It’s a bit of a tough challenge writing a Poppy Playtime review at the moment. We’re on the threshold of the final chapter being released, and half a decade’s worth of drip-fed lore is finally going to be resolved…hopefully. If you’re late to the bandwagon, or you just stick to watching YouTube videos over actually playing the game, then you can sit right back and get ready for this marathon review of all 4 previous chapters in the storyline to get you ready for Chapter 5.
What Is Poppy Playtime?
If you’re not already familiar, somehow, Poppy Playtime is a first-person mascot horror game from MOB Games. It tells the tale of the rise and fall of Playtime Co., a toy company with a meteoric rise to success who fell to abandon and obscurity by the 90s. As an ex-employee, you one day find yourself called back to the abandoned factory and have to explore it to see what happened the day that the laughter died.
To aid you in this, you spend most of your time solving puzzles, running away from monsters, and attempting to pick your way deeper and deeper into the abandoned factory to discover the truth about what happened all those years ago. You’ll also find a bunch of VHS tapes to watch, which will give you some insight into the narrative, as well as gratuitous YouTuber cameos. Now, let’s take a look at each chapter in turn and see what they’ve got going on.
Poppy Playtime – Chapter 1: A Tight Squeeze
The first chapter in the game is a free download that you can check out for yourself on Steam, if you feel inclined. You start out as you enter the abandoned factory, and your first puzzle is figuring out the code that gets you into the rest of the building. This starting area is pretty atmospheric, featuring dead silence and the creepy analogue recording of the voice on the VHS tape you find on the counter. Combined with the bright and colourful, albeit faded, décor and the piles upon piles of mutilated children’s toys, you can begin to see why this managed to make the splash that it did.
There’s only one real monster encounter here, and overall, the chapter is pretty short, but it’s effective at introducing its enemy, story, and location. There are some genuinely brilliant uses of the monster, though I won’t ruin the specifics on what happens, and the puzzles are a semi-gentle introduction to the sorts of things you’ll be doing from now on. A bit basic, but I also enjoy the hell out of the GrabPack that you’ll be using for most of the rest of the game.
- 8/10
Poppy Playtime – Chapter 2: Fly in a Web
This chapter begins at the exact moment that the last chapter leaves off, but it is a fair bit more substantial than the free opening chapter. Firstly, you will have several monsters to deal with before you move onto the next chapter, and there’s a larger area for you to explore by quite a large margin. You’ll also find that the puzzles have been expanded too, with electrical upgrades for your GrabPack and a bunch of extra collectibles scattered throughout the levels, if you’re looking hard enough.
In terms of the puzzles you have to complete, now you have access to the green hand that lets you keep an electric charge temporarily, and you have to use it to power certain devices. It’s not a huge evolution of how the GrabPack works, but it adds enough of an element to keep things interesting. If anything, this is where the game really opens up and starts to feel like a full-fledged game, with several specific challenges to complete, a huge area to explore, and more than one monster to worry about. The secondary antagonist of the chapter gives me chills too, and the story feels like it’s starting to open up into something more interesting from here.
That said, it’s also missing the subtitle options that were featured in Chapter 1, which is a bit of a glaring omission. If you were someone hard-of-hearing who enjoyed Chapter 1, I hope you’re not planning on playing Chapter 2 until they release the full game once Chapter 5 drops.
- 7/10
Poppy Playtime – Chapter 3: Deep Sleep
Chapter 3 has the best moments from the game so far but also features some of the worst moments too. It’s also a damn sight bigger than the previous two chapters, with a solid few extra hours of gameplay at minimum, and that’s if you don’t suck at the gameplay. There’s a very clear difficulty spike around this point in the storyline that might make you want to rage-quit.
Firstly, the good. This is the first chapter where I felt like the atmosphere was closer to a psychological horror game. Several of the set-pieces were incredibly effective at being scary, relying heavily on a very slow build-up of the monster being glimpsed around every corner and the cloying atmosphere of the gore-strewn abandoned location. There are even a few really interesting puzzles to play through as well, some of which might test you.
The annoying parts mostly relate to the bugs. There were a few soft-locks I experienced, especially in the generator room area. I also tended to find my way forward barred pretty often, mostly due to missing obvious stuff that was hanging around the ceiling area where I was barely looking for fear of the stuff that might strike from the ground. Also, the segment with the critters in the Playhouse can bite me. I never want to have to do that again.
- 6/10
Poppy Playtime – Chapter 4: Safe Haven
If there’s one major issue that Mob Entertainment will find when it comes to releasing Poppy Playtime as an entire package, it’s going to be the lack of consistency between chapters. This is partly because the team has clearly improved as developers over the years, but the games are wildly different in terms of settings, gameplay features and even direct continuity. At the very least, this chapter features some great gameplay moments and much fewer bugs than the previous chapter.
Safe Haven is a chapter that mostly revolves around attempting to confront one of the major baddies behind the series and the things you’ll have to sacrifice to do it. The chapter is a bit shorter on scares, with nothing quite matching the highs of the CatNap boss fight or wandering around the abandoned, destroyed orphanage, but the great gameplay sequences more than make up for it. You have at least three different major monster encounters, and they all manage to feel quite different.
There are a few letdowns as you play through the game, though they’re relatively minor. There’s an encounter with a specific enemy that seems like it’s going to be a big encounter, but it ends before it begins, which was a bit frustrating. I also had one or two issues with hit boxes in the Yarnaby encounter, but eventually, I did manage to clear it. In the end, I enjoyed this chapter more than the last purely for the slightly more polished experience.
- 7/10
Overall
So far, Poppy Playtime has ended up as one of the more intriguing entries in the indie horror genre at large and (arguably) mascot horror as well. It has the extra lore of a FNAF game but with more clarification in the games themselves and, honestly, just better gameplay than most of the early games in the aforementioned series. While there are a whole bunch of bugs and inconsistencies, Mob Entertainment have plenty of time to square things out for the final, non-episodic release, and we all know that the mysteries surrounding the plot alone will be enough to keep most of us coming back for Chapter 5.
Developer: Mob Entertainment
Publisher: Mob Entertainment
Platform: PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PC, Nintendo Switch
Release Date: 30th January 2026
