My Friendly Neighborhood Review

Won’t you be my neighbor?

Letting loose and diving into the crazy side of gaming is a must for keeping your sanity intact. So, I present My Friendly Neighborhood if you're into stories like Candle Cove and Five Nights at Freddy's.

This game, cooked up by John Szymanski and Evan Szymanski, throws you into everyone's favorite Saturday morning puppet show. Picture this: the once-forgotten studio springs back to life and starts beaming out to the world. Now, what's the catch, you wonder? Well, the puppets pulled a Night at the Museum stunt and decided to stir up some trouble by coming to life.

At the start of the game, you meet Ricky, a sock puppet with one goal. To dissuade Gordon, the main protagonist, from disconnecting the antenna broadcasting nationwide. As witty and charming as this little guy can be, I don’t mind his clever ways of trying to talk me out of things. I found it a welcome addition to the story; it never got annoying or repetitive.

Ricky is just a small part of the MFN family because we have Norman, the game's first puppet, to be showcased. His dialogue is great, and so is the rest of the MFN cast. When Norman starts talking to his own echo due to his loneliness, I almost thought he was talking with somebody in the same room… but nope! He’s just crazy and alone with thoughts of murder in his head. All the dialogue you will hear completes the experience in the most joyful and scary way!

I stuck around all of the major areas to see what everyone had to say next in their murder-filled conversations with themselves. I fell in love with its Resident Evil-style gameplay, with doors that seamlessly creak open and let you enter a new area while giving you inventory slots like RE4!

The collection of puzzles in this game are simple and straight to the point for a casual gamer. Nothing is too challenging, and save stations are always close by if you choose to find them, with at least two tokens in each area for a panic save when you're on the verge of death. The use of duct tape is handy when you need to permanently clear an area by taping up your puppet friends and giving you complete freedom of the zone. You won't be able to do that in every zone, so use your resources wisely. Now onto weapons.

I hope you know the English alphabet because you will shoot letters from all your guns! You start with a pistol called the Rolodexer, which makes a pretty cool sound when fired. This game might have one of the most original starter guns I've seen.

Find all the cheat codes scattered around the world and go for a second playthrough with them activated; you won't regret it. Once you have beaten the game and hopefully played for a second time with cheats enabled, you should go for Neighborhorde Mode allowing enemies to come after you from all sides of the map. It will give you a heavy machine gun for your puppet-killing fantasies as icing on the cake!

Learn more about My Friendly Neighborhood by visiting the official website.

DEVELOPED BY:

John Szymanski, Evan Szymanski

PUBLISHED BY:

DreadXP

*This review has been lightly edited for clarity and was originally published in Issue #1 of Fearzine Magazine which was distributed in June 2024.

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