Just like the deranged kids’s programming offered by the 5 Nights at Freddy’s and Chucky sequence earlier than it, My Pleasant Neighborhood takes everybody’s favourite childhood recollections and converts them right into a ugly state of affairs the place you’re preventing on your life. The outcome, at the very least primarily based on my journey thus far, is a extremely entertaining pseudo-horror recreation crammed with face-slapping goofball murderers and extremely disturbing musical numbers. Whereas it actually leans far more closely into silliness than it does horror, I’m fairly having fun with the abundantly disturbing journey thus far.
My Pleasant Neighborhood solutions the hilarious and fully pointless query: “What if Resident Evil occurred on Sesame Avenue?”, and that Raccoon Metropolis inspiration is obvious in every thing from the shambling muppets to the grid-based briefcases used for stock administration. I even had a restricted variety of recreation saves and was compelled to spend valuable recreation tokens scavenged from ranges to save lots of my progress, or threat dropping all of it when a dopey-faced fuzz buddy hugged me to demise.
Enjoying as a handyman named Gordon who was referred to as to the scene of an deserted broadcasting station that was as soon as dwelling to an iconic kids’s present, I all of the sudden discovered myself trapped by a bunch of insane, sentient puppets that appeared very desperate to homicide me on sight. That extraordinarily sturdy premise paved the way in which for loads of cartoonish shenanigans and references to the Sesame Avenue-watching days of my youth, and that made for an immensely entertaining handful of hours.
However the place Resident Evil is understood for its darkish tone and terrifying moments, My Pleasant Neighborhood largely makes gentle of the style with brightly coloured environments and a few extraordinarily foolish antagonists. In a single part, I needed to keep away from the eye of a large Massive Chook-like abomination that needed to devour me as I collected letter tiles to move a spelling take a look at, whereas in one other I discovered myself in sewers that served because the area to an especially Grouch-y tenant who hoped to bonk me over the pinnacle with a wrench.
“Though the sections I performed by no means hit the horror spot I hoped they’d, the excessive variety of memorable laughs alongside the way in which largely made up for that absence.”
Though I bought a kick out of most of what I noticed, one nagging annoyance is that, whereas sneaking round to finish puzzles, I needed to relisten to quite a lot of the identical voice strains from the puppets as they flailed round relentlessly. It appears they solely say new issues if you transfer on to new areas and ranges, so when it took me a bit to get by means of one part or if I died a few times, I needed to take heed to quite a lot of the identical nonsense a number of instances. That did make a few of the novelty run skinny within the restricted time I spent with it.
Nearly every thing about this so-called horror recreation doesn’t take itself significantly. My weapons used rolodexes of the alphabet to shoot large metallic letters at my puppet pursuers, defeated enemies can be despatched ragdolling throughout the room with a yelp, and the complete solid of characters repeatedly monologued demented kids’s programming at me that together with issues like instructing me a way of studying how one can rely that concerned consuming my very own fingers. As somebody who enjoys snort, all of that largely labored for me. Though the sections I performed by no means hit the horror spot I hoped they’d, the excessive variety of memorable laughs alongside the way in which largely made up for that absence.
However the lack of actual moments of horror is actually noticeable, making for a really completely different expertise from friends like 5 Nights at Freddy’s, the place there are many shriek-inducing scenes regardless of the kid-friendly material. Even after I was murdered by maniac muppets, there weren’t any soar scares or genuinely terrifying moments to be discovered (at the very least within the early sections I performed), and that was admittedly a little bit of a bummer.
Even so, as somebody who fairly enjoys goofy, irreverent video games, I’m excited to see extra of My Pleasant Neighborhood and its unlovable solid of characters when it makes its debut later this month.