I am in love The muppets And Sesame Street. With their adorable dolls and silly characters, these shows are the epitome of children’s television. However, I also have this strange fear. What if the puppets on these shows were real? How did it actually exist in our world? Would they all be immortal? Powerful? Controllable? Luckily for me (I guess) there’s a new hit horror game on Steam that lets me experience this spooky scenario.
Launched on Steam on July 18th (and coming to consoles at a later date), my friendly neighborhood is a first-person survival horror game set in an abandoned and aging TV and film studio. When the studio’s large antenna starts transmitting again and interferes with other channels, you have to enter the facility and turn everything off. But remember when I said the studio was deserted? Well, all the people have gone. But the full size dolls are still hanging around and are very vivid and gory.
I think some of the best and scariest horror games, movies, and stories are ones that start with a simple goal and focus on it. In the case of my friendly neighborhood, it turns off the broadcast tower in the spooky doll-infested studio. This goal will keep you focused throughout the game. Even if you don’t look into every nook and cranny to find out what was going on before you arrived, you still feel like you understand most of what is happening.
dolls + Resident Evil 4
While my friendly neighborhood looks very much like it Five nights at Freddy’s‘S On the screenshots, the actual game looks much more like the current one resident Evil Title. Played from the first-person perspective, you feel slow and weak MFN. Though there are weapons, you’ll need to be smart about when to fight and when to flee, as the puppets you encounter can quickly kill you and get back up once you exit an area and return. The only way to permanently keep them away is to bring a roll of duct tape that you can use to wrap them and secure the area. But there’s limited amount of duct tape, so much ammo, and way too many dolls. So you have to manage your resources wisely to survive and get your job done.
Salute to the inventory system in my friendly neighborhood: It appears to be directly inspired by the wonderful briefcase found in Resident Evil 4. It made me so happy managing and sorting this case and carefully placing the items in just the right places. Leon S. Kennedy would be proud.
MFNThe puppets and the world it builds for them are amazing. The dolls are a perfect match for the foam and cloth figures you would expect to find on a doll-themed TV show, complete with colorful clothing, straggly hair, wild movements and goofy voices.
But these qualities are twisted MFN to make the dolls scary. They wave around endlessly in place, babbling loudly about basic life concepts like mail or brushing their teeth, but if you stick around, their conversations with themselves spiral into insanity and disturbing images. At one point, a character started talking about living inside your TV and eating the channels you don’t watch. He then asked the children watching to smash the screen with a hammer and release it. (Kids at home, don’t do that!)
Hey you stupid puppets, shut up!
Similar to in resident Evil, end my friendly neighborhood, You have to solve some strange puzzles. At the beginning of the game I had to win a board game against a creepy doll. Another time I had to use circuit breakers marked with card colors to solve a door puzzle.
Unfortunately, sometimes I wandered around looking for a final item or piece of a puzzle. While the map is good and most areas are well designed so you don’t get too lost, being stuck in an area meant hearing the same puppets over and over again. At this point, fear turned to irritation as the dialogue began to repeat itself.
It didn’t help that the game has limited save capacities that depend on the number of tokens collected, so you might lose a large chunk of your progress if you can’t afford to save. And then you hear the puppets again. Pooh.
While the puppets and their dialogue can be annoying, the rest is MFN is so creepy that I hardly cared. The writing style is powerful and slowly builds up the mystery of what really happened here without forgetting the man you play as it’s just a random guy who is completely overwhelmed.
If you’re looking for a horror game that doesn’t beat its appeal, has great ideas, and is really scary, you should check it out my friendly neighborhood The journey takes about six hours and is a wonderful (and terrifying) ride from start to finish.
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