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My Friendly Neighborhood’s Steam Next Fest demo is a refreshingly grown-up take on old horror tropesNightmare on Sesame Street

Nightmare on Sesame Street

Entirely too many Ernie-like puppets approach the player in My Friendly Neighborhood

It’s no secret that I lovehorrorgames, but lately I’ve been going through a bit of a dry spell when it comes to finding upcoming titles to get excited about. I picked up theMy Friendly NeighborhoodSteam Next Festdemo to kill half an hour without many expectations, but what do you know, it’s shot right to the top of my indie horror wishlist.

My Friendly Neighborhood Demo at Steam Next Fest!Watch on YouTube

My Friendly Neighborhood Demo at Steam Next Fest!

Cover image for YouTube video

The weapons themselves have a surprisinglyBioShock-y feel to them, if BioShock was just a little bit more whimsical with its steampunk influences. In this demo, you get to wield the Rolodexer, a pistol that shoots letters of the alphabet off of index cards. Not only do the metal letters hit with a satisfying chime, they serve to indicate how much ammo you have remaining, adding a weird humorous tension to clip conservation as you edge ever closer to Z. Later on, you get a shotgun that fires cloth-bound children’s books that’s called, aptly, The Novelist.

Pull up your map, though, and you’ll suddenly be put in the mindset ofResident Evil, as MFN uses the same helpful red/blue highlight system to indicate rooms cleared and rooms that still have unclaimed items. As I said, there’s very little here that feels really new, but that pedigree is outstanding.

The player character wields the book-firing shotgun The Novelist in My Friendly Neighborhood

A map with Resident Evil-style colour-coded annotations in My Friendly Neighborhood

A room full of decommissioned puppets hang eerily from the walls in My Friendly Neighborhood

The overall effect was honestly not so much scary as tongue-in-cheek funny, with a tense but fair evade-or-confront approach to combat that never felt frustrating (and I have a particularly low tolerance for janky stealth in horror games). You also encounter one or two friendlier puppets along the way, whose wry commentary on the situation with their deranged cohort allows your character to fire off a few good one-liners. It’s all very promising.

My Friendly Neighborhood doesn’t have a release date just yet, but you can try the demo out for yourself over onSteam.