Be My Neighbor: what ‘My Friendly Neighborhood’ does right with horror.
It’s been a another terrible day. Nothing on TV last night, your boss has been riding you over being ‘unprofessional’, and you get stuck with a job right at the end of your shift. The world sucks right now, and it doesn’t look like it’s getting better any time soon.
I probably just described how a lot of people are feeling right now, right? Well, it also describes a lot of people at pretty much any time in history. Ever since we decided to gather around river valleys and start things like agriculture and shared language, there’s been those times where the world just feels doomed and nothing seems to work out right.
It’s also the opening scene for ‘My Friendly Neighborhood’, which is probably in my top 10 indie games for the year.
To start, I am going to do my best to avoid spoilers for this game. I want people to play and experience it, and it is still new, so I only think it’d be fair to avoid getting too deep into some things.
My Friendly Neighborhood, the creation of John and Evan Szymanski and published by DreadXP, has a fairly simple premise on the surface: you, the average handyman, are tasked with turning off a signal antenna that’s been broadcasting old reruns over other programming. It doesn’t take long until you end up finding out why: the puppets from an old children’s property have come to life and are wreaking havoc in the studio, and it’s up to you to stop them.
But, you’re not exactly the spry lad of your youth and all you have to carry stuff is your suitcase, so you have to be smart about your moves. Manage your inventory, learn the layout of the studio, and evade the murderous puppets as you contend with Ricky, the sock-puppet that seems to know a little too much about what happened in the Friendly Neighborhood.
Like I said, simple premise on the surface. And as far as hooks go, it’s a pretty good one with a solid foundation based in a lot of well-proven, if familiar, horror game tropes. Were it just that, then it’d still be a solid horror game experience. But the best horror games always have that small bit more just under the surface, the tendrils of some yawning beast lurking just behind the shadows that is meant to draw you in and pull you down into it’s world and lore.
For example, another top 10 of the year: Dredge.
I swear I’m going somewhere with this.
Dredge is another horror game that released this year with a similar ‘simple’ design underneath: You run a fishing boat. The wide ocean is scary and unexplored. Go solve some mysteries, find some doodads and make some friends. Keep an eye on your inventory and watch out for your sanity meter, or face some of the mysteries the depths hold for you.
But it doesn’t take long for Dredge to sink it’s hooks in and begin to unravel a little more. The ports, the places of rest that you find on the islands dotting the sea, all seem just a little off. Something doesn’t quite feel right when you talk to the fisherman about the strange catch you brought in. There’s that old man in the lonely house just out of the bay. Strangers in thick robes sit on the rocks, asking for meals. And as you venture further out, that same trader with that same smile seems to just be…everywhere. No matter the danger around, she’s always waiting for you, a friendly smile and a word of caution in a hostile land.
It becomes unsettling, almost wrong at points, but it also serves to highlight the world that you find yourself in. You learn more about the islands in the face of a woman willing to live on her own than you would in, say, an audio log you find strewn about a map. The way that the lighthouse crone glares at you as you walk past, the bitterness of how the separated brothers talk about one another tinged with concerns over their health, the way the fishmonger closes himself up in his shop once you fetch him some grotesque monstrosity from the deep. The dispassionate, almost mirror-like glare of the Collector’s glasses as he sends you out to find another lost treasure.
Dredge works wonderfully at this because it understands a basic concept about the genre of horror that a lot of other horror works might not: That the stage you set is as important as the characters on it.
And we’re back to the show.
My Friendly Neighborhood sets this stage wonderfully with the first moments, played out in front of the nightly television. Switching between channels in an idle haze, from a discussion on the paranormal to a banal comedy, to the nightly news. And channel after channel passes by in a haze, you see the old lot come to life, static filling the screen as a familiar yet foreign song cuts through the signal.
We’re all waiting for you! So come and see your Family…
Then you get your options, get your first file (that job order with the complaint about your attitude), you meet Gordon, voiced by meme poster and angry skeleton Tom Schalk, and you’re off to explore the set. And it’s empty. Quiet. No signs of a break-in, no vandalism. Even the chalk drawings on the sidewalk in front of the studio are still perfectly preserved, a moment in time where everything didn’t seem so dark. Only the noise of the city outside, the birds overhead, and the light from the antenna blinking steadily atop the main building. It’s a good indicator of where to go. And inside you meet Ricky, voiced by real-life puppet youtuber Arlo, who immediately tries to convince you not to shut down the broadcast but, inadvertently, helps you with you first task by coughing up a keycard.
I mention the actors here because they do an excellent job conveying these characters, and that’s going to be important later, but they have an excellent chemistry together during these scenes that plays almost like a slapstick bit you’d see on an old comedy show. Intentional, of course, but it hits that feeling of nostalgia without pandering towards a property, and it’s a testament to their work that helps to bring the game together.
It isn’t long after you get that keycard that you head inside the studio, following a mysterious figure, and meet your first friendly neighbor. Norman, the normal puppet. Literally bending over backwards and flailing uselessly against a door. The game uses the ‘creepy thing’s shadow just out around the corner, whatever could it be?’ shot as the starter, which is a trope for a reason, but it doesn’t give you a cutscene to reveal the horror that awaits you. And you can just…watch him do it. Bending completely back until his head nearly touches his legs, arms flailing like a tube man every time he bashes his head against the wall harmlessly. There’s no blood, no raggedy features. To Norman, it’s almost like a game.
And if you get too close, he spots you and waves.
This was the point that sealed the game for me, in total honesty. Especially in horror games, you expect something grotesque because so much of our horror is built into a rejection of the status quo. We expect monsters because we don’t expect monsters in reality. There’s an innate fear in something familiar being ‘un-familiar’, twisted and turned into the obscene. Dredge (we’re back to Dredge!) does it wonderfully, even making it a game mechanic.
But My Friendly Neighborhood doesn’t do that here. Norman never sprouts tentacles or gushes blood, he never un-stitches himself to become a spider or some evil, writhing monster. Norman is Norman. He’s genuinely happy to see you and wants to be a friend, even if that means his hugs are a bit too much for the old and grumpy Gordon, which leads to him falling down and taking damage because he just can’t keep up with that excited energy. If you’ve ever owned a puppy that gets a bit too rambunctious and knocks something over, or plays just a little too rough and hurts you, then imagine that but in puppet form.
(There is one exception to this rule but I won’t spoil it here.)
To them, all of this is just another game. The puppets are forgetful and will return to a neutral position if you leave the room, waiting for their friend to come back. When you finally get armed with a wrench and later a ‘gun’ that shoots big shiny ABCs, they will ragdoll and laugh about it, or pout, but then get right back up to play again once you leave the room, unless you tape them down with duct tape to keep them from moving. Norman is fond of telling you ‘Goodbye!’ as he spirals off into a wall or crumples onto the floor, as if he knows you’re busy and will see you again soon.
This is where the classic ‘survival’ aspect of survival horror comes into play: as your enemies are essentially immortal, you need to choose how you approach each room with regards to your inventory. Do you waste ammo and tape on making sure this room stays clear, or do you try to avoid a grab and save your resources? Are you ‘really’ going to be traversing this space a lot, and is it worth it to make sure your return trips are safe, or are you confident that you can make it through without using up your letters? Even your saving and healing is limited by tokens, which also take up precious inventory space and ensure that you can’t constantly checkpoint yourself to ensure a victory condition. And though you have a shared inventory box to stash stuff away, even that is limited to ensure that you actually use the things you carry instead of hoarding it away for eternity like I usually do in these games.
The other side of this equation, the ‘horror’ aspect, doesn’t come from the threat of the enemies themselves but from what they represent. The part about it being a ‘game’ for them, specifically takes on a wholly new dimension when you realize that they’ve been trapped in this place for years now. Alone. Bereft of purpose. Awake and unable to speak to a world that has, sadly, forgotten them. And you can hear it in their voices when they’re talking about the fun of swapping limbs, eating gravel, shipping hamburgers in the mail or shoving their hands in their mouths and swallowing as hard as they can. And especially when they see you, their tone turns desperate and lonely.
C.S. Lewis once said ‘Hell is no one but yourself, forever and ever.’ Anton Chekov’s ‘The Bet’ is a short story about how isolation is worse than death, a pain unbearable to the soul. OldBoy, one of the best movies ever made, hinges on the madness of Oh Dae-Su caused by his twenty years of isolation and the intense hatred and joy he explores on his escape. The theme of isolation leading to madness is well-explored, but there is also another fear as well at play. So let’s ask a question:
Have you ever thought about what happens when you’re forgotten?
In the progress of time, there will come a point where all that you know and hold dear will be gone. The things you enjoyed will cease to exist. The cities and towns you grew up in will fade into nothing. Everything that you know and hold dear will, at some point, return to the starstuff it was constructed from. It may take millions of years after you are gone, or it may be as quick as a generation, but time pauses for no man or wonder of this world.
Now imagine if that comes to pass, but instead of being gone, you still exist. Trapped in the same four walls, unable to escape as the world passes you by. In stasis, nothing ever changing, the same day in and day out for years.
What does that do to a mind?
As you explore the Neighborhood, you see these signs start to piece together, especially in the ‘Large’ puppets that are unique to each stage. Daisy the Bird, who lost her glasses and now wanders on sound alone. Ray the Handyman, wanting to ‘fix’ the world with just his wrench. And others that you meet while you try to make your way up to the antenna. All of them manifesting their grief and sadness in ways that are unintentionally destructive to the world around them, unable to process the idea of hurting another person even as they threaten you. Though we are the protagonist of the story, the horror lies in how the world has left them in this state. And there’s no over-arching villain, no seedy businessman or evil overlord plotting behind the scenes. Only the sadness of what is gone, and that deep burning hope to see the light again.
And that’s what makes the game stand out to me. It’s a game where the horror is observed, watched through these small windows and minor tragedies, in the eyes of a man who’d seen too much of his own life go down those horrible roads. Once again, I have to bring up the voice direction of the game: Tom Schalk and Arlo do an excellent job as Gordon and Ricky, and Brendan Blaber absolutely nailed the direction with every character.
In my Silent Hill piece, I talked about the difference between two genres of horror: immersive (where you can’t shoot your problems) and survival (where you need to manage resources and ‘survive’ your threat). There’s a mind-boggling amount of sub-genres when it comes to horror, and it’s hard to categorize them all into neat little places because the genre is inherently interpretative. No one is going to view the same thing as horrific, as we all have different experiences and views of the world. There is a subset of horror that has recently been very popular, however, that is called ‘Mascot’ horror. One of the more recent ones, Poppy Playtime, has been seen in a lot of places and has, on the surface, a similar theme to children’s tv mascots turning violent and uncontrolled.
And though My Friendly Neighborhood ticks the marks of the genre (it has colorful characters based on beloved children’s properties, it subverts them by making them horrific, they often cannot be stopped in any meaningful way), I don’t classify it as such. Not only do you have more agency as Gordon in dealing with the threat, but I don’t see the puppets of the Neighborhood as horrific. I see their situation as horrific, and their reaction to it tragic. There are indeed horror elements in the game, but they are done in a unique and haunting way that makes the horror less of something to endure and more something to study, to watch and with some time and cleverness, to help.
Much like how Dredge’s horror is in the world that it builds and the implications therein, My Friendly Neighborhood builds its horror in the steps that led to this point and the unknown future that awaits when you finally complete the job and are presented with your choice at the end. Or if you just get back in the truck and drive home, that is totally an option as well that counts for an ending. Nothing is stopping you, but you. I love it when games give you that option, it’s such a small detail but such a fun way of showing agency for your character.
In Conclusion
Should you try the game?
I think that it’s worth a look, and it even comes with a free demo attached (the level in the final game is re-mixed so you can’t use demo knowledge to complete it) to give you a chance to try it out.
And especially in a year that’s replete with horror games from AAA titles to indie projects like this one, My Friendly Neighborhood stands out in a lot of ways. From the time you step out of that truck and into the studio, the game is a fun and intriguing example of the genre with a stellar cast and a satisfying loop that doesn’t wear out its welcome. It’s like stepping back into a familiar block and being welcomed home.
My first ‘traditional’ review of a sorts, thank you for stopping by. If you like what I do or have something to say, reach out to me on twitter at SquidRadio, or RealSquidRadio@gmail.com. Be safe and be happy.
