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This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at Scranton chapter.

Who doesn’t love a good indie horror game? I am not a big horror movie fan, but the games, both playing and watching? Addicting. It all started out with “Slenderman: The Eight Pages” back in 2012 when our generation found an obsession with indie horror games or maybe it was back when the “Scary Maze Game” was a terrifying obsession even further back.  After Slenderman, there were a few other horror indie game releases and then “Five Nights at Freddy’s” happened. The start of a completely new fandom.

The game came out two years later in 2014 and is based in a place called “Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzaria” where the player attends their first night as a nightly security guard.  Throughout the game, the player only has a flashlight with a consistently dying battery and must keep control of manual doors in order to keep out Freddy Fazbear and his friends, animatronics that comes to life at night and basically kills the player with jump-scares.  Since the game has come out so have seven more causing more conspiracy theories to evolve and put each little piece of the game together from the backstories of the animatronics to the origin of the place and the overall future of the entire game sequence.

Back in 2021, a new indie horror game took an uproar: Poppy Playtime.  The player represents a former employee, visiting the abandoned toy factory “Playtime Co.” where mysteriously all have the workers have vanished.  The main characters are the company’s most famous toys: Poppy Playtime, Huggy Wuggy, Cat-Bee, Kissy Wissy, and a few others. The player uncovers a few VHS tapes, one of them confessing that the missing employees are trapped in the factory and to uncover them, the player is to solve puzzles. Along the way, the player is surprised and chased by a few of the characters which causes a few jump-scares.  The game is not entirely violent except for the markings on the wall such as “Staircase to hell” with the word “hell” written in crayon and blood splatters all over the wall.  

Overall, have you played Poppy Playtime and what are your thoughts on it? Is Poppy Playtime the new Five Nights at Freddy’s? Which do you prefer? If you have not played it yet, you can watch videos of game walk-throughs on YouTube or even purchase it yourself through MOB games either mobile or PC.

My name is Leandria Hercules and I am currently a senior at the University of Scranton, with a major in Journalism and Electronic Media and a minor in Business Communication. Currently I spend my free time on writing my upcoming book and achieving little steps towards my future goals. Feel free to add me on Instagram @leandria_ev831 where I post food content and my daily life!