When I started playing the first installment of episodic first-person horror game Poppy Playtime back in 2021, I thought it might be just yet another Five Nights At Freddy's-alike. I was quickly proven wrong thanks to some top-notch voice acting, inventive puzzle-solving systems, and excellent character design. It may have a lot in common with many of the jump scare-fueled streamer-bait games that Steam is bursting at the seams with, but Poppy Playtime is pretty successful at doing its own thing.
Its fourth chapter, Safe Haven, launches today, and takes you deeper into the Playtime factory than ever before. Call it Hell, call it Toy Prison, call it whatever you like: it's a place "where the devil never sleeps," as some graffiti scrawled on the wall informed me when I played a bit of Chapter 4 this week. It's a deeply unsettling sub-sub-sub basement of the factory, where discarded toys are piled so high they seem to form mountain ranges and it feels like tiny button eyes are watching you everywhere you go.
You're not alone down there, of course. A watchful malefactor isn't that pleased at your intrusion and there are horrifying new toys hunting you as you attempt to solve new puzzles with your ever-useful gadget-hands. There's also a new character, Doey the Doughman, a Play-Doh-like character featured in a commercial at the start of the chapter. As he bounces around and sticks to things, the jingle goes:
"He's stretchy, he's gummy, he's squishy, he's funny! D-O-E-Y, Doey!
He's silly, he's gooey, he's sticky, he's gluey, D-O-E-Y, Doey!
So many toys in one! Triple kind of friend and triple type of fun!
D-O-E-Y, Doey! Fun until the day that you die!"
There's probably nothing ominous about that last line. Have a look at the Poppy's Playtime Chapter 4 trailer below, where you can take a look at Doey for yourself and decide if he's really triple kind of friend and triple type of fun, or if he's a chilling 6-foot-tall clay golem wearing a cute little hat.
Poppy Playtime has been something of a lightning rod for controversy. In 2021 the developers began dabbling in Poppy Playtime NFTs, drawing an immediate and predictable backlash from the community. The developer of Venge, a horror game set in a movie theater, accused Poppy Playtime developer Mob Entertainment of plagiarism.
In 2022 the character of Huggy Wuggy, a towering, terrifying teddy bear got parents all in a tizzy when police reports in both the UK and US stated (wrongly) that the character sang songs about "hugging and killing," videos of which were slipping past parental safeguards on TikTok and YouTube Kids, which children were then viewing and repeating. Snopes has a pretty exhaustive investigation of the whole panic, which can be traced back to a fan-made video and the overreactions of some concerned parents. (Bottom line: Huggy Wuggy doesn't actually sing songs about hugging and killing in the game. He just hugs you and kills you. There's also no evidence the video was viewable on YouTube Kids or TikTok for Younger Users.)
That's not all: the latest dust-up involves Mob Entertainment suing Google for refusing to remove "scam" apps that pretend to be the Poppy Playtime games from the Android Playstore. Whew. That's a whole lotta drama around a pretty enjoyable game about surviving a factory filled with evil toys, huh? Poppy Playtime: Chapter 4 launches on Steam today.
