➕Creative setting/world design
➕Survival horror mechanics
➕Excellent puzzles

🔹Inventory management can get rough

➖Saving the game costs in-game currency


The game world takes place on a television studio set. You have various buildings that you traverse around this set - things like a hotel, writing room, shooting stages, prop rooms, ect. It’s essentially what you would expect on any Hollywood-style movie set, just at night and (mostly) abandoned.
I found the world awesome to explore and felt it was really well put together.

The narrative is fairly simple - your goal is to shut off a broadcast that has been running from an empty building. You must get to the top of the building where the antenna is, but you quickly find out that the puppets seem to be intent on stopping you.
The narrative seems okay, but it's not the focus point of the game, it only serves as the vehicle that drives the player through the game world.

This is where the survival horror aspects shine, and why I absolutely love what MFN does here. I adore the mechanics of survival horror, but don’t really enjoy horror games. MFN nails the item scarcity, inventory management, and puzzles exceptionally well.
Special callout to the puzzles. I found them perfect and interesting enough to really explore how they work, but not hard or frustrating enough to immediately look up a guide.
There are times that the player will be faced with constant backtracking, but I enjoyed the world enough to where I didn’t find this to be a big issue.

I found the difficulty to be fair, perhaps slightly on the easier side. I played on Normal and ended up finding so many healing items that my inventory was just a clusterf**k of heals.

Good. I would probably consider this a solid PS4-era title. The art style is mostly simplistic and embodies a very similar style to a children’s show like Sesame Street, which compliments the game world exceptionally well.

I noticed a few small bugs - I found it hard to select a specific object if a puppet’s body was on top of it. Also, I was able to reach through a door to grab an item (music studio), but this didn’t break the game as it wasn’t an important item.
The game also ran perfectly smooth, I encountered no technical issues.
i9-13900KF | RTX 4090 | 64GB RAM | 1440p @ 240hz | Windows 11 installed on SSD

I didn’t notice too much background music, if any. It seems like the game is mostly silent with any music being from deliberate set-pieces, like a television or radio. I found the atmosphere to be spooky/creepy, but nothing terrifying.

The voice acting is ample and superbly well done. The puppets banter is exquisite dark humor that really adds a unique element to this game. Instead of creepy zombie-like sounds, you have a children’s show voice and demeanor with dark content. It's awesome.

There is replay value here, but I didn’t find it good enough to experience it all again, especially with a generally linear gameplay path. Once you beat the game (~6 hours), you unlock harder difficulties, cheats and a horde mode.
Aside from additional modes, the only reason to replay would be missed achievements or increased difficulty.
I found that this is one of those games that doesn’t have much replay value, but you wish you could replay again for the first time.

My Friendly Neighborhood (MFN) is a wonderful experience. It provides excellent survival horror mechanics without the stressful experience of horror elements. That’s not to say it’s a completely carefree experience. It's decently creepy, sure, but there are no jump scares or a focus on horror as part of the game, which I consider a positive thing in my opinion.
Think of it as a much more approachable Resident Evil 7 or 8. While I did enjoy RE7/8, and I’d consider them a few of my favorite REs of all time, the thing that makes MFN such an impressive game is that the lack of tension and the focus on mechanics and puzzles is superb. I want to stress though that fans of horror will probably feel very differently than me, but for everyone else, especially those that don’t particularly enjoy horror, this is an excellent alternative.

While I can’t think of anything very negative that MFN does, it didn’t blow me away, it's just a very well-made game. Perhaps the only thing I want to call out as a negative is the in-game currency to save. I understand how this was a thing in early REs using ink on typewriters, but from a modern viewpoint, I don’t like having my ability to save and quit if something comes up, to be dictated by a currency. Yes, I had more than enough currency by the end of the game, but that’s something the player doesn’t know at the start. Especially since there’s also a healing option too that uses the same currency.

Overall, I easily recommend MFN. You should not miss this game.

$30 price tag is high for around ~6 hours of content. I do want to say wait for a sale as the price-per-hour ratio is not good, but this is a very well-crafted game, regardless.
You can find my curator page here: https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/groups/Synik_GR

too convoluted.

banger

just a cool freakin game

even when this game is out of the spotlight, it is one of the most fun games i have played. if you are not playing this, YOU ARE MISSING OUT.

It's Resident Evil. Except on Sesame Street. Which you have to tear through as a Vietnam vet turned handyman. By shooting the Muppets with letters.

MFN's premise is about as inspired as they come and it really is a blast seeing this silly idea realized. It's also played wonderfully straight, in a way. Yes, it is tapping into an inherent uninteded creepiness of these puppets, akin to FNAF, but it's also directly spoofing the prospect of further creepifying them in an edgy way. Yet it also ensures that you'll show little mercy through having them constantly return and demand ammo and also just simply never shut up (even after you've neutralized them by taping them - the game's one truly inspired mechanic).

MFN's biggest weakness, in the end, is that it never exceeds this fantastic premise. It just executes its idea without any major hitches. Gameplay-wise, It's very methodical, limited and by the numbers. Which doesn't ruin it or anything, it just means that this is a case where you can determine whether or not you're going to like the game based on the single sentence sales pitch alone.

this game is very good, eventhough there were meny glitches i would still play again, as a person with 15+ hours on the game i would reccomend this game to people who like atomic heart, definetly one of the best mascot horror games i have ever played

You'd honestly think from looks alone that this would be just another crappy mascot horror, following all of the same tropes you'd come to expect in this post-FNaF world, but it's far more than that.

My Friendly Neighborhood opts for a Resident Evil style game, with resource management akin to RE4's system, excellent "scares", and a whole bunch of other stuff. In terms of the actual "horror" aspect of the game, I wouldn't go as far as to say the game is necessarily as scary as the likes of many other games out there, but it does get a jump or two outta ya at times. Aside from that, the game is extremely fun and replayable, especially once you unlock the extra game modes and cheats, my personal favorite being DUSK mode. Given this game was developed by the brothers (John and Evan Syzmanski) of DUSK's lead dev (David Syzmanski), it was a very welcoming inclusion, making the game more of a retro shooter as opposed to a survival horror.

But despite that, the game has amazing and intriguing puzzles, a well-thought-out inventory management system, and a surprisingly heartwarming and light-hearted story. Definitely give this game a shot!

Might be the best mascot horror ever made

Played this multiple times I love the story concept and hopefully devs can one day come up with a sequel or something equally as good