Key Preview Takeaways:

  • Each additional shift you take makes things tougher.
  • You can’t directly attack; you can only use items to fight back.
  • You can play solo, but co-op will be the way to go if you can.

Toy Story might be pop culture’sthe most recognizable take on the idea that our toys have a life of their own when we're not around, but Mob Entertainment’s Poppy Playtime might be among the more unique approaches totakes on the concept. It’s story, about shoving sentience into the products in a toy factory and those very abominations rebelling against their creators, is a sort of dark horror that has really spoken to a dedicated and growing audience of fans across games, film, and more. And though Escape From Playtime isn’t the studio’s first attempt at a multiplayer game, building one inside the Poppy Playtime universe and putting players inside the furry bodies and twisted minds of the monsters of the factory hopes to be their most robust attempt.

We got to play a few rounds of the co-op extraction looter ahead of its open playtest starting October 1st, and I found it surprisingly challenging in mostly fun ways despite the finicky controls and abundance of small bugs.

As a person unfamiliar with Poppy Playtime, I found Sr. Comms Manager Tyler Sanchez’s rundown of the lore to be helpful. Lots of attention has been paid to making the environments, enemies, and all the little details in between as accurate and respectful of the world they’ve made and that people have immersed themselves into as possible, as well as leaving breadcrumbs for real lore heads to devour. “The community is VERY passionate about the lore,” he punctuated his summary with. A quick perusal of the subreddit shows this to be true pretty immediately - quite a few of the top threads are people sharing early art or debating the merits of certain interpretations of story morsels.

Mob’s animation origins really make the macabre merriness stick to you as you watch monsters slink through the darkness in pursuit of you.

Once we got split into groups and dropped into the factory, I really appreciated how creepy and also silly all of these things were in motion. Walls and furniture askew and messy and towering over our miniscule bodies. Colorful bits and bobs all covered by jagged shadows or washed with eerie, sickly reds or greens. Our teddy characters, the Smiling Critters, whose namesake mugs curl uncomfortably from ear to ear. Mob’s animation origins really make the macabre merriness stick to you as you watch monsters slink through the darkness in pursuit of you.

Night Shift

QA Manager Jostin Bilyeu’s rundown of the gameflow was pleasantly chaotic and elaborate, but boiled down to a simple goal: our team must scavenge loot from around the factory and return it to Barry, a googly-eyed cart, without being caught and killed by the twisted experiments that roam the building’s corridors. Different bits of loot have different point values and rounds, called shifts here, have minimum point quotas that must be reached before you can leave the factory with the victory and move on to the next shift. Easier said than done, of course.

Grabbing loot is pretty straight forward, but you have a very limited amount of inventory space to keep them in. You really have to be discerning when managing the four slots if you're trying to be efficient. The added wrinkle is that most of the items you’ll find have some sort of utility that can be helpful in navigating the labyrinthian factory, like glow sticks you can mark important features or leave trails with. I got a kick out of the airhorn, which can be useful in helping your teammates find you with the unfortunate downside of also letting the enemy know your approximate location.[

Even when our squad of four had our pockets filled to the brim, we never had enough to hit the threshold in one wave, so we’d have to double back deeper into the factory on the hunt for more valuables. The deeper we ventured, the more the factory itself became its own oppressive enemy. With so many halls and doors that seem to sprawl out endlessly, not to mention the verticality of it all with rooms that potentially go as high as they do wide inviting us to use our ability to climb on practically anything to scour from floor to ceiling. Most of the climbing I did was pretty sketchy, thanks to both my unfamiliarity to the controls and the bugginess that comes with every surface in the game being potentially sticky at the press of a button.

Hazards revealed themselves the deeper we went, like a series of rooms consumed by noxious read CatNap gas, toxic to us if we stayed in it for too long. To clear the gas we had to navigate a path of school room desks whose tops peeked out over the noxious cloud, hopping from desk to desk through a series of rooms in order to pull a series of switches scattered among them. Again, easier said than done, as the floaty jumping could make for some dicey near misses, but I appreciated the way events like this modified the overall task.

You’re Not Alone

And then there’s the other denizens of the dilapidated workhouse that really don’t want you to leave. Of the four enemy types that possibly roam those corridors, I encountered three. Little green Boogie Bots were the bulk of the opponents, rolling around in patrol loops, sounding an alarm when they spotted one of us, and speeding towards us in an attempt to blow us all to bits. The Cat Bees float around like ghosts and latch onto players, and the only way to get them off as they slowly tick your life away is if an ally throws something at them. And then there was Miss Delight, an apparent fan favorite character who wanders the halls almost like a Big Daddy from Bioshock. She is a terrifying threat, and even though my encounter with her was brief - I ran and hid under a box as soon as I got the slightest hint that she was around - the menacing aura was real and palpable.

Monster types are limited, but I didn’t feel like I needed more variety to stay on my toes because each of them are so different and require different strategies to counterplay. I always had to keep a quick exit route in mind for the bots, and was incentivized not to stray too far from the group because of the bees. I also found that, for a game without direct combat (you can only throw your items at enemies and hope for the best), out- maneuvering these foes felt engaging enough that I didn't miss having the option to just simply bash something to death.

When we hit our quota and escaped, we moved on to the next shift, where the necessary number of points to extract raises. And so does the difficulty, as the procedurally generated factory map gets larger, and is filled with a greater variety of environmental hazards and more enemies. The longer you stay in the map looking for loot, the more deadly it gets, as monsters get better at finding you and the poisonous CatNap gas starts to fill the halls of the place. We struggled to stay alive in shift 2 long enough to see how grim it could get, though.

Survive Together or Die Alone

Escape from Playtime has a heavy emphasis on co-op and teamwork, evident in a special room we found that had giant piano keys scattered across it and a song we had to play by pressing the keys in a specific order. Was this puzzle solvable solo? Hell, the whole game can be played in single player, but the pain in the ass it would have been for a little bit of loot and opening a short cut would have made it untenable. That said, the only ways to communicate with other players areis through a single, context-less ping or the proximity voice chat. And without matchmaking, you’ll have to bring your own friends to the party (or I guess join a stranger’s hosted game?), which in its own right could be a challenge as tall as Huggy Wuggy.

Though more challenging than may meet the eye at first, Escape From Playtime’s kleptomaniacal co-op is fun and has a lot of potential. It has steep competition from all sides, as the number of multiplayer games in all genres has explodeds exponentially, but if overnight successes of games like Mecca Chameleon is any indication, small- scope romps with friends can always find a foothold with the right community, and Mob has that in spades.

Enter the factory at your owl peril when Escape From Playtime hits Early Access on Oct 21st.

While you're here, check out these recent previews of other big upcoming games we've checked out recently!

  • Grand Theft Auto 6
  • Fable
  • Exodus
  • Final Fantasy 7: Revelation

Jarrett Green is a frequent contributor to IGN. Talk video games with him on X/Twitter at @Jarrettjawn.