From humble beginnings as a shoestring-budget indie, the Poppy Playtime franchise has undergone quite the meteoric ascent over the past half-decade. Shifting upwards of 39 million units, it’s now a multi-platform, multimedia sensation and, like it or not, it happens to be one of the biggest names in horror right now.
There have been five mainline chapters, an asymmetrical spin-off — in the form of PROJECT: PLAYTIME — not to mention collaborations with Gen Alpha institutions like Fortnite, Roblox and Minecraft (practically giving all parties involved a license to print Croesian sums of money). Of course, there’s nowhere the series’ cultural dominance is more clearly evidenced than IRL, where enshrinement of its mascot character Huggy Wuggy is seemingly a mandatory requirement for all carnival game booths, random knick-knack stores, and arcade claw machines.
The point is, Poppy Playtime lost any claim to underdog status a while back. The same cannot be said, however, for its development team at Mob Entertainment, who, with neither the headcount nor the resources of a AAA studio, have managed to produce episodic outings in the series on a near-annual basis. You gotta respect the hustle!
For 2026’s installment, they’re taking a break from the usual solo experience to dabble once again in the realm of online multiplayer. Only this time it’s not asymmetrical, but rather a strictly co-operative affair.
Trading Solo Horror for Co-Op Extraction
Indeed, the new Escape From Playtime wisely avoids going down the stale Dead by Daylight route and instead hews closer to the likes of Lethal Company and this year’s The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu. Just like those games, it’s a first-person extraction title that has you braving hostile territory, salvaging loot, and then trying to haul ass back to your home base (with cargo in tow), all at the behest of a cruel taskmaster who cares not a jot if you live or die.
As per genre tradition, successfully evading the clutches of death and meeting your quota here only results in you getting sent back out into the fray. Now with an even more demanding target to hit and even more workplace hazards to overcome. Talk about performance punishment!
So, the fundamental rules, progression, and structure of matches are fairly boilerplate for this sort of thing. Where Escape From Playtime hopes to distinguish itself, though, is in how it combines those familiar basics with elements of the mascot horror subgenre, as well as the deceptively cutesy aesthetic that has made its own franchise such a hit.
The end result is doubtlessly an enticing proposition for die-hard PP fans. Yet, if our recent hands-on preview is anything to judge by, it’s going to be a tougher sell for those who aren’t already deeply invested in the lore of Playtime Co.
Toy (Horror) Story
Set during the intervening period between “The Hour of Joy” (an uprising that saw sentient toys turning against their makers) and the events of Poppy Playtime: A Tight Squeeze, the game casts you in the role of a so-called “Smiling Critter”. For the uninitiated, these are basically candy-coloured animal plushies that boast soulless black eyes, vacant grins, and zip-sealed mouths. Think Beanie Babies, only marginally less creepy!
At this point in the series continuity, the little imps have been left to fend for themselves within the derelict Playtime Co. manufacturing plant and are struggling to find common purpose in a post-rebellion world. That is, until they hear a disembodied voice transmitted over the loudspeakers, promising salvation if they can band together and collect enough materials to facilitate some unknown construction project.
This enigmatic rallying cry provides the narrative set-up for your matches, or “Shifts” as they’re called in Escape From Playtime. Essentially, you’ve got to wade out onto the factory floor, alongside up to three other critters, and secure your contributions for the great stockpile. The dungeons you explore are, to a certain extent, procedurally generated here, meaning that you’ll have to coordinate with teammates to cover as much ground as possible, locate prospective donations, solve light puzzles, and evade patrolling toys from other unfriendly tribes. All before a debilitating red gas seeps in and cuts your expedition short.
It’s a solid premise, and the developers do get a lot of comedic mileage from juxtaposing the reassuring, childlike imagery of the toy factory with the darker implications of what’s happening on its floor. For instance, if one of your fellow plushies is killed in action — let’s say it’s the adorable unicorn one — then you’re able to consume their flesh (or would it be felt?) to temporarily sustain your own existence.
Then there’s the selection of goofy items at your disposal, such as the acrobatic-augmenting bunny ears, the legally distinct NERF gun, and the concussive air horn that can be used to grief teammates (hilarious, so long as you’re the one wielding it). We were also charmed by the silly Doppler effect, which causes the voices of allies to modulate in pitch as they fall to their death or sprint by in a mad panic, as well as how the developers give you leeway to just bounce endlessly on springy trampolines when in safe zones, for no other reason than sheer dumb fun.
These are all nice little touches that give Escape From Playtime some arch, mischievous personality. Alas, they are only little touches.
Killing the Buzz with Sparse Encounters
For all of its whimsical cannibalism, quirkiness and frenetic energy, the rest of the experience is rather inert. In fairness, the game is only launching in early access later this month and isn’t being touted by Mob Entertainment as a finished product. Still, it’s hard to imagine it catching on with anyone other than the staunchest of Playtime loyalists, or those simply looking for new friend slop.
The few matches we played during our hands-on session were oddly lacking in incident. For the most part, we just blundered around a series of indistinguishable, dimly lit corridors and barren rooms often unaccosted by enemies as we searched for anything of value to collect or even just something engaging to do.
Once we managed to scrape together a paltry haul, we then had to suffer the tedium of retracing our steps all the way back to the beginning of the dungeon. Even with glowsticks serving as droppable waypoints, this return journey was often quite frustrating, given that we’d ascended multiple floors, gone through ventilation shafts, scaled walls, and generally got ourselves all turned around in the hunt for elusive resources.
On that note, traversal is cool in theory here, as the critters can do quasi-parkour and climb virtually any surface (à la Link in Breath of the Wild). Yet in practice, it’s often disorienting, thanks to the ludicrous movement speed and the way that your avatar’s limbs constantly get in the way of your vision. We can foresee people who like this kind of ADHD, twitchy gameplay happily mastering the mechanics. But for those mere mortals amongst us who can only perceive the world in real time, such hyper-kinetic motion — combined with an iffy first-person view — could prove to be a little nauseating.
Conversely, the monsters you encounter are borderline stationary half the time. It can take a while for any of them to show up but, once they do, they feel less like autonomous threats to be outsmarted and more like dormant traps to be sidestepped. There’s the Boogie Bot: a proximity mine on wheels that looks like the result of some unholy union between WALL-E and Astro Bot; the Cat-Bee: a poisonous stinger that idly floats around with all the indifference of a jellyfish being carried along by the ocean current; and Bunzo Bunny: a leporine spin on the old cymbal-clashing monkey toy that roots itself to the ceiling in a way that recalls the barnacles from Half-Life. As enemies go, they’re a weirdly passive bunch.
The only one who injects any urgency into rounds is Miss Delight. A doll with a cracked face that actively pursues you around the map and can detect sounds over the proximity chat, she’s a proper stalker with menace. Her appearances add some much-needed tension to Escape From Playtime and, once she’s on the prowl, there’s a chance for suspenseful scenarios to finally develop. She’s got this whole Weeping Angel gimmick — rendering her unable to move whenever you’ve got a beam of light fixed on her location — and that alone produced some nerve-wracking moments whenever we’d anxiously check on the dwindling battery life of our torch.
Puzzle-Focused Shifts Point to a Stronger Future
Another thing that helped to liven up our preview was a later-stage puzzle gauntlet that imposed a welcome structure on gameplay and had us feeling like we were doing more than just rooting around through trash cans like some kind of starving raccoon.
When in one of these special matches, you essentially go from zone to zone solving quick escape-room challenges, like playing the right arrangement on a walking piano, shooting hoops in an employee gym, or activating kindergarten blocks in the correct sequence, until you reach a conclusive endpoint. We were informed by Mob Entertainment that the shifts will periodically take on this more linear format and, honestly, it works a lot better than traipsing around the more open-ended dungeons.
Unlike the normal shifts, they incentivize communication with your team, have you interacting organically with one another, and can feel suitably panicky if you’re trying to complete tasks while Miss Delight breathes down your neck.
Suffice it to say, the gauntlet left us on a high and had us wondering if maybe Escape From Playtime is just a late bloomer. Perhaps it’s only after you’re a few shifts deep that things really get good, because that’s how it felt as our one-hour session drew to a close.
The addition of puzzle rushes, the inclusion of a roaming stalker, and the general ramping up of intensity certainly got us more engaged, anyway, and we hope that stuff becomes more prominent as the game develops in its beta form. Otherwise, it’s only going to appeal to those who are looking for new morsels of Playtime lore and who want to experience the world they already know from a fresh (in this case, diminutive) perspective.
Then again, given the franchise’s entrenched fanbase and enormous success, maybe that audience is the only one Mob Entertainment needs to worry about.
Escape From Playtime will launch into Steam Early Access on 21 October.
