Vidjama Gmaes Work

Some thoughts.

Poppy Playtime Chapter 3 is equal parts spooky and tedium, and while I am planning on making a video on it I wanted to take a moment to collect some of my thoughts and write about them here. Because I plan my time well.

The third chapter in the game came out this week and I can already tell it is miles ahead of prior chapters in terms of complexity and time spent. And I especially know that because I have softlocked Poppy Playtime Chapter 3 twice in the course of two hours and actually had to restart from scratch. Which kinda brings me to my first point; Poppy Playtime needs multiple save slots. It’s really stupid that a game like this only gives you one save slot. For what purpose? It’s utterly idiotic.

It’s also been a routine problem in Poppy Playtime as chapter 2 for example had a bug where the game would occasionally just delete or ignore the existence of your save file, sending you all the way back to the start of the chapter if you died on rare occasions. Having one save file only makes sense if you really want to make player choices matter and not let them go back and just change them.

It also doesn’t help that Poppy Playtime’s autosave has shit for brains. The particular spot I got softlocked at is one where the player has to put four batteries in four battery slots. I quit the game after putting in two. Putting two batteries in each side powers that side’s power source. The game acknowledged I put the first two batteries in the slot, but didn’t understand that the power source should have been running. So I ran around finding the last two batteries for the game to be like “nah brah, you only powered this halfway.” But the other two batteries were already in the slot, but it didn’t work.

I had to start the whole chapter over again when a save system not built by jackasses could have let me go back to a save file from 15 minutes prior and booted from there.

But enough whining for one piece. I am enjoying Poppy Playtime 3 for what it’s worth. As I said there’s already a lot more game here than prior installations. Chapter 1 was a 15 minute walking sim with two puzzles and a chase sequence. Chapter 2 was a forced series of mini-games. This time around the game feels like an homage to other horror games. I played a PT segment, and then there was actually a point where I was in danger. You have to navigate a maze of rooms while being chased by a puppet that can only move when you’re not looking at it.

It always feels like this game is just about pushing its limit, specifically with Miss Delight whose sequence goes on just about one room too long. It was fun, it was tense, but maybe just one set of doors too long. Also the game is way too damn dark, to the point where it can be hard to see what you can even interact with.

But more on that to come.