I'm not a mascot horror guy, but Poppy Playtime has always been one of the rare ones that I think works. Like, yes, it too is just a brightly coloured vehicle to sell ugly-ass toys to kids (there's literally a dude in the middle of the city I live in that peddles knock-off Huggy Wuggys to people from a little cart, and I think that's the moment I realised we'd be doomed to see this blue bastard for the rest of our lives), but the devs have a simple, effective vision. Creepy, Goose-Bumps-esque stories with some mystery, fun set pieces and high production values. They aren't out here aiming to make exceptional video games. They're out here making heavily scripted rollercoaster rides that largely play themselves but are good fun considering you're going through in one sitting.
But I feel they kinda bit off more than they could chew with this one; the whole thing is just kind of a mess. For the majority of the runtime, it's just playing through boring puzzles and unintuitive gameplay segments which you can tell it knows are unintuitive because you have this whiny ass little kid in your ear overexplaining everything. I feel like the idea was to focus more on gameplay, but Poppy Playtime's gameplay has never really had that much longevity. It's usually just grab a green thing and use it to power up another green thing. In the other episodes, it's to give you downtime between the scary spaghetti lady chasing you, but here, there is barely a spaghetti lady at all, so it's all downtime.
The bread and butter of this series is the scripted setpieces. You've spent a year being like, there's this massive cat guy wandering around that's gonna pull your bones out and play the drums with them. How come I don't get to interact with this dude until the last 20 minutes? Why am I fighting him in the world's most convoluted final boss encounter, where the scariest part is having to telepathically link myself with the devs to figure out what they actually want me to do?
As always, production values: top notch. Looks great, sounds great, animations are... mostly great (sometimes there's a little 'ooooo, spooky moment' but then the spooky thing will just disappear because you didn't stop and admire it for five seconds). But I came for the spooky cat and I got an endless supply of boring puzzles, so maybe give me more spooky cat next time.
But I feel they kinda bit off more than they could chew with this one; the whole thing is just kind of a mess. For the majority of the runtime, it's just playing through boring puzzles and unintuitive gameplay segments which you can tell it knows are unintuitive because you have this whiny ass little kid in your ear overexplaining everything. I feel like the idea was to focus more on gameplay, but Poppy Playtime's gameplay has never really had that much longevity. It's usually just grab a green thing and use it to power up another green thing. In the other episodes, it's to give you downtime between the scary spaghetti lady chasing you, but here, there is barely a spaghetti lady at all, so it's all downtime.
The bread and butter of this series is the scripted setpieces. You've spent a year being like, there's this massive cat guy wandering around that's gonna pull your bones out and play the drums with them. How come I don't get to interact with this dude until the last 20 minutes? Why am I fighting him in the world's most convoluted final boss encounter, where the scariest part is having to telepathically link myself with the devs to figure out what they actually want me to do?
As always, production values: top notch. Looks great, sounds great, animations are... mostly great (sometimes there's a little 'ooooo, spooky moment' but then the spooky thing will just disappear because you didn't stop and admire it for five seconds). But I came for the spooky cat and I got an endless supply of boring puzzles, so maybe give me more spooky cat next time.
ASwitchDog
3 months ago