Game Review: ‘My Friendly Neighborhood’

We see a lot of mascot horror nowadays. If you’re like me, you’re pretty open to it. I may have lost most of my interest in the Five Nights at Freddy’s phenomenon many moons ago, but I can still find myself brought back into the fold with interesting releases like Security Breach (I would say Secret of the Mimic, but I experienced a game-breaking glitch that cut me off at the heels about a quarter of the way through the story), that add new, interesting additions to the formula.

Many others, however, have likely grown tired of the perceived repetition that comes with taking things we associate with child-like wonder and twisting them up into a horror story. I can understand the sentiment. Certainly, I walked away from Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey, wondering if the film needed to be made – a sentiment that extends to the plethora of other public domain horror films that have been released in recent times.

On the videogame front, however, at least we can say that there are layers to it. With every Poppy’s Playtime or Bendy videogame that is released, we go a little further off the reservations for what a mascot horror game actually is. Poppy’s Playtime obviously wears its influences on its sleeves, borrowing heavily from the Five Nights franchise, but I also found there was a surprising amount of influence drawn from the Portal game series as well, meanwhile, Poppy and Bendy both take influence from the BioShock franchise, continuing to add ingredient after ingredient to what was, initially, a fairly bland dish.

My Friendly Neighborhood offers a new ingredient, and it’s an ingredient I am surprised we haven’t seen more times in the mascot horror subgenre.

Developed by brothers John and Evan Szymanski and published by DreadXP, My Friendly Neighborhood sees to assume the role of a repairman that is sent to disable the signal at an old abandoned television studio. In it, however, are puppets from a canceled television show that have since come to life and begun wreaking havoc throughout it. Our puppet antagonists draw a clear inspiration from children’s shows like Sesame Street and The Muppets (that isn’t the new ingredient though). The premise draws to mind being a security guard in Five Nights at Freddy’s, but it’s also clear early on as you begin playing that this is a very different beast.

After a short time, after you take stock of everything, you’ll begin to notice a few things. There is a scarcity of ammo. Saves are finite, acquired through discovering tokens hidden around the game. There is an inventory management system, restricting you on how much items that you can carry at one time and requiring you to sometimes leave items behind in your toy chest at the last save station you visited. By golly, My Friendly Neighborhood plays like Resident Evil. Hell yeah! And, not only does it play like Resident Evil, which in itself isn’t uncommon, it carries the flourishes added with the more modern games. The map system marks rooms that still need to be further explored with a red tint and marks the ones that have been completed with a green tint. In the inventory system, items that have served their purpose are marked with a check mark, letting you know you can discard them or move them to storage. I have no doubt there are some survival horror purists that don’t enjoy these modern flourishes, but I am simply not among them.

As an experience in totality, I came away thinking that My Friendly Neighborhood achieved everything that was on the tin for what I expected. The biggest strength the game has is its sense of style. As far as personality is concerned, it has it for days, and even if I do think it may have fallen victim to the law of diminishing returns by the end, that personality never depleted. The soundtrack of the game isn’t a soundtrack at all, per se, instead, it’s the repetitious mania of a bunch of different puppets blurting out sound bites and one-liners – something that ran its course a bit by the end, but was I thought was a neat idea overall. With all the different voices blurring together at the same time, some sounding like Elmo, some sounding like Bert, or something else outta Jim Henson’s Workshop, it always felt like one could lurking in the corner someplace, ready to reel its ugly, little head in and attack you. I love the weapons, as well, like the Rolodexer, which is exactly what it sounds like – a Rolodex that has been repurposed to shoot letters at enemies. You have twenty-six bullets before you have to reload, and if you knock an enemy down, although you won’t kill them, if you have tape in your inventory, you can use it to keep them down for the count.

There is a lot of charm to it, and that charm wins it half the battle in my book.

The melee combat can be rough-around-the-edges and it is far from what I would call an actual, proper third-person shooter, with no cross hair to line up your shots or an ability to better situate your character and aim your gun. When enemies grab you, it thrusts you into a fixed animation, and makes it feel like the controller has been taken out of your hands, sometimes, too, when the enemies grab you, it feels like you had more space between them than them attacking you suggests. Sometimes enemies can feel a little sponge-y, with you being able to take down one enemy with one shot, whereas the same enemy, later on, will end up requiring half a dozen. That can be a little daunting, however, when you fire off a bullet, and the puppet flies off the roof entirely, that’s a pretty great feeling! In general, although I do love the little wrinkles and charm that came with the combat and I do prefer it over the alternative of this being another mascot horror where I spend most of my time hiding in lockers and crawling around, I did find myself sometimes wishing the combat was either a little more in-depth with more variation or a little scarcer.

I encountered a couple of glitches along the way with My Friendly Neighborhood. There was one option puzzle that I solved and was never allowed to complete it. I checked and verified later through a guide that I’d done exactly what I was meant to, but the Trophy never popped up and I was never allowed to turn in the last item to complete it. Another glitch I encountered early on was toward the start where I couldn’t figure out how to progress. It turns out I was meant to pick up a wrench that was sitting on a table to use as a melee weapon. The only problem is, I couldn’t interact with it until after I re-loaded my save.

The story is interesting, but I came away thinking that it didn’t have the strongest forward trajectory. Similar to a lot of videogames like My Friendly Neighborhood, the story is told largely through piecing together information from documents that shed light on the peculiar world you find yourself in. Tucked away in My Friendly Neighborhood is a commentary on censorship and propaganda that feels reminiscent of Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared (a YouTube and television show without a similar puppets gone bad theme) at least on a surface level. It’s interesting, but the characters and the plot itself come away feeling like they don’t build a lot in terms of rising act, climax, and general momentum that I think something like this would have benefited from. A lot of mascot horror games boast lower budgets, which is why they don’t tend to go all out on certain things or depend on hidden lore to draw up interest and anticipation, but I feel like My Friendly Neighborhood almost pays for its own success by how stylish and well done it is that the instances it doesn’t reach my perceived potential for it hit a little harder than I would another similar game. I am not saying I needed elaborate set pieces and boss battles, but that I feel like I wish I would have gotten more out of each puppet character and been given more to chew on about why they things are the way they are. I almost feel like it plays like a proof of concept, but, in like, the most respectful of ways. As is, it’s a good game, and I want that to be the takeaway, but it makes me think if they had a little more resources available, they could flesh out all of the puppets, tighten the game-play, improve the puzzles, and really hit one out of the park, so, maybe proof of concept isn’t the right word, My Friendly Neighborhood feels like the walk before a run.

By the end of my playthrough of My Friendly Neighborhood, which took me just a hair shy of seven hours, I was fairly satisfied with what the developers had cooked up. It isn’t going to top the Nightmare Deck or anything like that, and not every videogame needs to, but it was a stylish, charming experience that felt like it had a lot of love put into what was being created. It isn’t the hardest hitting Resident Evil style survival horror game, but it’s solid and that charm it has goes a long way to putting it up there with some of the highest ranking horror games on the market.