Toy Story might be pop culture’sthe most recognizable take on the idea that our toys have a life of their own when we're not around, but Mob Entertainment’s Poppy Playtime might be among the more unique approaches to take on the concept. Its story, about shoving sentience into the products in a toy factory and those very abominations rebelling against their creators, is a sort of dark horror that has really spoken to a dedicated and growing audience of fans across games, film, and more. And though Escape From Playtime isn’t the studio’s first attempt at a multiplayer game, building one inside the Poppy Playtime universe and putting players inside the furry bodies and twisted minds of the monsters of the factory hopes to be their most robust attempt.
We got to play a few rounds of the co-op extraction looter ahead of its open playtest starting October 1, and I found it surprisingly challenging in mostly fun ways despite the finicky controls and abundance of small bugs.
As a person unfamiliar with Poppy Playtime, I found Sr. Comms Manager Tyler Sanchez’s rundown of the lore to be helpful. Lots of attention has been paid to making the environments, enemies, and all the little details in between as accurate and respectful of the world they’ve made and that people have immersed themselves into as possible, as well as leaving breadcrumbs for real lore heads to devour. “The community is VERY passionate about the lore,” he punctuated his summary with. A quick perusal of the subreddit shows this to be true pretty immediately — quite a few of the top threads are people sharing early art or debating the merits of certain interpretations of story morsels.
Once we got split into groups and dropped into the factory, I really appreciated how creepy and also silly all of these things were in motion. Walls and furniture askew and messy and towering over our miniscule bodies. Colorful bits and bobs all covered by jagged shadows or washed with eerie, sickly reds or greens. Our teddy characters, the Smiling Critters, whose namesake mugs curl uncomfortably from ear to ear. Mob’s animation origins really make the macabre merriness stick to you as you watch monsters slink through the darkness in pursuit of you.
QA Manager Jostin Bilyeu’s rundown of the gameflow was pleasantly chaotic and elaborate, but boiled down to a simple goal: Our team must scavenge loot from around the factory and return it to Barry, a googly-eyed cart, without being caught and killed by the twisted experiments that roam the building’s corridors. Different bits of loot have different point values and rounds, called shifts here, have minimum point quotas that must be reached before you can leave the factory with the victory and move on to the next shift. Easier said than done, of course.
Grabbing loot is pretty straightforward, but you have a very limited amount of inventory space to keep them in. You really have to be discerning when managing the four slots if you're trying to be efficient. The added wrinkle is that most of the items you’ll find have some sort of utility that can be helpful in navigating the labyrinthian factory, like glow sticks you can mark important features or leave trails with. I got a kick out of the airhorn, which can be useful in helping your teammates find you with the unfortunate downside of also letting the enemy know your approximate location.
Even when our squad of four had our pockets filled to the brim, we never had enough to hit the threshold in one wave, so we’d have to double back deeper into the factory on the hunt for more valuables. The deeper we ventured, the more the factory itself became its own oppressive enemy. With so many halls and doors that seem to sprawl out endlessly, not to mention the verticality of it all with rooms that potentially go as high as they do wide inviting us to use our ability to climb on practically anything to scour from floor to ceiling. Most of the climbing I did was pretty sketchy, thanks to both my unfamiliarity to the controls and the bugginess that comes with every surface in the game being potentially sticky at the press of a button.
Hazards revealed themselves the deeper we went, like a series of rooms consumed by noxious red CatNap gas, toxic to us if we stayed in it for too long. To clear the gas we had to navigate a path of school room desks whose tops peeked out over the noxious cloud, hopping from desk to desk through a series of rooms in order to pull a series of switches scattered among them. Again, easier said than done, as the floaty jumping could make for some dicey near misses, but I appreciated the way events like this modified the overall task.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.ign.com/articles/escape-from-playtime-is-its-own-uniquely-twisted-multiplayer-toy-story-ign-preview
