Who doesn’t like The Muppetts and Sesame Street? That gentle, witty, sweet, but not pastel tone, where things are treated with intelligence, humor and affection, treating children and not so children as beings capable of thinking and not as idiots. Maybe that’s why horror games that present us with adorable pets that turn out to be monsters that want to eat our faces have been so popular for years. They’re scary, but not too scary, they appeal to our nostalgia and, moreover, they scratch at that same point that those couple of masterpieces that so many different generations have grown up with do.
That’s why it was only a matter of time before someone was more explicitly inspired by both. And while they were at it, what if instead of making a horror game, they made a survival horror in the style of Resident Evil or Silent Hill? That’s what John and Evan Szymanski must have thought and the result was My Friendly Neighborhood.
The premise of the game is simple. We are Gordon, a handyman who must enter an old building where the My Friendly Neighborhood show – a sort of Sesame Street that, after being cancelled a month earlier due to a horrible act of cannibalism among dolls, has started rebroadcasting old episodes directly to local TV sets. We wander in there to see what’s going on with the antenna only to discover that, to the surprise of no one reading this, our friendly neighbors may be our neighbors, but they are not friendly, and just as they were cancelled for devouring each other, they have now decided that it sounds like a better plan to devour us.
Our duty is simple: get them to stop broadcasting episodes and run away from there. To do it without getting eaten, not so much. With survival horror mechanics in the style of Resident Evil 4, we have limited ammunition, a character that moves relatively slowly and slowly, an inventory with a limited amount of space that we will have to manage and some dolls that, besides being extremely convincing in their cuteness -they could be real puppets from a Saturday morning show-, resist more shots than we could expect in the first instance. Advantages of not being made of flesh and blood.
The game was released last July 18 and is available on Steam. With very positive reviews and starting to attract the attention of the public, this is a game that will delight fans of games like Five Nights At Freddy’s as well as the more classic style of games like Resident Evil. A real gem that could go unnoticed, but you should jump headlong into playing it.
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