Vidjama Gmaes Work

Script.

Poppy Playtime Chapter 3 is out and I have a bit of a love hate relationship with this series. The first chapter was fine for what it was, the second had a lot of major design problems that should have come up during playtesting, and the third is a lot like the second. It is hard to deny that the production quality and overall scope and vision of the games gets much bigger with each iteration, to the point where it might be kinda weird if you play them back to back over the course of an afternoon.

Chapter 3 picks up right after the events of Chapter 2. We are introduced over the course of the chapter to a few new characters like DogDay, the Smiling Critters, and more. You find a phone pretty early on where a kid named Ollie communicates with you to provide exposition and guide you out of danger. Gee, a horror game with a disembodied voice who claims to be a friend who can keep you out of danger. I have a sneaking suspicion we’ve seen this trope before… but let’s table that for now and circle back in a future chapter.

Actually my favorite character in this chapter is Miss Delight because she’s friggin terrifying. There’s a whole sequence with Miss Delight where you have to navigate school rooms while avoiding her, and she can only move when out of sight. The puzzles are based around that green electrical hand meaning you not only have to be smart to avoid Miss Delight but fast enough to not screw around otherwise you’ll lose your charge. The level design is pretty well thought out here, and the puzzles themselves are just intricate enough to be more tense when under a present threat.

You get two new hands in Chapter 3. The purple hand lets you push yourself against specific charged spots on the ground, adding jumping into the mix. You also get a flare gun hand that has to charge over time, which comes in use during the Smiling Critters section where you have to navigate a small maze while occasionally shooting flares to scare away the critters.

As with Chapter 2 before it, Poppy Playtime has its share of mechanics that are interesting to use, until they break. The grabby hands in Poppy Playtime are routinely shit when you need them to not be, especially during scenes where you need to grab and pull levers at a moment’s notice and the hand just refuses to go where you point it. There’s a few parts in this game where you need to grab and drag heavy objects, and I noticed a lot of the time the hands would just fail to pull things. There’s another scene where you have to break containers by dropping them from a height, and it’s insanely inconsistent on actually recognizing the drop. I died multiple times on the critter map because they just ignored the flares I shot which is the whole damn point of that section.

It’s also very easy to softlock the game, including a few spots where the auto-save gets you stuck and you completely have to restart the chapter from the beginning. The enforcement of auto-saves and not having multiple save slots is a big detriment to a game that, while short, is heavily reliant on scripted events being triggered that don’t always work.

The game is also way too dark, leaving you feeling like you’re just fumbling around, and later on when you have to have the gas mask on for longer sequences it really makes the everything hard and frustrating to see. There’s ambiance and then there’s just ruining the mood. It’s not nearly as bad as the whack a mole mini-game from the last chapter though. There’s also really questionable level design choices where the game has open yet out of bounds areas that just kill you even though it’s a two foot drop. The gas mask overlay can go to hell if I haven’t made that clear yet.

My thoughts on the final boss fight against Catnap are mixed, starting out with this is a miserable experience until I beat him after a dozen tries and now the rest of you can all git gud and cry more. Seriously the final boss fight is annoying and I would argue poorly made and frustratingly difficult for all the wrong reasons. I didn’t capture any footage of me beating it.

I also feel like the developers are trying to buck the stereotype that this game is for toddlers by literally covering the maps in this chapter with bloody dead bodies on the floor and hanging from the ceiling. They’re everywhere.

Is it worth the $10 I paid? Sure. We’ll see you in two years when Poppy Playtime Chapter 4 comes out, but in the meantime you can Poppy play my other videos and huggy wug that like and subscribe button. Yeah I apologize for none of that.