You play Gordon, a maintenance man who was sent to disable a rogue broadcast of a Sesame Street style TV show for kids that had been off the air for years, but for some reason has started broadcasting over other shows, disrupting everything.
You arrive to an abandoned studio and meet Ricky, a sentient sock puppet-worm creature who is constantly trying to talk you out of shutting down their broadcast. You also begin to encounter several puppets, all of whom try to... I dunno, shake you a little bit? You spend the entire game running from point A to point B collecting random key items to solve puzzles, to eventually stop the broadcast.
The plot isn't exactly what I would call deep, and it seems like the people writing it fall into the horror trope of "Person doing a thing no reasonable human would do ever" since... Everything is alive and trying to kill him. Why doesn't he go to security? To his bosses? The police? Never explained, in fact the game tries to pretend sentient puppets are just normal and part of the world, which is interesting I guess. That would at least explain why Gordon has such a non-reaction to them.
The game features three endings, at least three I know about, a good ending, bad ending, and true ending. However all of them can more or less be lumped into "bad" so not sure why the devs are trying to say otherwise. Here's the quick breakdown of each ending:
The good: Gordon disables the broadcast, but decides to stay and help the neighbors, at least for a while. Eventually he manages to get them back on the air, but then after a while he stops helping them and goes back to just being a maintenance man.
The bad: Gordon does his job, leaves, and gets promoted to manager for doing such a great job. That's right, getting a promotion and a pay raise is the BAD ending, because the game wants you to care about the puppets more then Gordon.
The True ending: Similar to the good ending, Gordon stops the broadcast, but then helps the puppets get back on the air on multiple channels. Gordon however is fired from his job later after it was discovered he was helping them and he was responsible for them getting back on the air.
The secret ending: I lied about there being only three endings, there are in fact FOUR!!!! But this one is more of an easter egg then an ending, so it doesn't really count. In this ending after you encounter the first puppet you can just leave. You can return to your truck and leave the studio. This results in Gordon getting fired the next day for failing to do his job. Doing the reasonable, responsible, human thing in that situation results in what is basically another bad ending.
The game also has a myriad of secrets and hidden collectables, but most of them aren't worth talking about. There are also hints that Gordon might be suffering from some PTSD from being in a war, but the game only lightly touches on it by having Ricky annoy Gordon once and then get shot with a Rolodex. Otherwise all the extra plot details are hidden away in newspaper clippings and collectables.
So... That's the story, hows the game-play?
Very, very, very, VERY, VERY, VEEEEEEERY slow. You have no ability to run, jump, crouch, or interact with the environment in any way outside of preset puzzles and items. The game gives you several not-a-gun guns throughout the game including a melee wrench, a Rolodex pistol, a shotgun that fires scrolls, grenades of receipt paper, and eventually a mini-gun if you decide to follow the convoluted secrets the game has hidden around and explore every nook and cranny in game.
Puzzles range from so easy a child could do them, to so convoluted that it makes you wonder what they were thinking. With some of the easier puzzles being "Shoot the obvious target" or "plug fuse into fuse box" and the more infuriating ones being "Find the 5th mask hidden in a globe locked in a room that requires a key you don't get until the very end of the game, which requires a code you can easily miss scratched on a chalkboard, then find the paper hidden behind a curtain in an optional area in a place a normal player would never look, then using those masks unlock a secret door" OR, even better, "Find a film reel, watch the film to get a 3 digit safe code, to get a 5th fuse, to un-solve a puzzle you solved earlier, to unlock a new door, to find a hidden elevator, to find a hidden set, in which you need to locate 3 hidden gems, to unlock a chest, to get the mini-gun." It's a bit irritating at times. This on top of the fact the game has everyone's favorite horror trope... INVENTORY MANAGEMENT!!!
Hope you like having to walk ALL THE WAY BACK to the safe/storage room every time you realize you needed the blue key, not the red key, or the film reel instead of the velvet mask, and enemies re-spawn every time you leave a room, and ammo is limited, AND enemies take a random amount of hits each time to bring down... No I'm not joking, sometimes an enemy takes 2 hits, sometimes they take a full clip. The game of course has SOME mechanics to help with this, enemies randomly reorient or even abandon rooms when you leave and return, so you can often cheese them by simply exiting then re-entering a room. This isn't always going to work, as for some reason the devs thought it would be ok to have puppets spawn near doors, so near that you can literally enter a room and be attacked before you can even move.
All of this minor issues can result in one massive one, frustration. The game has very few, or absolutely no, quick saves. Instead saving is done via a token system, as you play you find tokens, those tokens can be used to purchase health items, a temporary speed boost item, and SAVE THE GAME. I need to point out that enemies DO NOT drop items, so there is a hard limit on the number of saves and heals you can do throughout the game. HOWEVER, because of this I found I wasn't saving very often, after all, if I save after making it through an area but am on 1 hit point, I need to save... But what if the next room has a health potion? Yes the game has health potions, called "Health-o-Lax." This creates a situation where if I save before I heal, I have to re-heal every time I die, but if I heal before I save using the heal station then find a health item I wasted a token. After wasting about 4-5 tokens healing I stopped using the heal station, and would only save after certain extremely long traveling bits, or clearing several rooms of items. I also only found out about the saving issue after losing over an hour of progress, which ALMOST caused me to quit playing, I had to step away for a little while because of how pissed I was at the poor design choice of no auto/quick saving.
But I've complained about a lot of stuff, whats good about the game-play? Well, the weapons are at the very least unique, each one firing letters at your targets. The devs also must have realized that limited ammo and having to go back and forth across multiple areas with respawning enemies would get tiring fast, so they DID include an in-game item to help with that issue, duct tape! You can use duct tape to permanently disable enemies in an area at the cost of 1 roll per enemy. So certain rooms/areas can be made much, MUCH easier this way. However you do have a limited number of duct tapes, so I found myself not really using them as often as I should have. The game also very helpfully marks key items when they are no longer of use, and allows you to throw them away once done with them. I actually struggled with this, as I assumed the devs would have tried to be cheeky and have hidden doors that would need the keys later for optional secrets, but nope. Once all doors are unlocked a key gets checked and can be tossed out freely. Finally, the game does something ALL games should do, and marks off rooms once they are cleared. Once you complete a room it turns green on the map, letting you know that, yes, you did get everything... Except notes, see previous statement about note in curtain in optional area.
People generally talk about sound when they review games, right? Well I thought the sound design was fine. All the puppets announce their presence by loudly talking to themselves, and at first it seems like this would mean each puppet has it's own personality and you would be able to tell them apart based on sound to know how to deal with them... Lol, no. All the puppets repeat the same voice lines, all shared, no unique lines for any puppets. This, I feel, was a huge missed opportunity. This could have been a way to really have certain puppets shine, but instead they all homogenize into one single personality.
Environments have ambient sounds, but to be honest I wasn't paying much attention, there were a few stand out areas though. One maintenance hallway gave me a spook when a clanking noise could be heard echoing through it and it was too dark to see into, making me think I would get jumped when I tried to walk through the darkness. The hotel was eerily silent with really soft music playing, and despite being a safe area I always felt on edge going into it. Gordon also could have talked less, whoever was voicing him was doing a very gruff new yorker accent, and it got old fast when he has to comment on every little thing. someone clearly liked the sound of their own voice a little too much.
Graphics? Yeah, that game has them. For the most part they are fine. The puppets look fine for the most part, there are three puppets that could have used a little bit more work. Gobblette, which looks like a giant green blob and I have no idea how or why that would be in a kids show. The game even makes note of this by having Gordon find a statue of her and commenting it looks like something out of a horror film. Ray, which just looks incomplete, and seems to be some kind of horrifying pipe centipede monster. And Ray, which is just another blob, except he has fur, and Gobblette doesn't. Puppets aside, the environments look like environments. Things look like they should generally, whoever made the assets did a good job on them.
So... Is the game fun? Eh... Depends really. Personally, I think no. If I had paid $30 for this game, which clocks in at around 3-4 hours for most people, I would be disappointed. Given I had a definitely legal copy, hey shut up, and it took me 6 hours but a lot of that was replaying areas and trying to find the unmarked key item I was missing and getting one shotted by a puppet that spawned beside the door I just walked through... No, I did not have fun.
Does it have replay-ability? Only if you want to find all the secrets, I thought I had gotten most of them in my 6 hour playtime, but turns out I only found about a quarter of them, collecting secrets actually has a purpose too, as they unlock additional game-modes and cheats, like long arm mode (which makes the game much better btw), speedrun mode, unlimited ammo, etc. I have to give credit to the devs for including those kinds of things as in-game unlocks like old games did, instead of DLC like modern game devs. So outside of secret and cheat hunting, there is no replay-ability at all. All four endings can be done on a single save if you REALLY want them all, you just need to save before taking the final elevator and then you can backtrack and complete all the "side" missions. I say "side" because I did them by accident thinking they were part of the main plot to progress the game.
So overall I thought the game was... Fine. It's got problems, but it was at least an attempt at something new. As new as mascot horror can get anyways, because yes... This is just another attempt to jump on the FNAF bandwagon, but this game isn't trying to be FNAF, thankfully. It wanted to do something entirely different by having the player explore several areas and do puzzles, find keys, and have semi-randomly spawned enemies. The player is sort of invading an area, disrupting the Residents, who aren't Evil, they are jsut doing what comes naturally to them. In this mostly original game.
So final thoughts... It was fine. Just fine.