 |
|
| So the problem with most of these mascot horror type games back in the day is that most of their story stuff is hidden behind sites like YouTube, Discord, and all archived in FANDOM wikis.
Because of that, and the Continental Rapture causing all of these servers to disappear, it makes understanding all of this pretty much incomprehensible. Incredibly annoying. Any problem you have with the game’s story comes with this itch that it might have been explained already, but you don’t know that. Thankfully I had a friend over who’s very good at improv, so I pretty much listened to her interpretation of the story. Poppy Playtime! It was one of those dime-a-dozen 5-chapter horror games that was very popular in the 2010s and 2020s. I think Blopy even made one of his gajillion Blopy Venture games into a 5-chapter release format, but that’s for another SackiSaw. The story: It’s been a year since everyone inside the Playtime Co. Factory has vanished without a trace, and the sole survivor has been given a letter to find the orphans who are being held in the depths of the factory. A guilty conscience weighing on their mind, and they’re off. 
As you reach deeper and deeper into the facility, you encounter a variety of kooky characters and slowly learn more about the factory’s secrets. After the owner died, an attempt to bring back profits had the board hire a previously-rejected neuroscientist to experiment and replicate the magic of the company’s first line of toys: the Poppy and Ollie Playtime dolls.
Why would you hire a neuroscientist? Because those original dolls were made with human organs inside, pumped with preservatives and sold to kids all around America to give the most life-like conversations... because they were alive. Realism takes a bit of a backseat for this story. Those orphans mentioned? They were actually test subjects for the company’s Bigger Bodies Initiative, a program to neurologically skin children and put them inside human-sized versions of their toys for a variety of uses like security or entertainment. This is all so they don’t have to pay their employees. This is also thanks to a mixture they created in their laboratory and it’s all meant to sound technical and stuff but it’s not really that important. Orphans, put them in toys. Each chapter has you learn more about Poppy and Ollie. How they were the original owner’s children, their endgoals, what they’ve done to reach that endgoal. You go through the motions, kill the experiments representing Poppy and Ollie’s philosophies, find out all the orphans are dead, and you blow the whole factory sky high. The post-credits reveal the bursting hand of the Prototype, Ollie, and then the game ends. ...And that’s the “Poppy Ending”. Let’s talk about the Playtime Ending. Starting in the second chapter, you can do a little bit of sidetracking to get some different outcomes. 
Like, in Chapter 2, when you grind up Mommy Long-Legs, you can pull the lever again to stop her from being ground up, but she’ll still kill you. So, before all that, basically you have to go around the map, find the two Family Long-Legs toys, and give it to her at points where she’s trying to give the player something.
She represents like Poppy’s loss of family, so she gets incredibly conflicted when you spare her in conjunction with completing her family. So with that, and her being afraid of the Prototype punishing her, she runs away and you won’t see her for awhile. Poppy still does the same dialogue as if you killed her in the Poppy Route, so she probably expected you to have just killed her. 
You get to Chapter 3 and you’ve got Catnap who represents Ollie’s devotion to his cause of achieving immortality. His Playtime Route is a big bunch of bull :(. The deal with him is that he’s always stalking you, meaning he’s also listening to all the collectible tapes you’re playing. What you have to do is play all of the tapes in their numbered order, so chronological, and that’s just going to help him remember all the experimenting done to him, that the Prototype is working with the doctor who turned him into this in the first place, and that’s just going to de-program him from worshipping Ollie.
I get that you can’t accurately portray deprogramming with the kind of pace this story’s going for, but it’s pretty ridiculous to have Catnap be convinced this easily. I suppose the Playtime Route ending where he’s still bowing at the presence of the Prototype’s hand means he’s still seeking approval, but that’s all really as he also runs away. I’ve a lot of friends who’re psychologically aware, and I guess that whole rushed Catnap arc reminded me of how they'd react disappointed to something like this. In both routes, in Chapter 3, you get this phone where Ollie calls to you. Now, at this point, you don’t know “Ollie” is “The Prototype”, so he talks to you all happy and chippy and appears to be your ally as he guides you along the Poppy Route. However, Ollie gets more and more confused the more you do the Playtime Route, wondering how you’re getting so many allies and sneakily trying to rush you with stuff like “the Doctor is about to attack” so you don’t spend time doing the Playtime Route. Chapter 4 is the most complex in the Playtime Route narratively, as you’ve now created a third party of this conflict instead of the Poppy Route’s two. It’s also the most fun chapter now instead of the most boring one. Basically, you’ve got Mommy and Catnap on your side, and with that comes her Mini Huggies and his Mini Critters as your personal army. You can even add more Huggies and Critters as some are imprisoned by the Doctor and you can sacrifice this chapter’s limited Omni-Hand’s power to either save yourself or free your soldiers. You basically unleash your army of Huggies and Critters on the Nightmare Critters, who are on the Doctor’s side. The number of Nightmares in the Playtime Route are a lot larger now to accommodate the small army you’ve got, so you’ve really gotta be careful not to die with your flare gun hand thing. The army’s like, incredibly buggy. You can get like 20 Huggies to attack the Nightmare Critters but you will get some of them clipping on rubble. You can still win though, it’s just really funny. What’s also funny throughout this whole army thing you’ve got is that Doey and Poppy don’t know anything about it. There’s always something convenient happening where you end up heading to Safe Haven alone. This is also where the side quests start rolling in. Although the side quests in the Poppy Route were just meant to make it much more emotional when Safe Haven’s destroyed, in here they’re given a more sinister undertone. The player’s a lot more competent with how successful they can complete some of these quests, only thanks to the army they’ve got. In the Poppy Route, collecting a book for Doey results in only a few pages being recovered, while the Playtime Route gets you the full book. 
The birthday cake for Izzy in the Poppy Route is a plastic toy, while the one in the Playtime Route is actually edible. The description for that cake in the menu says it’s not for consumption though, so that’s weird. All in all, the “heightened” end results of this route starts to make everyone feel more reliable on the player, and random NPC dialogue even starts to doubt Doey’s competence as a leader. It’s pretty heartbreaking lol.
Doey represents Poppy’s leadership, with a bit of magical DID sprinkled on it, so we’re once again providing an alternate solution to this conflict by inviting Mommy and Catnap into Safe Haven. The cutscene that follows that is incredibly funny, with Poppy and Doey freaking the HELL out at seeing both of them suddenly enter. Thankfully, with how helpful the player's been, they were willing to set up an alliance. Catnap even called out Doey for calling him a murderer initially, responding with how “we’re all sinners down here” and, yeah, everyone here killed someone with that massacre about a year ago. Ollie on the phone gets incredibly sarcastic after the successful alliance, saying stuff like, “Wow! You got Mommy and Catnap on Doey’s side? That’s fantastic! Doey DEFINITELY needs the help he can get, that’s for sure!” And it’s like, both talking about the size of his force, and also insulting his mental state. That’s actually the last call you’re getting from Ollie before you head off to fight the Doctor. He’s treated a bit more differently than the other experiments, mainly because you have to kill him in both routes. Yeah this game doesn’t give you any mercy for the guy LOL Besides all that, the only changes you get are slight dialogue where the Doctor goes like, “The only thing you’ve done is line them all up for the slaughter.” in that usual husky voice he’s got. He’s also right, because when you head back to Safe Haven, Your soldiers and Catnap are all dead, with Doey already turned monstrous. You’re lead to believe he’s the one that caused these deaths (either because of how everyone trusts you more, because of who you decided to ally with, something else, or a combination of it) as he now chases you into the boss arena. It’s just his regular fight though: you Quick Dash when he charges at you right into the water pipes, you dilute his body with that water, and then you electrocute him in his liquid form. After like 5 hits, he completely melts down as his dough seeps between the flooring. Of course, the actual reason behind Safe Haven's destruction is consistent between both routes: Prototype did it Chapter 5 is basically the same deal across both routes: You’re in the Labs, you’re being relentlessly hunted by both Huggy and the Prototype, and you’re just completely alone. I have to say, I really like how the Labs look. It’s got this expected sterile white, glass panes, and striped markings look on it, but they’ve combined that with church-like architecture. You’ve got pillars with a base and arch, one-view mirrors have steel frames in the shape of the company’s mascots, and many more tinier examples. From the looks of it all, they really wanted the scientists inside to worship progress. The visible piping surrounding the Labs are also filled with the glowing gel used to make these living toys. The friend I’ve mentioned awhile ago usually associates orange with sunsets or sunrises, the beginning or end of something, so it’s pretty fitting that the orange gel covers this final chapter. The way the Prototype and Huggy works in this chapter is unique off of eachother. The Prototype’s deal is that he hunts in the dark, so you can only stay in there for a short while before he just stabs you. 
Huggy. He’s very fast, incredibly so. You can stun him with the electricity hand, but only for a short while before he continues chasing you, so you have to run and hide while he recovers. If you use the flare gun on him, he just comes at you faster, which I found out pretty quickly lol
This whole beginning section is pretty short and is just meant to show how alone you are right now. In the Poppy Route, you eventually reach the Dollhouse and get captured by Lily Lovebraids, who has captured Poppy and Kissy as well. You do some stuff, the Prototype’s face is revealed, and then you escape while killing Lily in the process. It’s a bit different in the Playtime Route. It’s actually Mommy Long-Legs who discovers you, then quickly ushers you inside the Dollhouse to see Poppy, Kissy, and three tiny Doeys. All unprisoned. After that whole massacre at Safe Haven, Mommy fled all the way down in the Labs and encountered Lily. Of course, that’s the woman responsible for brainwashing you into the person you’ve become, so Mommy instinctively tore her apart as she took in this home as her own. You can even see her remains in the kitchen if you bother exploring. Around the same time, because you managed to melt Doey, the three children used to create Doey all managed to split off into three separate figures. Clinging close together, they were then found by Mommy and used this Dollhouse as a temporary Safe Haven before Poppy and Kissy appeared as well. The three Doeys are all still using the same deep voices, so that’s funny. The rest of Chapter 5 begins, and it continues the hunting portions, but you’re now aided by Mommy and Doey. Mommy essentially acts as a Grabpack with 6 limbs, while the Doeys can keep their conductiveness a lot longer. So basically, most of it is just being able to hold onto multiple batteries while still using the trampoline panels, and electricity puzzles with a longer distance. Kinda boring. It’s probably not up to their technical advancements, but I’d have liked the Doeys be able to form platforms and such like in the fourth chapter. It’s weird because they got hurt by electricity, so why are they resistant now?? Anyway, this section is all about reaching the orphans who are all locked behind sealed door after sealed door. Thankfully, most of them aren’t puzzles and are all fairly quick-paced parkouring segments. I did like this one segment where the handlebars broke off, so Mommy called in her Mini Huggies as a replacement handle. It’s crazy how different this is compared to the Poppy Route, because that ended with a train being rigged with explosives to explode the entire factory after hearing from the Prototype that the orphans are all dead, so you’re wondering how they’re alive in the Playtime Route... Well, it’s because they’re only technically dead. The Prototype put them all into specialized toys that all look like Poppy proportionally. Because all the other experiments needed to eat, except Poppy and the Prototype, his idea was to just put them all into bodies resembling Poppy's and seal all of them inside cases resembling those of Poppy’s in Chapter 1. Good thing they’re all in stasis. After that spooky discovery, we’re finally put with a 1-on-1 fight against the Prototype, and it’s so different tonally. 
You’re actually fighting him, and by that I mean tearing to pieces. You tear off those gas canisters he’s got, sever the limbs supporting him. He’s very big though, so you have to use the grabpack to hoist yourself up at the ceiling to avoid him slashing and dashing at you. He even starts using that gas of his to make you hallucinate two versions of him and you have to dodge the correct Prototype. After a while you have to rip open that ribcage of his, freeze the organs inside, and pressure explode it.
This still doesn’t kill the Prototype, but it turns out you’ve just been helping your team distract him as they’ve been loading up all of the sleeping orphans onto a train reaching outside. You quickly reach it, but the Prototype catches up as well as he keeps yelling that the outside world will hurt them just as much as in here. It’s a pretty tough endurance section as you have to dodge the Prototype’s attacks on a small arena while the train is on its way to the surface. Your allies keep decoupling parts of the train at every milestone, so you have to keep moving and dodge the Prototype on a variety of arenas. Thank GOD there are checkpoints at every milestone because the Prototype attacks FAST. Like, you don’t instantly die at his attacks, but it takes quite awhile to auto-heal. One of the Doeys actually sacrifices himself to finally put down the Prototype. It was the Leader Doey one, I don’t remember his name. There was Innocent Doey and Angry Doey, whose names I also don’t know. It was pretty sad though: Leader Doey was under the belief that this is how he can repay the deaths at Safe Haven, who he believed he was responsible for. But that’s the end of the Prototype. The last thing he heard was Poppy saying the orphans will live and be happy, but he couldn’t finish his response because check the paragraph above. The way he dies is crazy as well: Leader Doey takes the player’s flare gun hand, forces one flare into his mouth, jumps out, rips open the Prototype’s organs, then let the flare react with the red mist to make the both of them explode. It’s insane!! The train stops as the sun starts to rise over a residential area. As the experiments take some time to breathe in all of this fresh air, it causes Poppy to clamp up. All of the fears that the Prototype placed in her come back to haunt her as she starts worrying about how the people will see them. Kissy pats her, and that just reminds her of that thing they said in a previous tape about being “scared together”, which helps calm her down. Poppy then turns to the player, and asks them what to do. The player then looks at the other experiments, the hold with all the orphans inside, then back at Poppy, the screen goes black as the credits start playing. The ending is not all that ambiguous though, because the post-credits is just Poppy’s voice saying in a very grateful tone: “Thank you.” I suppose whatever the player had planned, it ended up all okay. And that’s the Playtime Ending. This story was alright, definitely not a highlight in this journey to archive/play everything from the Old World, but it’s okay for all the things it tried. I don’t even know what happened to Huggy lol 3/5 |
|