The Haunted Hoard: My Friendly Neighborhood (PC)
The mascot horror subgenre is all about taking innocent and friendly images and twisting them into macabre and terrifying versions meant to terrify instead of comfort. Oftentimes, these perversions of childhood iconography are pretty straightforward about what they’re doing, some blood and violence able to make most anything disturbing with the right presentation, and My Friendly Neighborhood looks like the kind of game that would be turning the usually comedic and kid-friendly world of Sesame Street into something dark and macabre. However, while My Friendly Neighborhood is a first-person survival horror game, it is not only bloodless, it is downright reverent to the puppets that inspired it. Surprisingly, a game where you need to fear for your life actually ends up a love letter to the lighthearted franchises it was inspired by.
My Friendly Neighborhood sees you playing as a repairman named Gordon O’Brian who is called in for what sounds like a routine job. Television stations are receiving odd interference after the antenna at an abandoned broadcast station reactivated and started airing old episodes of the My Friendly Neighborhood puppet show. Once he arrives though, he finds that the place may not have any humans around, but the old puppets, known as the Neighbors, are still alive, kicking, and surprisingly hostile, although potentially not on purpose. These man-sized Muppets mull about the various studio buildings, but when they spot you, they come running towards you not with violent intent so much as a desire to hug a new friend. They’ll do it so hard it hurts though, and something definitely seems to be wrong with their heads, as they’ll yammer to themselves alone in a room mixing the old moral lessons and educational content they’d say on T.V. with some new more violent statements that they seem unable to differentiate in their blissful ignorance of what they’re really saying.
The Neighbors are flagrantly based on the kinds of puppets you’d see on Jim Henson shows like The Muppets and Sesame Street, and this game makes no attempt to hide that. All throughout the studio you can find posters of movies that are pretty much word swaps for the Muppets movies except now starring the Neighbors, and while the colorful human designs most common in the neighbors evoke characters like Bert and Ernie, you also have some more dangerous large puppets like Pearl who is the game’s stand-in for Big Bird. Normal Neighbors will oppose you mostly in a similar manner, waiting around until they’re aware of you and walking over to squeeze you tight, but as you head through the different major sections of the game, more unique and larger puppets will often serve as an additional danger you need to manage. You might think you’ll get a hang on avoiding the grabbing hands of the regular puppets, but then you find the game’s version of the incorrigible Cookie Monster and really need to be swift and capable unless you want to find out if it has broader tastes than its Sesame Street counterpart.
While you’re avoiding the Neighbors though, you’ll gradually find notes and newspapers telling you about the world My Friendly Neighborhood takes place in. Over time, you begin to learn more about what it’s like outside the sets and backstage areas of the show, a place where people have turned sour thanks to a brutal war. Some pretty effective ruminations on the nature of collectivism and individualism arise, the Neighbors existing in a world where the harshness of reality has caused people to turn inward to deal with their pain. Where do jolly puppets just trying to teach you how to count and be kind fit into such a society? What happens when bitter people reject friendliness? Maybe these puppets aren’t simply monsters in your path, although My Friendly Neighborhood definitely gets some mileage from the Muppets already having actual characters called monsters to get away with some unsettling but believable appearances for its counterpart characters. While Gordon does need to fight to survive on this very busy work night, it’s also just as important to understand what really went wrong and see if he can fix more than the broadcast issues, a more emotional journey awaiting those who take the time to notice and engage with the game’s messaging.
Even if you want to open your heart though, there will be some time spent having to be violent yourself. While early on Gordon makes good use of a wrench to defend himself, the Neighbors aren’t always so easily knocked out, the player needing to find stronger weapons and eventually coming across some creative reinterpretations of firearms. You don’t get a pistol in My Friendly Neighborhood, you get the Stenographer, a weapon with 26 shots in it because it fires actual letters from the alphabet as its ammunition. Similarly, the Novelist is a shotgun that blasts what might as well be full words when fired. Ammo refills are spaced enough you need to be smart about opening fire, especially since you have a limited inventory where you need to make all objects fit on a grid in a case similar to Resident Evil 4. You can store items at most save points, but save points are spaced out well to lead to perhaps the most important consideration you’re going to make when in combat. Neighbors will go down when you hit them enough, but if you exit the room and return, they’re right back up. There isn’t even puppet gore in this game, you just knock out the felt people for a bit. However, you do find duct tape on occasion, and if you wrap up a puppet after it has been knocked down, it will never get back up again. As you’ll be crossing the different buildings of the studio repeatedly as you get new keys and find important items, you’ll need to weigh up which puppets to use your tape on. Efforts to smartly conserve ammo can lead to taking damage, and even if you have healing items and other resources back at the save point, that won’t mean much if you let yourself meet your end trying to preserve what you do have on hand.
The survival balance of navigating the locations of My Friendly Neighborhood is well designed to keep the Neighbors scary despite their disarming friendliness and the ease with which a single one can be dealt with if you aren’t considering the broader picture. There will be tight hallways where you know there will be a confrontation, but other times you might have something like the wide open neighborhood where you try and sneak around and hope to not earn any attention during your furtive exploration. My Friendly Neighborhood has quite a few puzzles to keep you moving around in the game’s current area of focus, a good deal of informational and interpretive puzzles joined by ones that focus more on grabbing the necessary items through small manipulations of the area. Unsurprisingly, a good deal of them tie to the game’s theming, such as playing a board game with a Neighbor or trying to learn the decorations in the studio’s play area so you can accurately mark them down. Locations are often made quite eerie with their relative emptiness or some effective lighting, the outside play area much more sinister at night while a place like the dingy sewer below the studio can use the usual tricks that make such a place uncomfortable to pull from. The game doesn’t forget it’s a horror game despite being clearly made out of love towards the iconography it’s twisting towards terror, your vulnerability keeping you on edge with the game only having a few jump scares and the rare cases of what might be considered puppet body horror that isn’t exactly disturbing since everything’s still made of felt.
My Friendly Neighborhood does include an additional major mode to tackle after you’ve cleared the main adventure, the Neighborhorde electing to focus on action pure and simple. You’ll be thrown into a cordoned off area from the story with the goal being to earn points by taking out puppets, the player needing to shoot targets to earn time, try to keep combos going by not taking damage, and manage their ammo by collecting the tokens dropped by the Neighbors to spend at nearby machines. There are unlockable characters and four stages in total to tackle, although when divorced of the long term survival considerations of the main adventure, the combat in My Friendly Neighborhood isn’t exactly thrilling. Neighborhorde does have a few tricks to make it tough at times like new Neighbor variants, but it’s more like a quick amusement to check out rather than something that will pull you back to the game to try and hit new high scores.
THE VERDICT: My Friendly Neighborhood is a heartfelt tribute to the Muppets that inspired it and yet manages to use them effectively for horror without losing its deeper message. It’s a game with tension, tough calls on how to fight, and the pressure of being in a dangerous situation, and it does so without using cheap tricks to make the Neighbors scary. The game is able to have messages of positivity despite the dark and eerie abandoned studio locations, puzzles keeping you moving and making judgment calls on how to survive in an effective and meaningful take on the mascot horror genre.
And so, I give My Friendly Neighborhood for PC…
A GREAT rating. There is a place for a game about puppets where they’re depicted as horrific creatures with blood and guts, but there’s also a place for this more earnest attempt to come up with a more believable reason why something akin to Sesame Street could suddenly go down a dark road. The game doesn’t need to dip into inappropriate territory, trying to keep the messaging of kid-friendly media present yet adding a more mature layer to it to ponder. It can be enjoyed as a game where you just blast puppets away with the alphabet, the ammo management and the way you handle danger with choices like when to use the tape adding some substance to the survival horror, and the puzzles work well in keeping you moving around and exploring without just being busywork. For fans of Jim Henson style puppetry though, the game feels like it has been designed by a kindred spirit rather than someone seeing a new angle for corrupting childhood iconography. It has a strong sense for what works in survival horror to build suspense and keep you on edge but it also pays tribute to the very thing it’s distorting for that unnerving sense of wrongness. It’s been said that gritty stories or horror are hopeful stories because they can show us that evil can be overcome even at our lowest point, and in a similar way, My Friendly Neighborhood works in its friendly message in a world that left their optimism behind. Neighborhorde was part of a free update after release as a little bonus, making its somewhat slight nature not much of an issue, the focus on a compelling main adventure definitely the wiser choice rather than trying to build up the action side into something different than an extension of the resource management of the core story mode.
My Friendly Neighborhood is a game that can be called wholesome and maybe even heart-warming without that detracting from its effectiveness as a horror title. Managing items and navigating interconnected places might mean people who don’t normally indulge in horror games might feel some strain trying to use this as an entry point, the game making you use tokens to pay for saves yet you’ll probably get more tokens then you’ll ever need seeming like a point that could cause some anxiety for the uninformed. It still works remarkably well for those who are well-traveled horror fans though, the game not going for easy scares almost making it more novel despite it wearing so many influences on its sleeve. My Friendly Neighborhood is a special kind of scary game, a labor of love that can leave you feeling warm despite the nerve-wracking encounters along the way.