Survival Horror and Optimism: The My Friendly Neighborhood Experience

The world of horror gaming is a fascinating one because while there are often original aspects within each game, it’s also so common anymore to borrow some tried-and-true formulas from games we’ve loved over time. Some people might complain, having a desire for purely original concepts and gameplay, and while I agree that originality will usually make for an exceptional experience, the originality still has to resonate. It still has to perform well on its own. That’s where applying original concepts to formats we already love can sometimes be just what we need to have a memorable time.

My Friendly Neighborhood does this exceptionally, feeling like a classic survival horror game with a fun, original concept.

If this is your first time hearing of this game, I am beyond delighted to enlighten you! My Friendly Neighborhood follows the story of a maintenance man named Gordon, a crotchety, middle-aged man with some heavy baggage, who is tasked with turning off the signal for MFN when the puppets turned it back on after a significant period of being canceled. Along the way, Gordon must fight puppets (the game refers to them as “neighbors”) who have become violent, navigate treacherous obstacles, and combat his own inner demons that he picked up after fighting in a war that changed the neighborhood for the worse.

The game doesn’t hide the format it was inspired by, but that doesn’t stop it from feeling so fresh and original. It feels like Sesame Street and Resident Evil had a kooky, muppet-like baby that makes you laugh, but also scream two seconds later. You shoot puppets with a gun that fires giant, metallic letters, tie them up with duct tape to keep them from coming back (akin to lighting the zombies on fire in RE1), and constantly take stock of whether or not you have enough ammo and healing items in comparison to how many neighbors you may have to outrun. Cute!

It has all the bells and whistles of a survival horror, in that you navigate an intricately created map (and if you’re like me, you checked it every five seconds just in case you somehow started going the wrong direction), deciding if it’s better to sneak around enemies to conserve ammo or to go in with your ABC’s blazing, and a couple of boss battles that made me think “you know what? Maybe going ham on shooting puppets wasn’t a good idea.” All in all, I was incredibly impressed by everything the game had to offer.

While the gameplay was a fresh take on a classic model horror fans know and love, what impressed me more than I thought it would was this story about a neighborhood that was just looking for a little light in a time of unfathomable darkness.

There was a line that Ricky, a sock puppet that acts as a friendly motivator for Gordon throughout the game, says toward the end that really hit hard, for me. “You know why I think we got canceled? Because people like darkness more than light.” I couldn’t help but think about how social media platforms like Twitter (X now, but I refuse to accept the change) push negative content into our eyeballs more often than not. I thought of how often we’re bombarded by sad news and the world becoming a more miserable place for a lot of us, even our own personal lives being the bearer of this news. I thought of how in moments like these, we can fall so deep into the darkness, we start to find comfort in it. I’m not just talking about dark humor and coping in a way where we try to find some power over it.

I’m talking about being so deep into darkness, it starts to feel familiar. Comfortable, even.

A big plot point of My Friendly Neighborhood is the puppets deciding to watch and study other shows while they were canceled. They found content that was so dark, and they consumed it long enough to make several of them turn monstrous, some of them to the point where they look like feral, decaying versions of themselves. Most of the “monstrous” puppets we see throughout the game look like your average puppets, except they’re actively trying to kill us, thinking they’re actually being a friend. Once we find the big underbelly of a once delightful television studio, we see how a life of all darkness and no light turned so many of the puppets into twisted, decaying husks that couldn’t even come close to sparking the same joy as they did before.

In a sense, I feel like we’re the puppets. We’re an eclectic group of people with different strengths, with a desire for purpose and camaraderie. Once we let too much darkness in, it changes us, so much to the point where if we really took an objective look at ourselves, we might be a little surprised. Sometimes it causes us to lash out, to be unkind to ourselves in a way that keeps spiraling into a dark hole of self-loathing, even if we consciously believe that we’re being the same person we’ve always been. But with enough purpose, with enough attention to spreading love where we can, in a way that only we as individuals can do, the world doesn’t have to look so dark all the time.

You eventually find the final address that I felt really brought us home for the message of this story, a heartfelt letter to the audience, encouraging them to “have faith in the light. Sometimes it may be scary, sometimes it’s hard to know what’s right and wrong, because good and bad are all jumbled up and confusing. And when that happens it can hurt a lot.”

The awareness the game’s story has for just how gray areas exist in simply being human blew me away. It beautifully offered a bit of optimism, reminding us that it’s not always easy to know how to spread love, that learning to find the light often means feeling the pain all over again. It’s like a parting message, emphasizing how important it is to have faith, if even just to safely navigate the darkness.

You may not think a survival horror game where puppets teach you how to count by swallowing their fists could be this deep, but these little nuggets of wisdom about navigating times of darkness felt too poignant to ignore. I went into the game knowing I’d enjoy it for its kooky take on a game format we’re familiar with, but I finished the game being reminded that the world is a messy place, and we’re all just trying to find some light.

While the darkness can be so overwhelming, changing us in ways we aren’t always aware of, My Friendly Neighborhood reminds us that all you need is an optimistic sock puppet, despite how long it took him to tell us where to find a flashlight, to make the world a bit brighter.