If Elmo Had a Violent Side: My Friendly Neighborhood

What do you get when you mix Resident Evil and Sesame Street? My Friendly Neighborhood. 

My Friendly Neighborhood is a survival horror developed by Evan Szymanski and Ducky Dev Games. It was released in July of 2023 and is available through Steam, Windows, and Xbox. 

My Friendly Neighborhood is a game that makes you experience it alone, since there is no multiplayer feature. That’s five or more hours of the player alone in the titular My Friendly Neighborhood. But they’re never truly alone…

You play as a repairman named Gordan. He’s called to the scene of a rundown broadcasting station to fix an antenna. This station used to be the home of an iconic children’s show, My Friendly Neighborhood. He suddenly finds himself trapped with a bunch of sentient puppets and is forced to fight his way out. 

These antagonists classify My Friendly Neighborhood as a mascot horror, like Five Nights at Freddy’s. Unlike other mascot horror games, My Friendly Neighborhood has a huge and very detailed cast of characters. 

There’s Ricky, a sock puppet that helps guide the player through the game. Norman, the star of My Friendly Neighborhood, that’s reduced to a side antagonist to let others shine. Ray, a not-so-handy handyman, who serves as a major antagonist for a section of the game. 

The best part of My Friendly Neighborhood’s cast is that they aren’t what they seem. There’s a piece to the story of My Friendly Neighborhood that is bound to catch any player off guard, which makes it stand out amongst a sea of mascot horror. 

My only issue with the characters comes from the fighting mechanics. In the early game, you only have a melee weapon, forcing you to get up close and personal with the enemies. This would be fine if the hit boxes were easier to hit and didn’t constantly force you to lose health. 

This issue goes away later in the game when you get long-range weapons like the Novelist, the Rolodexer, and Punctuation. All the weapons are nods to writing and even shoot letters instead of bullets. My Friendly Neighborhood doesn’t just put incredible detail into their weapon designs, but their environments as well.

The different brightly colored environments of My Friendly Neighborhood are the homes to some antagonists. In one section, you have to avoid being detected by a Big Bird-like abomination while running around a set to collect the needed items to complete a task. 

The maps can be rather complicated to follow and understand, leading to a lot of doubling back and retracing your steps. The biggest part of having to go back and forth that bothered me was every time you go through a door, there’s a loading screen. This broke immersion for me because the screen took a while to load. 

A benefit of the map system is the feature that tells you if a room is completely looted or not. The rooms on the map change from red to blue once there is nothing left in that room for you to do. This makes completionists’ lives easier.

The maps also mark your safe rooms. Where you can save, heal, and store things from your inventory. The saving system adds a level of stress, because you have to pay for a save with money you collect around the map. Which means you can only save as many times as you can afford.

The money feature urges players to continue to explore, and when they do, they get to hear the amazing lines delivered by the voice actors.

The background dialogue from the lingering felt fur balls adds humor to the game. The line deliveries and the content of the lines themselves got a few genuine chuckles from me, the first few times I heard them.

After a while, it grew annoying because the puppets just repeated the same phrases over and over. By the fifth time of Leonard teaching me how to count by swallowing my hands, I was ready to turn off my volume.

My Friendly Neighborhood encourages replaying with its four endings: good, neutral, bad, and secret. It wasn’t enough to get me to play again, though; I got the neutral ending and called it quits.

My Friendly Neighborhood was advertised and marketed as a mascot horror, but it is truly an adventure puzzle game with some horror elements sprinkled around. 

As a horror game, it's not all that great. There are a few decent scares, but nothing that lingers past that initial jumpscare. However, as a darkly comedic adventure game with a very interesting, different story, it stands out. 

Looking at the game from a horror standpoint, I’d give it a 1.5 out of five rating, but looking at the game as a whole and not just a horror game, I’d give it a different rating.

My Rating: