Everyone is always looking to pass the buck, when all they really need to do to find the source for all their frustrations involves staring into a mirror.

You are your own worst enemy. For the love of sanity, get out of your own way….

Though October flashed before our eyes like a bolt of lightning, gone in what felt like a single instant, I desired to keep the spoopy season going, as I happen to be a fairly ardent survival horror fan. So in my quest to elongate the time I would spend within the realm of the terrifying, I needed a fitting title with which to fly my freak flag high, and something equally bizarre to get real weird with. I had downloaded My Friendly Neighborhood (MFN) awhile ago, and had been eyeing it for sometime, knowing abouts what the premise of the game would end up being (Resident Evil set on Sesame Street). Though I also figured it might be a bit of self-sabotage to follow up almost any other survival horror title, immediately bookending my playthrough of the Silent Hill 2 Remake (SH2R), the heart wants what the heart wants, and it was about time to enjoy some demonically tormented saturday morning cartoon shenanigans, in the form of the puppet murder orgy known as My Friendly Neighborhood (MFN).

Not that I’m terribly unique in this regard, but in spite of my years of discipline involved with writing about games, hundreds upon hundreds of all kinds of articles written even, I still have a tendency to be quite the mood based writer, which helps to create variances in my style considerably. I also shy away from more traditional write-ups, like standard reviews, as I find the format to be…lacking, for numerous reasons. Which kind of puts me in a weird place, as I don’t issue numerical scores, which fails to endear me with developers, publishers, and gamers alike, as I don’t really “play ball”, as it were, and even once brought into question the idea of “digestibility” with my absurdist prose and meandering preponderance of astounding length. This is certainly a C’est la fucking vie kind of moment, as I’m not in this line of work of freelance writing to placate a bottom line standard of any kind, and since I tend to not make people money with my articles, one can certainly bring into question value judgement in relation to what constitutes quality in the first place, if the starting line metric is the one trending toward bog standard sensibility. I suppose I share this so explicitly now, because I am in a wistful mode of sheer reflective contemplation, and putting forth both obtusely creative deconstructualism, mixed in with some personal testimonial, is where my head is at right now.

I also have a tendency to write episodically about games, to give both myself and the reader a chance to enjoy bite sized portions of reality at a time, which I don’t really see others doing, so I can claim some originality in that regard. Possessing the stylization of a flowing narrative between my articles has many benefits, like being able to explicate considerably on any one title I’m working my way through, not feeling the need to write some unwieldy behemoth omnibus of information, 5000+ words in length, detailing any one game too long for anyone to reasonably read. It also allows me to dip into the idea of cultivating a philosophical system of sorts, in conjunction with my analysis of the game design in question, which helps to build a number of perspective standards which can apply not only to the current flavor of the week, but help build consistency across an entire body of work. A great example of this is in rears to my articles related to MFN, which would have never come about in a more traditional context of writing about video games, and the world would have been less interesting as a result of my lacking contribution in the matter…a proper shame and a half, that would have been, I reckon.

All of this exposition does have an aim, and is not just an exercise in excessively expounding an egotistical display of self-absorption, as going through MFN, a lot of ideas popped up for me, in relation to both the development of the game, the developers creative quest behind it, my approach to writing, and even my history with games themselves, all coalescing into an interesting dichotomy resembling a perfect storm. MFN is quite a personal project, which becomes more and more clear, especially post game, as one pokes around for the easter eggs hidden on the map, and it brought into focus something I thankfully had the foresight to touch on a little bit with my White Whale Standard article, in that I think the gaming industry is too predicated on the biggest and the best too much of the time, and it kind of shuts out smaller creators in trying to get their creative works out there. This was also in part due to why I didn’t abandon the game wholesale, after I had logged my first hour into the title, as I had a strange intuition there would be some value in pushing forward, even if it meant me eating…nay, sucking down crow puppet style on the subject matter of what the game truly had to offer, in contradistinction to milquetoast sentimentality early on.

This leads up to one of the larger points I’m attempting to underline here, in that for too long, I’ve fallen prey to the very same pitfalls the industry at large has, in that I have been wrongly writing off games far too easily myself, with perhaps too demanding a standard in what they should offer, instead of what they do offer, a notion I recently explored earlier this year with some insights I shared in response to my replay of Gex 1. At least on my part, this turn of events has mostly likely been due to collateral related to creating too cynical a standard I ended up falling into, with my playthrough of Death Stranding many years ago. This whole incident was made even more insane, due to my love of the Metal Gear Solid series, and how much I enjoyed playing those games, but found the cult of personality surrounding Kojima to be loathsome and eye-rolling. I think this came to a head when he was given full carte blanche to do whatever he wanted on DS, as the whole premise of the game is such a farce, and I felt the same way after five hours playing the game that I felt for 200 hours after playing the game.

I wisely stayed second guessing myself, upon my more recent return to freelancing, as there have been a number of times, including as recently and as impactfully so as the release of Silksong, that I dismissed my initial bounce off of the first Hollow Knight, and bought the sequel, much to my surprising delight. This all relates to MFN, as all of this struggling process led me to not write off MFN too quickly (as mentioned) for having what I dubbed “Rough Start Syndrome”, which plagues even the best of games on the market. And I’m glad I was dubious of myself overall, and not too cocksure and headstrong to admit when I could be wrong, like so many other misguided fools of our day, as MFN has been worthy of my time, and delivered in terms of survival horror fanfare in my humble but experienced eyes, and even made me second guess my own approach to analyzing games, in whether or not it is just the mechanics themselves that so heavily contribute to a games standard of quality, as the metaphysical reality that makes up, and indeed envelops MFN ends up making the game better than the sum of its parts, certainly making for a freakishly invigorating romp running from maniacal puppets, and a unique and engagingly thoughtful moment in time.

Speaking of which, time is something that is regularly not on my side, so we will have to pick this up again tomorrow, where I will have finally choked down the massive amount of crow I had to suck down, in initially doubting MFN capable tenacity, and all of its absurd glory there after.

-Pashford