About twenty minutes into my hands-on time with Escape from Playtime, our guide stopped at the foot of a staircase in the Playtime Co. library. "Staircases are for quitters," he told us. Then he scrambled up a bookshelf, swung across a rope hanging from the ceiling, and waited for the rest of us. We followed, badly.
That moment sums up my hour with Mob Entertainment's new co-op horror game. It's messy, and it's often silly. I also had a much better time with it than I expected to.
Mob was founded in 2015 by brothers Zach and Seth Belanger, and it's best known for Poppy Playtime. Since the first chapter came out in 2021, the series has sold millions of copies. It also turned Huggy Wuggy, a lanky blue monster with a mouthful of teeth, into the new cool thing kids are afraid of. Those games were single-player puzzle affairs starring a former factory worker; this one hands you and up to three friends a set of tiny toys, then drops you in a building full of things that would happily eat you.
It hits Steam Early Access on October 21, with an open beta playtest starting October 1. Mob says work on it only began earlier this year. The build I played showed that. Still, the bones are good.
Life at plush scale
You play as the Smiling Critters, the brightly colored plush toys (with alarmingly wide grins) that first showed up in Poppy Playtime: Chapter 3. The story falls between the Hour of Joy, the night Playtime Co.'s toys turned on the staff, and the start of Chapter 1. Mob was proud to announce that the game was canon, for those following along with the overarching story.
During the presentation before we played, a Mob spokesperson said the studio loves leaving "breadcrumbs" for its community to pick apart. Setting the game at this point in the story also lets Mob bring back characters who died in the main chapters; Miss Delight, the lunch lady from Chapter 3, is the big one. Newcomers needn't worry, though. Mob wants people who've never touched Poppy Playtime to jump right in.
The setup is simple. A mysterious Voice tells the Critters to gather parts for something it's building, and promises them a safe place to hide in return. What's it building? Mob won't say yet. You drag your finds back to Barry, a cart with eyes (whom the Mob spokesperson was nice enough not to kill me with when I fell into Barry's pit), who hauls everything off to a worksite. "Barry is hungry," we were reminded more than once. Each round has a quota. My group cleared our first at 1,430, mostly thanks to a single puppy coin worth 1,000.
Shrinking down is the game's best idea. The game's aesthetic obviously has many parallels with that of Little Nightmares, but I would argue it's even more effective here with the first-person point-of-view. A classroom feels huge from a few inches off the floor; a desk becomes a cliff face. The monsters tower over you, which made it genuinely jump-worthy whenever I succumbed to the red mist. Mob says you can climb almost anything, from walls and shelves to ropes hanging off the ceiling, and that held up when I played. Movement is a bit floaty and stiff. I will say the platforming mechanics paired with the climbing controls could be genuinely frustrating. But loot often sits somewhere high and awkward, so every room turns into a not-so-fun puzzle about how to get up there (though it did make scary sections even more exciting).
Throw everything
The first part of our session was a guided tutorial. We rode in the caboose of a toy train, then shot hoops at a little basketball court to learn how throwing works. It's time well spent, because throwing is the heart of the game. Wind up harder, and the arc gets longer. Almost anything you pick up can be a tool or a weapon.
It's also how you deal with the locals. Bunzo Bunny, the rabbit with the cymbals, hangs from the ceiling and snatches anyone who walks underneath; the only way down is for a friend to hit him with something. Cat Bee (half cat, half bee) has a poison sting that only a certain antidote can fix. When one landed on a teammate, our guide knocked it off with a quick throw. He then showed us how to bounce an item off a wall to swat a bee off yourself when you're alone.
Miss Delight works like the Weeping Angels from Doctor Who. She only moves when you aren't looking, and she freezes in your flashlight beam. Flares make a line she won't cross. Boogie Bot, a small green robot, simply blows up; one of my teammates found that out the hard way. The items have plenty of charm. Glow sticks take on the color of whoever drops them, so purple trails are mine and red ones belong to someone else. The game gets completely dark, so it required a lot of conscious management of the flashlight and glosticks. An air horn can knock a friend flat (our guide tried it on me), but hang on to it too long and it explodes. If you're hurt, you can even heal by eating a downed teammate's leg. You're "doing your friend a service," our guide insisted. I'm not sure the friend would agree.
Keep your friends close
As a huge fan of Big Walk, I can say Mob has made one of the best uses of proximity chat. You can only hear teammates who are close by, so splitting up to cover more ground means losing your lifeline. Halfway through our run, one of us drifted off after loot (one of several valuables that exist only to be cashed in toward the quota), and the group scattered. Nobody had laid down glow sticks. Nobody knew which way Barry was. This happened a dozen other times through the playthrough, all ending in our team's death, which is why our guide stressed the importance of an unofficial buddy system while traversing the game's environment.
The best moment came near the middle, in a piano room. Each of us had to stand on a certain key while our guide played conductor, calling out directions as we hopped through a tune. It was silly, and a bit of a mess. It's also exactly what this kind of game is built for: it gives you a reason to work together, then lets you fumble through it as a group.
Early days
As I mentioned, this was an early build. Mob warned us about bugs up front. Our guide even told us that dying fixes several known problems, and it recharges a dead flashlight while it's at it. Some of the rough edges were funny. (I may have leaned on one flare glitch more than I should have; our guide noticed, and said he was "all for it.") Others are a reminder that Early Access here really does mean early.
There won't be much at launch, either. Mob plans to open with four playable Critters, four more to unlock, one starter zone and a core set of monsters. More zones and Critters will follow, shaped by what players say. The studio says the factory's layout changes with each run, but our session was so tightly guided that I can't tell how much that adds over dozens of hours. For a game like this, that's the big question.
Then there's the competition. Co-op scavenging horror has become one of the busiest corners of Steam since Lethal Company and R.E.P.O. showed how it's done. Escape from Playtime has a famous setting on its side, plus a huge built-in audience. Whether that's enough depends on how well Mob keeps it fed after launch. From what I enjoyed, it just might work.
I expected a licensed side project, and came away having a really good time. The scares are lighter than in the main chapters; it's hard to stay frightened while a teammate honks an air horn in your ear. But clambering around a giant factory as a toy, lobbing junk at monsters, gives the game a feel of its own. Fans get new lore to chew on. Everyone else gets an excuse to drag three friends into a toy factory and see who gets eaten first.
Also, the music rocks.
