Poppy Playtime

Poppy Playtime - A Game Where the Toys Play With You

Another Horror-Filled Adventure FNaF Fans Will Love

A Creepy Addition to the Survival Horror Genre

Poppy Playtime is a must-play for any Five Nights at Freddy's fan. Developed and published by MOB Games, this horror-puzzle adventure game is available for Windows, Android, and iOS.

Players will find that Poppy Playtime features the terror and jump scares that one would hope to encounter in a modern horror game. However, it also sweetens the pot with some extra depth and unique concepts, which help to set it apart from many other titles within the genre.

Evil Toys Come to Life

Poppy Playtime is in a first-person perspective, and the player takes on the role of a former employee of Playtime Co., a now-abandoned toy factory. The factory staff disappeared ten years ago, but you've received a letter from them, which has prompted you to visit the facility.

Unfortunately, when you reach the abandoned factory, it quickly becomes apparent that something isn't quite right. As it turns out, not only have the toys come to life, but they're also evil and have a strong desire to kill you. So, you'll need to do whatever you can to survive while the malicious, creepy toys attempt to hunt you down. 

While you're running, hiding, and strategizing for your life, it'll also be up to you to discover what happened to the Playtime Co. staff all those years earlier. 

Concept Rating: 4/5

A Sufficiently Spooky Environment

Poppy Playtime features grimy, realistic graphics that sell the idea that there is something sinister about the abandoned toy factory. The game adds various elements to ensure a creepy environment, including low lighting and often confining the player to tight, enclosed spaces, making you feel trapped. The model design is also perfectly suited to the game's setting, with the environment and the living toys looking plastic and blocky.

The game's atmospheric soundtrack consists of droning notes and the occasional piano notes, adding to the game's suspense and often giving the impression that the game is building up to something. Much of Poppy Playtime is silent, which increases the creepiness factor, and there are sometimes playful sounds designed to lull you into a false sense of comfort.

Graphics & Audio Rating: 4/5

Surviving the Night

The gameplay of Poppy Playtime, on the surface, is somewhat similar to Five Nights at Freddy's and other jump-scare horror games. You spend much of your time wandering through the eerie abandoned factory, constantly feeling like something terrifying is following you, watching you, or about to leap out at you from around the corner. However, Poppy Playtime also offers several aspects that make it unique and engaging, even more than your average survival horror game.

Uncovering the Story Through VHS Tapes

In Poppy Playtime, as you progress through each chapter of the game, you'll regularly encounter informational VHS tapes that reveal more and more of the game's storyline. It all begins with a 1950s-style video, reminiscent of what you might see in a Fallout game. The video is an advertisement for a creepy-looking red-haired doll called Poppy Playtime, and it gives the player a glimpse of life in the factory before the staff disappeared.

Playtime Co. was once the king of the toy manufacturing industry... until the day everybody inside the factory disappeared into thin air. Now, years later, you must explore the abandoned factory and uncover the truth.

Overall, these VHS tapes are an excellent device. They provide more context for the story and make the game's setting feel even more spooky and uncomfortable.

Having Fun With the Grabpack

One of the best aspects of Poppy Playtime is the Grabpack -- a valuable piece of equipment that you'll discover early on in the gameplay. The pack features a set of extendable arms, which you'll use to grab and interact with objects from any distance.

This amazing GrabPack is a wearable backpack, accompanied by two artificial hands attached via a steel wire.

In addition to grabbing hard-to-reach items and gripping heavy objects, the Grabpack acts as an electrical conductor for the various puzzles you must complete to progress.

Bringing the Factory Back to Life

Much of Poppy Playtime's gameplay revolves around bringing the decommissioned toy factory back to life, which you do by solving puzzles and utilizing your Grabpack. For example, in the Make-A-Friend section of the facility, you'll use your problem-solving skills to pull together infrastructures and restore function to various factory systems.

The Grabpack and the many puzzles are what makes Poppy Playtime so unique. While anyone playing a horror game is looking for scares, having to strategize and interact with the environment adds an entirely different element to the gameplay experience.

Gameplay Rating: 4/5

Purchasing Poppy Playtime

Chapter 1 of Poppy Playtime launched on October 12th, 2021, and Chapter 2 on May 5th, 2022. We can expect Chapter 3 to arrive sometime in early 2023, and there may be more chapters in the future. 

You can download and play Chapter 1 on PC for free via Steam, whereas getting Chapter 2 costs $9.99. As for Android and iOS, only the first chapter is available right now, and it costs $2.99 to download. Until more chapters are released, Poppy Playtime is a pretty short game, so the relatively low prices for each version are perfectly fair.

A Unique Take on a Popular Genre

Since the success of the aforementioned popular franchise, Five Nights at Freddy's, more and more of these creepy, jump-scare-based games have appeared on the scene. Some feature evil animatronics, some feature demonic cultists, and some feature raging puppets, but many of them feature pretty uniform gameplay. However, Poppy Playtime does things differently.

There's nothing wrong with a straightforward survival horror game, but it's always nice when a game brings something unique to the table. The most notable differentiator for Poppy Playtime is the Grabpack mechanic, which makes the game stand out. That, along with the presence of many brain-stimulating puzzles, makes Poppy Playtime far more compelling than many of the Five Nights at Freddy's clones.

Although the gameplay is pretty short—it only takes 30 minutes to an hour to play through the two existing chapters—it does have decent replay value. If you play a few times, you should discover new ways to interact with the environment each time. Even though the jump-scares may not get you in quite the same way after a couple of playthroughs, the toy factory will never stop feeling creepy.

Replay Value: 3/5

The Good

• Unique Grabpack mechanic
• Mentally stimulating gameplay
• An appropriately creepy setting
• Exciting jump scares

The Bad

• Very short
• Some puzzles can be a bit confusing

TL;DR

Poppy Playtime is a creepy, engaging survival horror game that features plenty of scares, puzzles, and a unique gameplay mechanic.