When I see a game labeled as “survival horror” I don’t expect it to be a classic survival horror and instead turn out to be a horror themed game of some random genre. So after playing the demo of My Friendly Neighborhood and seeing that it is shaping up to fit the classic survival horror genre pillars, I was pleasantly surprised. And while I wouldn’t name it among the truly good examples of the genre, it’s definitely a descent enough game to scratch that itch and it also has a bunch of cute ideas of its own.
Being an example of said genre, you can expect this game to have places to explore in a somewhat metroidvania-ish level design and limited resources to manage while dealing with enemies. Exploring the locations is pretty fun since they are as varied as the setting of the game allowed them to be, while also presenting fun problems to solve and secrets to find. And to game’s credit, apart from a final point of no return, and a couple of permanent location changes, the game allows you to return to old areas with no restrictions and search for things you might’ve missed before or perform additional tasks that couldn’t have been completed the first time you were there.
Resources on Normal mode, at least for someone who is well versed with the genre, are extremely plentiful and I’ve had more problems with managing the space for all the crap I had, then running out of things. But, in a way, that’s a me problem – I could select a harder difficulty from the beginning. That said, dealing with enemies in this game is… not great. It’s not terrible by any means, but the way enemies deal damage feels bad, avoiding them isn’t particularly fun and shooting them doesn’t feel good either. So I’m actually glad I didn’t play on a harder difficulty, because I feel that with this kind of combat design, more limited resources would have made my experience not more challenging, but more tedious instead.
That said, the whole concept that enemies never “die” and are active again as soon as you enter the room they’re in via a loading transition, unless you tape them up, is pretty cute. However, the fact that you don’t know which doors lead to a loading screen and which do not is bad and can lead to situations where you think you’re opening a “normal” door to quickly check what’s inside and instead get transitioned to a different area, meaning that all enemies that were safely knocked out in that previous room you didn’t fully explore, will be active again when you return. The Silent Hill approach to maps, where you simply don’t see where you are until you find a map item, is also not great as it’s very easy to miss items in the room and without the RE-inspired “room cleared” marking on the map you might never know if you’ve missed something or not.
Either way, My Friendly Neighborhood is a pretty nice and enjoyable game with a lot of charm. And it also has a bunch of interesting secrets, unlockables, a New Game Plus mode and other things that can motivate you play it more. It isn’t as memorable and fun as the FPS action adventure with horror theme In Sound Mind and it is also not on the same level of either quality or fun gameplay as Resident Evil 7 it’s most similar to. But it is about on par with Tormented Souls in “understanding what’s fun about the genre” and being a “good enough” example of it that’s worth checking out.