My Friendly Neighborhood Review
My Friendly Neighborhood stirs Resident Evil into your Sesame Street.
My Friendly Neighborhood. Credit: John and Evan Szymanski / DreadXP
My Friendly Neighborhood succeeds brilliantly at taking something that closely resembles beloved childhood imagery and making it authentically terrifying. This isn't a Five Nights at Freddy's clone, like the mascot theme might make you believe. It's a carefully crafted survival horror experience heavily influenced by Resident Evil that understands exactly why its themes are unsettling and brilliantly exploits them.
You play as Gordon, a repairman sent to shut down a broadcasting antenna at an abandoned television studio where the long-canceled puppet show My Friendly Neighborhood mysteriously started airing again. What should be a simple job becomes a nightmare when you discover the colorful cast of Muppet-inspired puppets has come to life and doesn’t have the best intentions for intruders. What happens when PBS gets shut down and the cast of Sesame Street is left to fester?
My Friendly Neighborhood. Credit: John and Evan Szymanski / DreadXP
The game draws heavily from classic Resident Evil, complete with familiar door-opening transitions and inventory puzzle mechanics. Room transitions can be awkwardly placed at times, breaking up what should feel like contiguous areas with loading screens that can be disorienting and interrupt the flow of exploration or reset enemy positions in ways that don’t feel natural. As you explore, you must carefully manage limited resources and decide when to fight versus when to run. Should you use precious duct tape to permanently stop a puppet from getting back up?
The rhythms of gameplay will feel intimately familiar to fans of Capcom’s classic zombie survival horror series, as My Friendly Neighborhood doesn’t break new ground outside of its core conceit. Combat and puzzle-solving follow patterns you’d expect. The puzzles aren't particularly challenging; they're more about finding the right items and using them in obvious ways. The real challenge comes from avoiding death while traveling between points of interest, as the puppets can overwhelm you quickly if you're not careful or are too frugal with ammo, as I found melee unpredictable.
The puppets themselves are genuinely terrifying. What makes them so effective isn't just their visual design and movement, but their unhinged rambling that casually drops disturbing madness into otherwise cheerful, innocuous children's show dialogue. The voice work really sells it, as the performers perfectly capture the tone of beloved educational characters while channeling sudden darkness. The fact that some of the voices resemble certain familiar puppets makes it more chilling.
The colorful 3D graphics work perfectly for the game's themes, creating a space that should feel welcoming but instead feels deeply wrong. The visuals make the abandoned studio setting creepy and surreal, as the nature of the monsters makes what should be a welcoming space feel chilling and dangerous. The game’s atmosphere stuck with me.
My Friendly Neighborhood. Credit: John and Evan Szymanski / DreadXP
John and Evan Szymanski’s My Friendly Neighborhood is another win for DreadXP. I came to it late, playing it now on its console release two years after the initial release on Steam; if you missed it like me, it’s well worth your time to check it out. Survival horror fans will love it.
My Friendly Neighborhood is available now on Steam, PlayStation 4/5, and Xbox One / Series X|S.
Overall Score: 8/10
Played on: PS5
