exposed, a pint of blood, a bloody meat cleaver, an eyeball ring, and handcuffs. These symbols pay between 0.2x and 1x your stake for 5 in a cluster and 20x to 150x your stake for 15+ in a cluster. The butcher demon Wild symbol substitutes for any pay symbol, but, as we shall see, that’s far from all it does.

Hell Butcher Slot - Reels Screen

The tumble feature removes winning symbols and replaces them with new symbols dropping from above. This repeats as long as you keep landing new winning clusters. When a butcher demon Wild lands, the demon throws his bladed chain towards the bottom of the screen, attempting to behead one of the characters and turn the head into minced meat. If he succeeds, the wild is upgraded with the character’s multiplier. The character is then replaced by a clone with a double multiplier value of the current highest one.

The doubling multiplier trail can go as high as x512, and you get more of the same in the regular bonus round. However, you can also get upgraded versions of the bonus round, where the butcher demon never misses or used multiplier values are eliminated. The best bonus round combines these two upgrades, increasing your likelihood of closing in on the 20,000x max win. Hell Butcher is a medium volatility slot game, scoring 3.5 out of 5 on the in-game scale, and it boasts an above-average RTP of 96.55% (RTP ranges) and a hit rate of 28.32%.

Hell Butcher Features

We have already given you a brief overview of the features, and the time has come for a more detailed reveal. We also recommend that you test the Hell Butcher free play demo to see the features in all their bizarreness for yourself. Let’s get to it!

Tumble Feature

The Tumble Feature triggers whenever you land a winning cluster, removing all the winning symbols from the grid. The remaining symbols then drop to their lowest possible positions as a new batch of symbols drops from above to fill the gaps. This process repeats as long as you keep landing new winning clusters, allowing for indefinite winning streaks per round.

Wild Multiplier

The poor, trembling characters beneath the reels represent multipliers of x2, x4, x8, and x16. When a demon Wild symbol lands, it may randomly behead one of the characters, which also means it takes on the character’s multiplier. When a multiplier is taken by the demon Wild, a new multiplier with a value twice as high as the highest remaining multiplier replaces it. The highest multiplier value possible is x512. The taken demon Wild multiplier boosts all wins the Wild is a part of, and Wild multipliers are added together if more than one is part of the same win. The character multipliers reset between tumble win sequences.

Scatter Symbols

There are 3 types of scatter symbols in this game, and you need at least 3 in view to trigger the bonus round. Landing 2 regular scatters and a No Miss Scatter awards the No Miss Free Spins modifier during the bonus round. Landing 2 scatters and a Madness Scatter awards the Madness modifier during the bonus round. If you land a regular scatter together with a No Miss scatter and a Madness scatter, you get the bonus round with both modifiers active.

Free Spins Bonus Round

The Bonus Round triggers when you land 3, 4, 5, or 6 scatters in view (of any kind), awarding 12, 15, 20, or 30 free spins, respectively. Landing 3 to 6 scatters on the same free spin or in the same free spin tumble sequence awards the same amount of additional free spins. During the bonus round, the following Wild symbols are available depending on the triggering scatters:

• No Miss Wild (triggered by the No Miss scatter) - always beheads a character and takes on its multiplier.
• Butcher Wild (available in the regular and Madness scatter bonus rounds) - takes on a multiplier that cannot appear anymore for the duration of the bonus round.
• No Miss Butcher Wild (triggered by the No Miss and Madness scatters combined) - guarantees to take on a multiplier when it lands, and this multiplier cannot appear again in the same bonus round.

To be clear, when you trigger the bonus round with a No Miss or Madness scatter, all wilds that land during the bonus round are No Miss or Butcher wilds. If you trigger the bonus round with both a No Miss and a Madness scatter, all wilds that land during the bonus round are No Miss Butcher wilds.

Hell Butcher Slot - Free Spins

Ante Bet & Bonus Buy (not UK)

Hell Butcher features both an Ante/Super Bet menu and a Bonus Buy menu for eligible players. Here is an overview of what you can purchase in this game:

• Ante Bet 1 – pay 4x your regular stake per spin to increase the hit rate of any bonus round by 8 times (this means the hit rate is increased from 1 in 243.94 spins to 1 in 30.49 spins).
• Ante Bet 2 – pay 5x your regular stake per spin to be 360 times more likely to trigger the No Miss Madness bonus round.
• Super Bet – pay 5x to be guaranteed a No Miss Wild per spin (the bonus round cannot trigger during Super Bet spins).
• Super Bet 2 – pay 5x your regular stake to be guaranteed a Wild symbol per spin, and all character multipliers are maxed out at x512 (the bonus round cannot trigger during Super Bet 2 spins).
• Standard Free Spins Bonus – pay 100x your stake to trigger the regular bonus round.
• No Miss Free Spins Bonus – pay 300x your stake to get the bonus round with the No Miss Wild active.
• Madness Free Spins Bonus – pay 300x your stake to get the bonus round with the Butcher Wild active.
• No Miss Madness Free Spins Bonus – pay 750x your stake to get the bonus round with both modifiers active on each wild (always hooks a multiplier and removes it from the possible multipliers pool).

Theme & Graphics

Hell Butcher takes you to the bowels of the underworld, or straight to hell if you want to be blunt about it. The molten lava backdrop with chains hanging around is a reminder of what eternal doom looks like, and the 4 terrified characters in the foreground must have committed horrible sins. You can hear the chattering of their teeth as they await the demon butcher's blade to leave them a head shorter. The demon butcher is carved out on each side of the grid too, holding a chain of skulls in his hand. The reels are filled with grotesque symbols like bloody meat cleavers, skulls with exposed brains, pints of blood, and stabbed hearts.

Hell Butcher Free Play

Whether you decide to play for real money or not, this is a must-try game for the shock value alone. Luckily, we have the free Hell Butcher demo available at the top of this page, and you can head up there after reading our verdict below. This allows you to test all the ante bet and super bet options and see how each version of the bonus round plays out. When you are satisfied with your Hell Butcher free play session, you can leave a comment to tell us what you think and check our list of casinos carrying this title below the demo game.

Pros and Cons of Hell Butcher

Our Verdict

You usually kind of know what you get from Pragmatic Play, at least in terms of how far into darker territory they’re willing to wander. With the release of Hell Butcher, they are pushing the envelope and crushing their “nice guy” image, making them a more unpredictable provider. NoLimit City is the trailblazer with regard to grotesque visuals and slot themes, and providers like Hacksaw and Shady Lady have also successfully explored their dark side.

The shock effect is stronger since you don’t expect this kind of brutality from Pragmatic Play, at least not before this release. I guess anything goes from here, although it’s unlikely that Pragmatic Play will go full NoLimit City on a regular basis. Even so, Hell Butcher proves they have the stomach for pure carnage when the mood strikes. It’s hard to not feel sorry for the 4 terrified characters, sweating bullets and chattering their teeth as they await the head-lopping demon like something out of a fever-dream nightmare.

For some reason, the bonus rounds play out in a less hellish setting than the base game, with different colors of the water that replace the lava depending on which bonus round you trigger. The core mechanic of Hell Butcher is a clever twist to the usual multiplier wild action. That being said, it’s also a bit twisted that the game is basically conditioning your brain to celebrate a growing pile of severed heads. After a while, you do get numb to the bizarreness of it, and each head collection animation feels, well, uhm, satisfying.

The base game mostly gives you a taste of the head-lopping multiplier trail action, and you’ll seldom see massive multipliers here. The regular bonus round is a hit-or-miss affair, literally, while things heat up when the butcher demon never misses. When multipliers are also eliminated, you can end up with only x512 multipliers left on the trail, which I came close to doing in my test session. With its gory yet bizarrely satisfying visuals and 20,000x potential, Hell Butcher adds up to a solid release. We hope to see more of Pragmatic’s dark side in the future.