Just like the deranged youngsters’s programming supplied by the 5 Nights at Freddy’s and Chucky sequence earlier than it, My Pleasant Neighborhood takes everybody’s favourite childhood reminiscences and converts them right into a grotesque state of affairs the place you’re preventing on your life. The end result, at the very least primarily based on my journey up to now, is a extremely entertaining pseudo-horror recreation crammed with face-slapping goofball murderers and extremely disturbing musical numbers. Whereas it definitely leans way more closely into silliness than it does horror, I’m fairly having fun with the abundantly disturbing journey up to now.
My Pleasant Neighborhood solutions the hilarious and fully pointless query: “What if Resident Evil passed off 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 pressured to spend valuable recreation tokens scavenged from ranges to avoid wasting my progress, or danger dropping all of it when a dopey-faced fuzz buddy hugged me to dying.
Enjoying as a handyman named Gordon who was known as to the scene of an deserted broadcasting station that was as soon as residence to an iconic youngsters’s present, I abruptly discovered myself trapped by a bunch of insane, sentient puppets that appeared very desirous to homicide me on sight. That extraordinarily sturdy premise paved the best way 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 mild 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 an enormous Large Hen-like abomination that needed to devour me as I collected letter tiles to move a spelling check, whereas in one other I discovered myself in sewers that served because the area to a particularly Grouch-y tenant who hoped to bonk me over the pinnacle with a wrench.
“Although the sections I performed by no means hit the horror spot I hoped they’d, the excessive variety of memorable laughs alongside the best way largely made up for that absence.”
Though I received 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 a variety of the identical voice traces from the puppets as they flailed round relentlessly. It appears they solely say new issues while you transfer on to new areas and ranges, so when it took me a bit to get by way of one part or if I died a few times, I needed to hearken to a variety of the identical nonsense a number of instances. That did make among 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 whole solid of characters repeatedly monologued demented youngsters’s programming at me that together with issues like instructing me a technique of studying the best way to rely that concerned consuming my very own palms. As somebody who enjoys a great snigger, all of that largely labored for me. Although the sections I performed by no means hit the horror spot I hoped they’d, the excessive variety of memorable laughs alongside the best way largely made up for that absence.
However the lack of actual moments of horror is definitely 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 once I was murdered by maniac muppets, there weren’t any bounce 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.