It’s difficult to recommend or describe My Friendly Neighborhood without using the phrase “and I’m not kidding.”
MFN is a short, speedrunner-friendly first-person survival horror game. Right from the start, it’s got a solid atmosphere of dread that’s carried by its audio design, with a setting that effectively mixes the mundane and the bizarre.
It’s also a game about fighting homicidal children’s show mascots. Where another game might have zombies or ghosts, MFN’s corridors are infested with knockoff Muppets.
It’s the Jim Henson version of George Romero’s The Crazies, and it works a lot better than it has any right to. I’ve been trying to figure out why, and I think it’s because its developers, John & Evan Szymanski and their team, chose to play the concept absolutely straight.
MFN absolutely commits to its premise, right from the start. If it spent any time at all winking at the camera – if there was so much as a minute where it tried to let you as the player know that MFN is in on its own joke – the whole game would be insufferable. Instead, it’s a creepy trip through a childhood dream gone rancid.
Imagine every joke you’ve ever heard about looking at children’s entertainment from an adult perspective, and turn it into a game about being hunted for sport by the cast of “Sesame Street.” That’s My Friendly Neighborhood.
You play as MFN as Gordon O’Brian, a handyman for the city who’s sent to the abandoned studio where they used to film a children’s show called “My Friendly Neighborhood.” A few nights ago, someone started broadcasting old episodes of “Neighborhood” from the studio, so Gordon’s here to disable the broadcast antenna.
A broken elevator forces Gordon to take the long way around to the studio’s roof. In the process, he discovers that many of the puppet performers from “Neighborhood” were abandoned at the same time as the studio. The “Neighbors” have been down here for over a decade, rotting in the old tunnels and dusty sets, and are so far gone that they try to kill Gordon on sight.
MFN is aiming for a PG-13 sort of horror, but it’s still remarkably effective. It’s not above the occasional jump scare, but what got me more than anything else was how the puppets never shut up.
Most of the puppets have their own collection of monologues, which range from normal kids’ television stuff to something more twisted. There’s one bit from Norman, the everyman puppet, where he talks about how they’ve survived all this time by “eating all the channels that no one watches,” which is going to stick with me for a while.
That’s an exception to the rule, though. Most of the puppets will randomly talk about hygiene, crafts, or how much they love getting mail, right before they turn around and try to kill you. It’s a constant background hum that consistently kept me on edge, especially when two or more of the Neighbors are talking at once.
The combat in MFN is simple, but it’s right out of the original playbook for survival horror. You can KO a puppet with a couple of hits from your wrench, or use a couple of makeshift firearms that were left lying around the studio, but they’ll get back up the next time you enter the room.
The only way to keep a puppet down is to wrap it in duct tape, but there isn’t a lot of that to go around. You get a fair amount of ammunition in MFN, but the smart play is to be careful about who you fight and where. It’s worth permanently disabling puppets in high-traffic areas, but it’s better to slip by unnoticed.
In a similar vein, the puzzles in MFN are relatively simple. A few are just key hunts, but a couple more require some thought, and it’ll be useful to keep notes. They also get better as they go, particularly towards the back half of the game, which is also when the map opens up.
If I’ve got one major criticism of MFN as a whole, it’s that it doesn’t highlight interactive objects in your environment unless you’re looking right at them. I was stuck for a solid half-hour on an early puzzle, and it turned out the last piece I needed was right out in the open and roughly the same color as the crate it was on.
I’ve also burned a lot of time in-game looking for the one last item I needed to mark a room off my map, and it turned out to be a single vending-machine token. MFN could use some good old-fashioned glowing items.
It could also use a couple of the simpler quality-of-life bonuses that other survival horror games have developed over the years, like not making you throw quest items in with your health and ammo. You play a lot of “inventory Tetris” in MFN, but it loses out on some of the attached satisfaction when you have to reshuffle the whole damn thing to cram 4 theater masks or a tank of hydraulic fluid into Gordon’s briefcase.
All that aside, if you’re as big of a survival horror nerd as I am, My Friendly Neighborhood was made for you by your people. It manages to overcome the sheer lunacy of its premise to create a game that’s varied, smart, and incredibly tense, despite the fact you’re running for your life from a bunch of store-brand Fraggles.
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