I want a HORROR experience, the kind that ACTUALLY sticks with you after it happens, I’m sick of all these friendly and marketable faces everywhere. Its all the same every single time, the entirety of Poppy Playtime is just good ideas wasted because they can’t expand beyond the limits of mascot horror. The Grabpack would been a fun mechanic in literally any other genre, ESPECIALLY in a platformer game.
So, here’s my take on this matter.
You know what this goddamn Mascot Horror genre needs to be shaken?
A 18-R game that actually treats the player like an adult.
I know what you’re thinking.
(If you're going "18-R", and the genre is "MASCOT horror", yes, the one genre with all the plushies and merch of CARTOON characters, then its nearing into edgelord territory.)
Horror is supposed to be PUSHING the boundaries of what is right and wrong, often exploring dark subject matter and dealing with transgressive topics or themes. Not act as a machine for merchandise to sell towards children and manchildren or a therapy session disguised as a "horror" (looking at you angel hare).
Mascot Horror games are designed to generate fanfiction and speculation, things kids have always loved to do when engaging with fiction. This, coupled with the fact that they're released in semi-regular bursts, keeps the chain going as their attention keeps being renewed for what is essentially the same product over and over again, and stories which could have been told in one shot instead of several. Scott Cawthon accidentally discovered the way to make making shit up as you go along extremely profitable.
The reason this hasn’t happen yet, an 18+ mascot horror game I mean, is because there's no money in that. It has to be subtly geared to kids. Children are the biggest fucking money makers of any market. They have toys, books, movies, plushies all for Fnaf and Poppy.
Is any of that shit gonna happen with a kiddie horror game strictly made for adults? No chance. Although kids would go outright crazy for the Mascot Horror game that's selling itself on not being for kids, that might cause controversy with the parents.
Past a certain point it’s more on the parents than the kids. If they tell them, “It’s not for young minds”, they better fucking listen or they will be scarred for life.
As for what this mature could be? Well, mascot horrors like using the sense of "innocence" and "nostalgia" so much, so how about of taking them to tackle a situation that exploits that aspect but to their moral limits.
Like...
WAR.
Say something like a mascot being used to sell, or placate the idea of, war to kids, in the same way that old war cartoons, or stuff like the MCU, sell it.
Get crazy with this concept; like “deploying Freddy Fazbear into Urzekistan” memes but taken seriously or base it off one of those old stealth games like Beyond Castle Wolfenstein or something but with costumes or biomechanical monsters.
Essentially, what I’m proposing is: Spec Ops: The Line, but as a decostruction of Mascot Horror
Think about it, this is different to another deconstruction of mascot horror in the game My Friendly Neighborhood. That game was a deconstruction of Mascot Horror in the sense that there was nothing actually dark or sinister supposedly going on.
Just an especially bad day "behind the scenes" of an Ersatz Sesame Street, which is obviously very dangerous, but nothing is actually a subversion of the pure and cute characters that are presented.
Everything is played straight and there are no actually dark moments that "subvert" the child friendly characters, and it’s a good game too.
The player character in My Friendly Neighborhood is implied to have fought in a war and experience PTSD because the game is essentially based on Sesame Street, a show that had a significant number of Korean War veterans and which first began airing almost exactly alongside the Vietnam War.
Making this just an acknowledgement of the time period built into the premise of "What if all of these wacky characters were just real creatures all being wrangled to make the show?" That's literally all there is to it, the point is that it would be a little bit of a fucking nightmare without anything needing to be actively sinister, because some of the characters are retards, naïve, functionally animals, or just really exaggerated assholes.
As how to tackle the WAR aspect?
I'd take the Ace Combat approach of making an alternate earth with fictional factions and such so that it makes the war scenario have more freedom with what's allowed and what isn't.
It being similar to our world BUT different so that it fits the narrative of Mascots being used for waging war and propaganda with the player character being a civilian or a soldier trying avoid the mascot creature in the area of its operation.
A scenario where there's a semi-hot war between a retrofuturistic Not-US and Not-USSR fought by mercenaries and proxy forces where both sides have deployed horrifying, biomechanical terrors that can barely discriminate between friend and foe because of some Macguffin device they issue to every soldier. But both sides have propagandized these things to hell and back by astroturfing them like Sea Monkeys.
To make this more effective, the player sees both sides' propaganda and the conflict itself as an interloper, maybe even a child. You could set it in a city that's changed hands multiple times in relatively short succession and had American-coded retro pop culture and architecture built up as well as Soviet-coded retro pop culture. You go between them, in an active warzone full of monsters, just trying to get out, while seeing just how dishonest and cruel both sides are being in their propaganda efforts.
Some might say that using mascot horror-creatures for war is just as stupid as jurassic world trying to convince the use of dinosaurs as war elements. But when you consider both the American propaganda animations of Disney and Warner Brothers and the soviet animations in WW2. This would be a simple exaggeration of those themes but driven to their limit, similar of the implications in Rodger Rabbit where the American toons aided the allies with acting in their war propaganda and the idea of a cartoon character who isn’t bound to the laws of our reality joining to a war being just horrifying to fight against.
Also, Dinosaurs were real animals, these mascots things aren’t so the suspension of disbelief isn’t shattered.
These are all some pretty good ideas, especially the idea of the monsters being created to fight and creating propaganda to make the war seem cool to young people and possible recruits, like Marvel making government mandated U.S Agent merch while the Soviets got Red Guardian toys.
And here comes the neat part, to make it a deconstruction, there HAS to be something relating to the idea of the 'ouroboros', the snake biting its own tail. A lot of mascot horror are corporations trying to make quick bucks off of kids with copy-paste formulas for these games. So, something that actually involves the big bad guys in universe effectively cannibalizing their own by trying to sell the merch as best as they can would be a neat thing to touch.
Making the actual "Mascot" characters only just barely resemble the monsters, in the way the art of Sea Monkeys only just barely resembled Brine Shrimp, with the big reveal being that both sides of the war made them from the same formula originating from a third party with superficial tweaks to suit their specific ideologies and needs.
And, as an oblique reference to Scott Cawthon only making FNAF because he was told his earnest efforts at making wholesome games were being held back by his creepy art style. It turns out that the guy who actually engineered these monsters in the first place was just trying to make friendly and helpful companions for humans to ease their lives and lift their spirits, but when he tried to get more funding for them, the investors took more interest in one of the broken prototypes. The one that followed ORDERS.
If someone were to do that, you'd both be subverting and playing the genre straight, which is what all good subversive fiction does.
Watchmen was so good because the characters in it feel like they could belong to a series that was played straight instead (to Alan Moore's eternal chagrin) And that's why The Boys is shit.
That's why Shrek is good, the core fairy tale about true love is preserved, while everything around it is played with, and that's why Hoodwinked, Gnomeo and Juliet and Over The Hedge are all shit.
It's why Drawn Together is so divisive.
When you make something subversive, you need a kernel of the core premise to anchor it to. And even Spec Ops: The Line does this itself.
Ultimately, it's the means and callousness you're taking part in that are the driving factor, but underneath that, it's all in service of trying to root out even worse people.
And it's not even rare for comic books to do the subversion thing right. Luther Strode does it well too. The entire thing is a huge excessively violent mess set in a world that keeps trying to tell the protagonist that trying to embody justice and use power responsibly is a fool's errand, that power is inevitably corrupting and that he too, will lose his way. But he doesn't. The horrors perpetuated by the other followers of Cain's Method don't desensitize him, his personal experiences don't desensitize him, and he's not even motivated by revenge despite being set up for it.
The best of subversions is something that feel like they could easily be played straight. I felt that it'd be important to have some subversion come from the gameplay actually expecting you to be on your toes, mostly because good tense stealth-action gameplay would give more interactivity than standard 'walk around, collect items and avoid the mascots trying to hunt you down'.
It's important that the person responsible is actually almost entirely blameless and that the people abusing these monsters for their own ends aren't just doing it because they're comically evil. Otherwise, this would be playing the Mascot Horror concept straight instead of subverting it.
Now how would these weaponized mascots look like?
I was thinking they'd be creatures reminiscent of Sea Hares, but with sharp teeth and big red eyes with strange looking pupils, all with a crunching and grinding robotic endoskeleton that can twist them around like the kid's dad from Xtro.
You could make the Disney or WB style version a cute squat little jovial character that's kind of like a bunny crossed with Charlie the Starkist Tuna with stars in its eyes, and demonstrate the flexibility with stretchy rubber hose movement, for example.
And the Kievnauchfilm style version could be much more realistically proportioned but still cutesy thing dressed like a soldier in an effort to make them seem noble and proud but also pleasant and intelligent, and use that side to explain the Mcguffin IFF beacons.
Two totally different avenues of propaganda.
One side is trying to endear their people to the monsters by abstracting and stylizing away everything unpleasant, and the other side is trying to represent some of the least bad unpleasant aspects in order to present them as strengths.
In this scenario it would fitting to set the game in an Eastern Europe-like continent, with a front line that has historically swung wildly across Expy-Europe.
None of the old Expy-European states remain. Their cultures have been wiped out by waves of The Federated States of Columbia (Expy-America) and The Socialist Union of Nations (Expy-USSR) forces.
Columbian and SUN rule cracking down on any respective nonconformities as sympathies to whichever side wasn't presently controlling the area. Even the languages have been killed off by this process and the mass depopulations of civilians.
Every piece of propaganda is in English with Russian loanwords. Even the Expy-Eurasians speak this dialect now.
This has gone on for decades.
Unnamed cities sitting at the in-between of a cold war about to go hot between not-USA and not-USSR
this means seeing soldiers, sometimes PMCs too, nearby but never actually entering to fight
Both sides want to court the people over so alongside sending diplomats, aid and sometimes gifts
starts off with simple stuff like toys and whatnot but ends up with both sides basically making their own masked mascot heroes for the purpose of parades and propaganda; think if the Power Rangers were a JP government asset
eventually the war goes from cold to frozen. one of them loses and concedes; the winner does not change this story's outcome
both were buying the tools to make these masked heroes and from the same company
both sides decommission the mascot heroes and turn them off; some get 'lost', others are sold off to some rich guys two miles away or whatever
skip forward to present day...10 years after all that and some of those mascot heroes have somehow 'turned themselves back on'
company went down and the not-USA nor the not-USSR think it's too small a problem for them to step in, at this point
have to find the guy who originally made the prototype that the company bought off of him since he's the only one else who would know what's going on
turns out that they're all connected to a mysterious radio wave signal being emitted from various old decommissioned factories and old buildings
have to run around with the equivalent of walking Fazbear landmines patrolling the cities, try and save whoever you can and put a stop to the masked menace left behind from this winter of a cold-war