My Friendly Neighborhood

This is what you’d have gotten if you’d hired David Lynch to direct The Muppet Movie. It’s self-consciously made as a mash-up between BioShock and one of the earlier Resident Evil games, except you’re up against crazy puppets who want to hug you ‘til you die.

My Friendly Neighborhood is set in an abandoned television station that suddenly starts rebroadcasting old episodes of a children’s show. When city repairman Gordon O’Brian shows up to find out why, he’s thrown into a cuddly nightmare. When this station closed down, the old performers got locked inside, and they’ve all gone insane. They don’t mean to hurt Gordon, but they will.

This is a hard one to explain or justify, but My Friendly Neighborhood makes the most of a twisted premise. Like Fear the Spotlight, it’s creepy without being gory, as every puppet has a gift of coming out of nowhere. And like Crow Country, it saves its scariest sequence for its endgame. If you missed this one last year, this Halloween’s a solid excuse to revisit it.

If you want something that’s about as unhinged, but much darker and weirder, the developers, the Szymanskis, spun off an older project into a standalone game earlier this year called The Pony Factory. It’s a short festival of action and jump scares that’s worth an evening.