Poppy Playtime Chapters 3 and 4: Are They Worth The Return To Playtime Co.?

The Poppy Playtime franchise started out strong with its first two installments, Poppy Playtime Chapter 1: A Tight Squeeze and Poppy Playtime Chapter 2: Fly in a Web. With those two games, Poppy Playtime climbed the charts of mascot horror and became one of the best in the genre. 

But along came Poppy Playtime’s downfall. It started with Poppy Playtime Chapter 3: Deep Sleep and only got worse with Poppy Playtime Chapter 4: Safe Haven. Developer Mob Entertainment released Chapter 3 in January 2024 and Chapter 4 in January 2025. Both follow the same single-player format as the previous two games and are available to play on Steam, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, Xbox, Windows, and Mobile. 

The Beginning of The End 

The story picks up at Chapter 2’s cliffhanger, and in the beginning, seems like a promising game. For the first two hours, the game appears to be well-made with impressive visuals, some of the best voice acting of the series, and some rather interesting enemies, but in the final four hours, the game falls apart.

The mechanics stay the same as the first two games; the nameless main character still has that grab pack with two hands. In fact, the grab pack is one of the good things in Chapter 3. It’s utilized in new and more interesting ways. For example, there’s a new hand you can equip that allows the player to jump across a large gap.

With the grab pack being upgraded, the puzzles get harder. Too hard. They’re significantly more difficult but not in a consistent way. The player starts off solving simple puzzles and then suddenly there’s a jump in difficulty, and they’re stuck facing puzzles you'd expect to be at the end of the game. This unexpected fluctuation sticks around throughout the whole game. 

Chapter 3, like Chapter 2, expands its location. This would be a great thing if it weren’t for the environments being so dark that you can’t see anything, leaving the player with the feeling that they are always missing something. 

As always, the character designs are rather interesting. I’d like to point out CatNap. The final boss provides a welcoming amount of difficulty that almost manages to save the entire game. Almost. CatNap brings the perfect balance of challenge and fear when on screen, but without CatNap, the game would have no sense of terror like the previous chapters. 

While the first two games were fantastic, and Chapter 3 had some decent highlights- interesting new characters and amazing voice acting- something was missing in this third game, leaving the whole game to feel hollow.

My Rating

Pouring Salt in the Wound

Chapter 3 set the bar low, so low that Chapter 4 could’ve easily beaten it, but Chapter 4 managed to dig the franchise an even deeper grave. The major issue with Chapter 4 is that its six-hour runtime is riddled with glitches and bugs that make the game virtually unplayable. 

The first hour and a half lulls the player into a false belief that Chapter 4 could be better than Chapter 3, but once you’re out of that first impression, the remaining time gets engulfed in audio bugs, slow frame rates, and even glitching bad enough that the player falls out of the map. 

Stress replaces the fear that comes with playing a Poppy Playtime game. Instead of the player being scared of what’s around the corner, they’re scared of what could possibly go wrong. 

I will give Chapter 4 one thing: it has two new interesting antagonists- Yarnaby and The Doctor. But with these new characters come new problems. 

The biggest glitches come from Yarnaby’s AI. It’s completely broken, sometimes he never spawns in, and other times his actions are coded so wrong that if he’s there, the game is unbeatable. With all of these glitches, the reloading checkpoint button becomes the player's favorite button because of how many times it's the only way to free themselves from a game-breaking bug. 

There is one main thing that makes a Poppy Playtime game: the puzzles. I wish I could say Chapter 4 at least got its puzzles right, but it didn’t. Unlike the previous Chapter, the puzzles aren’t too hard; they’re completely broken from all the glitches in the game. 

Chapter 4 was by far the worst Chapter of Poppy Playtime. The scariest part of the game wasn’t the monstrous toys, but instead the dread of the game breaking for the hundredth time. If it weren’t for the new and interesting characters- that could be so much fun if their software actually worked- I’d give the game a zero out of five Cyclones. 

My Rating

There is still hope with the franchise since there will be a Chapter 5 in February 2026, but will that be enough to undo the damage Chapters 3 and 4 have done?