the fact that “hyper-marketable indie horror game aimed at children and youtubers who make videos for children” is like a whole genre now is kinda fucked right like what’s up with that
Every few months someone makes a game called like Scrimbly Bimbly’s Wacky Silly Funhouse where you just kind of walk around a dark room for a bit and theres vaguely spooky writing on the walls like “DONT BELIEVE HIS LIES” and then the main monster of the game looks like this
and then within like a week my niece is playing roblox clones of it on her ipad and theres plushies of scrimbly in every gamestop and the devs are on twitter like We’;re making a Scrimbly tv show !! And the only person over the age of 7 who has ever thought about their game is the game theory guy because he needs to make a video about how scrimbly connects to the 1962 cuban missile crisis and theres like 80 scrimbly spinoffs that aren’t even pretending to be horror games anymore so they’re just sort of a normal kid’s games with a slightly fucked up looking animal like the concept of “ironic childish imagery in horror game” mutated into “Actually, this is just literally for children, and we are trying to get as much money out of those children as possible”
OH SO MY FRIEND SORTA HAS A STORY ABOUT THIS
So like MONTHS ago my friend was at a store and there were Huggy Wuggy plushies for sale because this was after Poppy Playtime came out and hit us all with its insanity
He saw a lady and a little boy with one of the Huggy Wuggy plushies in line at the registers and because my friend also likes Poppy Playtime he struck up a conversation with them. The mom said “Oh, yeah, he LOVES that game” and my friend said something along the lines of “Well, make sure you don’t play it with the lights off! It freaked me out a LOT when I first played it.”
Then the mom got this look on her face like she had been lied to and my friend knew he fucked up and immediately left then to the register, but as he was leaving he heard the mom go off on her kid like “IS POPPY SCARY?! IS IT A SCARY GAME?!”
The amount of parents that don’t know that horror is a genre of video game is astonishing. Then these parents proceed to bitch about the games being “iNaPpRoPriAtE” for their kids. Like yeah the game isn’t fucking made for kids. Parents these days never actually look into what their kids are playing then get mad when they find out that not every video game is for kids.
Long story short, I miss when horror games were specifically for teens and adults. At least the horror genre still has Resident Evil which hasn’t been overrun by children yet.
I feel like it’s a combination of both Parents Don’t Look At What Their Kids Play along with Kids Don’t Tell Their Parents What They’re Doing. Back when I was a cringey 13 y/o I discovered DeviantArt and tried to make an account, but i ofc didn’t have an email at my age and had no choice but to go to my dad for one. I kept completely silent about DA until then and when my dad saw the title and read it out loud i booked it into my room because just the way he said it was enough to make me think I was in trouble.
From what my friend told me, it sounded like the kid told his mom ABOUT Poppy Playtime, and because the title sounded so kid-friendly she didn’t think she HAD to look into it. My parents were PISSED when they found out my then elementary-aged brother was trying to play Call of Duty behind their backs because the games were violent af, but the title was enough for them to look into it because it didn’t SOUND kid-friendly. Titles like “Five Nights at Freddy’s”, “Hello Neighbor”, or “Poppy Playtime” SOUND innocent enough if you aren’t in or around the loop of gaming, and most parents aren’t because a lot of them in my own experience don’t playvideo games.
So I guess that the parents don’t always look into the games their kid plays, because the title sounds kid-friendly enough that it doesn’t raise any eyebrows. Sure, kids like horror, too, and I also wish that there were more games that could be directed towards older audiences. But because the Internet exists and indie/online games can reach a bigger audience than ever, there are going to be kids who stumble upon the adult-oriented content and think “WOW! Look at this cool new thing! I love it!” and not understand that it ISN’T for them, because they’re kids. Then it turns out to not be for kids, their parents find out it’s not for kids and are outraged, and the parental outcry essentially forces the more adult-oriented content to start trying to water itself down for future installments to keep people from yelling at them.
