My Friendly Neighborhood Review – Not So Friendly After All

While not a point of pride, one thing I have been pleased about has been my ability to avoid getting sucked into the mascot horror genre up to now. Thinking back, there was maybe one Five Nights at Freddy’s Game I played within the last few years, but other than that, only the first game in that series, way back before the sub-genre it spawned had a name. As such, I never really saw the appeal of these games, and that isn’t intended as an attack or a criticism, but more a genuine question. Is it the characters that take on a cute look compared to standard horror monstrosities? Is it the design? The exploration? The lore? The combination of it all? I was hoping My Friendly Neighborhood might give me some deeper understanding, since I like Sesame Street, which the game is in part a parody of. While the game grew on me, I don’t know if I walked away with that understanding; the genre definitely doesn’t do it for me. For the first game to see through to the end, though, I’m going to say that it could have been worse.

Players take the role of Gordon O’Brian, a mid-40s property manager who was called in to shut down the signal coming from the antenna on top of the studio that houses the puppet show My Friendly Neighborhood, which was cancelled long before the 1993 setting in the main game. The game has a background lore like most in the genre that I have seen, twisting the narrative of something players are familiar with in the real world into an alternative horror concept. Here it gets weird because sentient puppets are actually not the bizarre part, as this world has long since known that the puppets are sentient beings in this alternate reality. The fact that they are now evil is the problem. Gordon gives off some Oscar the Grouch vibes as well, playing into the themes the game will explore about niceness and the overwhelming negativity of the world, which is very on the nose but leads to some deep moments of narrative before the end of your night. Even if the story might take a bit to grab hold.

The game plays very similarly to classic Resident Evil, with multiple areas to explore, each with its own maps, and the eventual need to backtrack when you find keys that unlock doors marked by shapes and gain access to that one area you had to ignore cause you couldn’t open it. Despite this ode in structure, the game lacks the bite of a traditional horror title. There was never a moment when I felt typically scared by enemies or areas while exploring, and the typical late-game frustrations of exploration when you know where everything is and just want to get through it all took root way earlier than expected, within the first area of Stage 4. In this area, you need to find a multitude of blocks that spell Neighbor on a podium through an area with a lot of loading screen areas that both blend together and fill you with dread since you know exactly where you are but still lack the knowledge of where you are going.

What compounded the frustration was the combat, which is a first-person shooter and felt very BioShock-esque, not least of all because you get a wrench. The weapons were very interestingly designed, which only had a serious impact when you discovered the first one in a dressing room in the back. Playing on theme, they fire letters at your puppet enemies to knock them down. The pistol-like weapon that is reloaded with a filing system of letter blocks is very cool, and later weapons all play on this theme, though. Your wrench, which is more standard becomes unviable very early since its swing radius is literally the same for enemies to grab you, and as soon as they take more than two hits, you can assume you will eat damage to save ammo, pick your poison. Ammo is also scarce, so the fact that simply knocking an enemy down doesn’t defeat them, since exiting and entering an area will reload them, even if this occurs within two seconds, making combat feel pointless even in the best of situations.

Guns lack a reticle as well as a down sight function, which doesn’t feel like an oversight against the bigger enemies, but later on becomes an issue. At one point, you can participate in a shooting gallery to earn prizes. The targets in the back row, in particular, took me a lot of micro aiming to be able to hit, and with no visual guide, it reinforced limitations I was already feeling on range viability. A new type of puppet was encountered later that hangs on the wall could also be hard to hit, since they took up a tinier hitbox radius. Part of this might be the game’s inability to register in some locations, but in others, since you want to attack outside their range to jump, you still need to dial in your shot on them, which is an imprecise system from time to time.

This bleeds into my biggest issue with My Friendly Neighborhood: the puppets never shut up, literally, ever. Silent Hill had its famous radio static to let you know an enemy is approaching. My Friendly Neighborhood has the feeling of wanting to bang your head against a wall to let you know there is a puppet just waiting for you to get too close. While some have horror twists on traditional children’s show topics, most just regurgitate the same four long-winded statements on helping children learn. In areas with lots of enemies, EVERY ONE of them can be heard speaking over each other. Oh, and while there are a lot of areas with loading screens to enter and exit buildings, many of those areas still connect via windows you can look through, meaning you can also hear enemies in other areas ramble on and on as well. It never ends. I mean that, too, since once you defeat an enemy, in order to fully remove it from that area and not let it respawn, you need to tie it up with duct tape. Next time you enter, they will not get up and be a threat, but they will still be there, rambling on, just tied up. It takes an entire roll of duct tape to tie up an enemy, and Gordon can’t cover their mouths? They are all Sesame Street style puppets, remember, so they all sound like Burt and Elmo, imagine that never ending.

Once you beat the game the first time, which only took me around five hours and netted me a B rank, which I am going to guess means I was slow, there is a lot of content that unlocks, making the game highly replayable if it grabbed you in your first playthrough. There is a horde, hidden cheat tapes you find throughout the game that unlock after that, and several new difficulties ensuring that if you are enjoying this experience, you are sure to keep having a good time. For me, I started another run on the hardest difficulty, but never reached the enemies; one playthrough was enough in my case.

Verdict

Walking away after beating My Friendly Neighborhood was a victory in its own right. That Five Nights at Freddy’s game I most recently played held my attention for an hour at most, and bored me throughout, which I’m sure will upset a few people out there. My Friendly Neighborhood, for its part, makes me willing to at least try some other games in the subgenre, even if I still don’t ‘get’ it. It was a pretty fun experience, despite the combat, which I felt was lacking, yet was constantly there. The biggest, yet most glaring issue was the fact that these puppets never stop talking, and yet I powered through that to the end, and trust me, those were the moments I wanted to quit the most. Probably not destined to be the pinnacle of these games, I think there are enough here to keep this as an entertaining option.

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