Context: I only watched this game, I did not play it, but in lieu of an actual good way to get access to games I count full playthrough videos as an equally valid playthrough. It's like renting a movie but it's still your favorite story you saw all year.
Resident Evil & Silent Hill came out after Alone in the Dark, and I think that's a useful thing to keep in mind when the temptation to invoke Five Nights At Freddy's passes through anyone trying to talk about this game. The priming of puppets as potentially malicious forces does owe something to those games, but where those games exist for more commercial pursuits, My Friendly Neighborhood actually tries to talk about things. Either brilliantly or accidentally, it uses children's show "what did we learn" voicing to talk about these things, but if I've learned anything from watching denser stories about empathy bounce off the skulls of sycophants, that's kind of where you have to meet a lot of people who play games if you want to ask them why we let malicious forces do things to us that no one likes.
Resident Evil & Silent Hill came out after Alone in the Dark, and I think that's a useful thing to keep in mind when the temptation to invoke Five Nights At Freddy's passes through anyone trying to talk about this game. The priming of puppets as potentially malicious forces does owe something to those games, but where those games exist for more commercial pursuits, My Friendly Neighborhood actually tries to talk about things. Either brilliantly or accidentally, it uses children's show "what did we learn" voicing to talk about these things, but if I've learned anything from watching denser stories about empathy bounce off the skulls of sycophants, that's kind of where you have to meet a lot of people who play games if you want to ask them why we let malicious forces do things to us that no one likes.