Poppy Playtime, a name you might have heard: A somewhat recent chain of mascot horror games focused on a toy factory that was secretly turning children into toys. It took the gaming world by storm with a terrifying Huggy Wuggy in the first game. Then we moved on to Mommy Long Legs, another chapter with similar chase sequences and suspense that kept you playing. Then the third one was released, focusing on the evil giant CatNap that stalked you with sleeping gas as you worked on puzzles.
Then we hit the fourth one, where we started to fall off the train of anything sensical with an entire underground prison underneath Playcare and the Game Station. The villain of this game is The Doctor, an evil scientist named Harley Sawyer, the doctor who ran the Bigger Bodies initiative, which is the whole idea of turning children into toys to preserve life. Messed up, I know. He was turned into a machine, and in the end, the player kills him. The player also kills Doey the Doughman, a friend you make near the beginning of the game, who turned evil after the Prototype wrecked the camp that a handful of toys found to be their home.
And then here we are at the fifth, a confusing and purposeless story to keep the franchise alive; a parallel of “Kung Fu Panda 4.” Needless to say, this game is just as much of a mess. Within the rough plot, you somehow get deeper into the Playtime Co. factory to the labs, a place where the children would be turned into toys and conditioned to get used to being one.
All the player does is go through these areas, solving puzzles and getting chased by the Prototype, the main antagonist of the franchise, and Huggy Wuggy (yes, he’s back even after we thought we killed him in the first one). Eventually, the player gets kidnapped by Lily Lovebraids, a doll with long purple hair that is alive and able to get you at Lovebraid’s own will. This is where we finally see the Prototype’s full form for the first time after he has been chasing the player throughout the whole game.
His design is okay at best. With how the game had developed him as a character, he was supposed to be an amalgamation of a bunch of different toys, which I was excited to see. At the end of the second and third chapters, he takes the bodies of the giant toys we defeated, those being Mommy Long Legs and CatNap, away with his creepy mechanical hand. That’s the only part of him that is seen until the fourth chapter, where we can see his crab-like legs.
He was so creepy in the beginning of the franchise, but then when his design was finally revealed, he was just a large arachnid animatronic with a jester outfit that reminds me of Moon from “Five Nights at Freddy’s: Security Breach,” arguably one of the scariest characters in that game.
In this franchise, that’s not the case. He seems out of place in comparison to the stuffed animal and robot creatures that are typically in this game. From a picture of him, it seems he has the parts of the toys on him, but they look super out of place. Arms of a Huggy Wuggy are on the front of him around his hips, as well as a singular stretchy arm of Mommy Long Legs. And where’s CatNap, you ask? Just a patch of fur on his back, like a shag carpet that stretches a little over his butt. That’s the Prototype for you: Another lazily put together character instead of the creepy combination of dozens of toys that was expected.
The plot of this game is all over the place. There are close to three parts where you assume the game is over, but then it keeps going. First, it’s after a chase scene with the Prototype. Then it’s after you witness Kissy Missy and Huggy Wuggy get murdered. Then Poppy (the doll the franchise centers around that betrays the player practically near the end of every game) gets kidnapped for the millionth time right after you get stabbed in the back to be thrown in a vat with some kind of gelatinous substance. Then you get revived by Giblet somehow, as if the gaping hole in your stomach just needed a static jolt to be fine, and you end up looking for data as if nothing happened.
Eventually, you activate an old computer embedded in a data storage area, for some reason, and instead of the information you’re looking for, guess who shows up? None other than The Doctor, the creepy guy you killed in the last game. Yes, he’s back because somehow he survived in the backup system even after you blew up his brain in the last game.
I think this game was put out there because it was not ready to end. The massive amount of poking at the fact that you were going to be the one to kill the Prototype from the previous chapter led you to this game that feels like filler. Maybe the developers wanted to get something out quickly while they worked on an epic ending, or I’m sounding like an awful person as I write about a game they might have put a lot of pride into.
To go into more of the specifics of why this game was subpar, it immediately starts off with the fact that new characters are somehow well-known or present on each game’s respective floor of the factory before having a single mention in any previous games. Immediately, we’re given new toys to look out for, as the game starts with a commercial of these new toys called Wrongside Outimals.
And guess what? Unlike the Doey commercial in Chapter four or the Smiling Critters in Chapter three that had significance to the game, these Outimals had no contribution to the game whatsoever, other than a few of them scampering around to jump at and scare the player, from what I can see.
It’s a cool concept, having the toys have another inside that folds out, but there was no big creature with this concept, unlike commercialized characters in previous chapters, which makes no sense. There were a few characters introduced in the game, such as Giblet, a toy that I can’t decipher its origin, and a character we see for a few minutes, Chum Chompkins, a fluffy and cute but very toothy double agent for the Prototype, to which we hide in its massive mouth to escape being caught. He then leaves and doesn’t appear for the rest of the game.
What confused me most is Giblet, who probably says “I’m not a hero” more times than he appears in the actual game, although he’s considered a companion of ours, like Ollie and Poppy were in the third game and Doey in the fourth. He does nothing important that I know of other than having some former friendship with Poppy. He resembles no toy ever shown in this entire franchise. It’s not even explained what he is in any way, shape, or form.
There are so many toys in the franchise that have just been lying around with no purpose other than to create some kind of ambience or take up spaces in certain environments. For example, two I found often lying around or broken were Cat-Bee and Boogie-Bot, both of which could have been cooler toys rather than a messed-up chihuahua thing that is not a hero.
As I mentioned before, the logistics of this game are completely shattered. What toy factory has the money to build that many facilities in the ground without anyone knowing, and scientific, messed-up ones at that? The place has to be at least four layers deep by now, all with the purpose of experimenting on children. Maybe this is why the world is $315 trillion in debt; it was to build more layers of the Playtime Co. factory.
Then there’s the questioning of the areas themselves. Who approved to build these rooms to brainwash children into wanting to become a toy? Who thought the most efficient way of opening doors and getting around rooms was gathering batteries and solving electric puzzles with your Grab Pack? The puzzles in the first game were minimal and at least a tad bit sensical: this game uses it to stretch its play time to about five to six hours, which is five to six times the length of the first, depending on whether you decide to get all the collectibles and tapes.
Plus, the number of characters introduced in this chapter that haven’t been seen in previous games is unreal. The previous games were similar, except you could understand not seeing characters introduced in the second and third chapters, considering they were so early in the franchise. But then we had Doey in the fourth chapter, who seemed like he was a top-selling toy. Then in this chapter, we have Lily Lovebraids, Chum Chumpkins, the Outimals, Miss Gracie and whatever Giblet is other than not a hero.
In every way, this is indicative of the fact that this franchise was not meant to stretch for this long. With no planning of further chapters, it makes sense to add more characters to entice players to new and interesting things. Playing the same thing over and over again gets repetitive quickly. I’m assuming the game was not meant to be a large franchise until the large popularity of the first chapter, and then they just added on more and more without thinking about planning a few games in advance. That way, they could tease upcoming toys and have them already exist in the environment so when they’re fully introduced you can remember that it existed in the world before that point. With franchises, you have to plan these things instead of throwing in characters simply to have them, especially when there are so many unused toys that are seen around the factory as time goes on.
This game is a cash grab in every way. On many platforms, the first game is free to play, and then there’s a five-dollar price increase with every game (except for Xbox; the first game is five dollars to play and increases from there). The fifth chapter matches the fourth in price at $20, and it is a lousy stretch of the franchise to squeeze every drop of money they can out of the story and characters. I thought this was going to be the last one in the franchise, considering the last game very much set it up to be the last. There was practically no progress made in this game, other than seeing the Prototype, getting a ton of exposition shoved down your throat, killing off Lily Lovebraids and getting stuck with Giblet (he’s not a hero, by the way. Just in case you forgot).
This game was so bad that it spread waves onto all the gaming streamers and YouTubers alike who hopped on the popular franchise. Markiplier said it was so much of a mess that he wasn’t going to play the sixth one. Daz Games remarked on the killing of a character and bringing them back even against the logic of it all, like how the player themself gets stabbed by the Prototype and dropped in a vat of goop but magically gets revived by Giblet. He also talked about how he thought this would be the last in the franchise and how he hopes that it ends soon. I think everyone who has ever learned anything about the franchise felt the same.
Overall, a disappointing way to keep a franchise going. This game franchise quickly rose to the top of mascot horrors with its big, creepy idea among the dozens of similar games that hopped on the growing popularity of the genre. But as the games were produced, one by one, it quickly became a way to earn more and more money, and I think this game is their biggest flop in that regard. If the sixth isn’t the last one, then I don’t know how many more games I can tolerate. Let’s just hope that the developers come to their senses and focus on the story rather than getting a game out quickly.
Even after saying all of this, I have some room left in my heart to say it’s not a terrible game. The elements in themselves are cool, I still think the Prototype is a cool character, as well as some of the others introduced in this game and I will probably still look forward to the next game coming out, considering the liking I took to the previous games in the franchise. I just hope that logic will come more into play than more characters to make merchandise for.
Hayley Doda can be contacted at
