Are you ready to have a chipper time?
Chipper & Sons Lumber Co. is a construction and management game produced by Scott Cawthon in the days before Five Nights at Freddy's. In this happy little game, you play as Tyke, a young beaver who is just starting out in the lumber business, who must chop down trees, collect and sell wood (allowing your father, Chipper, to turn it into lumber at his mill), and buy or find various items to make your business easier to run.
The game was made in 2013 for iOS and Android, and came in two versions, Full and Plus. The Full version is free while the Plus version is a paid app that allows you to get special items early in advance. The game was also pitched to Steam Greenlight, but it was pulled a day later after Scott received scathing criticism regarding the art style and how the characters looked like "animatronic dolls". Those same critiques was later used to make Five Nights at Freddy's, the game that put Scott on the map for good.
After many requests, Scott finally released a PC port on GameJolt, which can be played here
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Chipper & Sons Lumber Co. contains examples of:
- Accessory-Wearing Cartoon Animal: Some minor characters just wear hats.
- Aside Glance: Occasionally, Tyke seems to be asking the player, "Can you believe this?" when his dad says a bunch of rather questionable stuff.
- Bamboo Technology: Played with. While you may need some additional parts (usually gained from random drops), most of the items you'll construct are made from lumber.
- Barefoot Cartoon Animal: Everyone else except for Seabill, who wears galoshes.
- Busy Beaver: The player takes the role of Tyke the beaver, newly employed at his father's lumber business, as he harvests trees, sells wood, and helps out the family business any way he can.
- Cartoon Whale: A duo of whales, Smoothie and Phil, can be found playing chess underwater. One is grey and one is blue, both have large squarish heads.
- Cloudcuckoolander: Mr. Chipper, with his sayings like "Never trust a termite, because it might have a meteor", dressing up as a giant termite to try and fool his enemies, (until he started wearing around the house), etc.
- Crossover Cameo: Look closely to spot the main character from Scott's other pre-Freddy game series, The Desolate Hope.
- Fantastic Racism: Mr. Chipper to the termites. He also casually calls the frogs "useless".
- The squid trapped in the pit, Squiddy, that Tyke can fall into refuses to climb up the rope, the only way out available, because it "stinks of beaver". He says this right to Tyke, who suggested they use it instead of waiting for a ship to find their tiny beach!
- The bird leader, who in addition to setting traps for Tyke, calls the poor little beaver "vermin" and whatnot, and then drops him back down from the top of the tree when the player is done with trading.
- The Ghost: Earl the frog, who fell off a tree and presumably died. A frog who knew him will give you things that he found
floating in the river and mistook for Earl. - Half-Dressed Cartoon Animal: Beavers (such as Tyke and Chipper) always wear overalls. No shirt or anything else, though.
- Meaningful Name: Played with somewhat. The game is called Chipper and Sons, but the house appears to be occupied by only Mr. Chipper and Tyke. However, at one point Mr. Chipper tells a bizarre story about having another son who turned himself into a robot and had to be dismantled, possibly vindicating the name... that is, if we're supposed to take said bizarre story at complete face value.
- Non-Indicative Name: Very, very, very downplayed. Chipper and Sons only show one son of Chipper's, but as discussed below, something bad might have happened to another one.
- Paper-Thin Disguise: Nobody, least of all the termites themselves, are fooled by Mr. Chipper's termite costume.
- Psychopathic Manchild: Mr. Chipper gradually reveals himself to be this, between gleefully murdering sapient termites, placing his wife's taxidermied corpse in his entry hall, and leaning more towards "Manchild" by being fooled by a trojan horse as a result of it being pink with brushable hair, his paper-thin termite disguise.
- Real Men Wear Pink:Mr. Chipper: I also wouldn't recommend [accepting] gifts from [the termites] such as gigantic wooden horses. I had a bad experience with that once. ONCE! Actually twice- But the second time it was all pink with brushable hair!
- Running Gag: Starting from day 2 and onwards, Tyke gets a date as a reward for his hard work. This turns out to be a disaster for him because Chipper keeps on picking the girl that isn't his type, causing him to back away in sheer awkwardness. That is until Tyke destroys Father Tree, and Chipper finally finds a date that is definitely the kind he's looking for, and it's from his own species.
- Silent Protagonist: Tyke never speaks a word, but if you talk to the group around the campfire after falling under the bridge, he presumably suggests the group climb out of the pit using the rope, based on the squid's reaction, though his dialogue isn't visible to the player.
- Stepford Smiler: Even in-universe, people find Fun Fungal, the grinning mushroom a bit creepy...
- Mr. Chipper is definitely not as up to eleven as Fun Fungal, but the way he screams, "We miss you!" at his taxidermied wife with a smiling model comes off this way.
- Tertiary Sexual Characteristics: One of Tyke's dates, a frog who is indistinguishable from the other frogs except for the pink bow on her head, lampshades this.Tyke's Date: You know I'm female because I have a pink bow on my head.
- Wacky Parent, Serious Child: Mr. Chipper and Tyke. While Mr. Chipper is no doubt a prodigious inventor and a hard worker who loves his son, he's definitely not all there which, based on Tyke's facial expressions, is not lost on the younger beaver. Tyke has none of his father's unstable tendencies (as noted by The Termite King), and never retaliates against any of the other animals even when a squid insults him or the birds capture him.
- Videogame Caring Potential: You can take quests from the termites and form an alliance with the termite king (to which Mr. Chipper is oblivious), after learning what Mr. Chipper did to them. Even if the termite king isn't the best person himself, the individual termites still benefit if you build mounds for them.
- World of Funny Animals: Beavers, seagulls, owls, fish, even termites.
