Games Like Poppy Playtime: Mascot and Toy Horror

Bendy and the Ink Machine is the closest in spirit and came first: a retired animator returns to an abandoned studio flooded with ink, where the cartoons he drew have become monsters, and you solve puzzles and hide from the Ink Demon. Its sequel, Bendy and the Dark Revival, is larger and leans more on stealth and fighting through an ink-soaked copy of the studio.

Indigo Park: Chapter 1 is the free pick and the most like Poppy Playtime's first chapter. A cartoon raccoon host guides you through an abandoned amusement park, restoring power and picking up collectables, until one of the park's mascots comes after you. Twisted Tower goes louder: a first-person shooter through an abandoned 1950s resort full of corrupted fairy-tale mascots, fought with a toy arsenal.

Five Nights at Freddy's is the series that made mascot horror popular. Security Breach lets you roam the Mega Pizzaplex all night while the animatronics hunt you, Secret of the Mimic sends you into an inventor's costume workshop with an endoskeleton that can become any character, and Into the Pit is a 2D pixel-art adventure in which a boy dives into a run-down pizzeria's ball pit, wakes in the past and hides from a yellow rabbit animatronic, closer to Poppy Playtime's puzzles and hiding than the classic night-shift games.

Amanda the Adventurer takes the cheerful mascot onto old VHS tapes: in your late aunt's attic you play episodes of a children's cartoon whose host, Amanda, and her sheep Wooly start talking to you through the screen, and the attic's escape-room puzzles hide their clues in the tapes. Its two sequels continue the story.

My Friendly Neighborhood brings the idea to a cancelled Saturday morning puppet show: a handyman sent to switch off its old station finds the puppets alive and hungry, in a survival horror game of scarce ammunition and puzzles in the style of the classic Resident Evil games.

Garten of Banban is the series most often named beside Poppy Playtime: a kindergarten whose mascot characters have turned into the things hunting you. Its eighth chapter, Anti Devil, is the best-reviewed on Steam so far, sending you alone into the deepest levels to find your missing child. Happy's Humble Burger Farm turns a fast food chain's cow mascot into the threat: get three orders wrong on the night shift and Happy is not friendly, and after work you search a strange city for a way out of the Barnyard Buds' fever-dream.

For toys rather than mascots, Tattletail has you keep a talking 90s toy quiet so that its recalled mother doesn't find you, Mr. Hopp's Playhouse is a free pixel-art game about a handmade rabbit toy that has left its corner, and its prequel, Mr. Hopp's Playhouse 2, follows an orphan through Blacklands Manor after three donated toys arrive and her friends start to vanish. Puppet House puts a detective in a dead ventriloquist's mansion, solving escape-room puzzles while the stage puppet, woken by a ritual, hunts anyone inside. Dark Deception mixes arcade-style chases through mazes with monsters you cannot kill, and Baldi's Basics turns a cheerful edutainment teacher into the thing hunting you through the school.

Venge drops you into the flipped dimension of Rotnic, a movie studio that vanished, where its cartoon characters have become grinning, toothy monsters with bosses to escape. KinitoPET takes the friendly mascot onto your desktop: a cheerful early 2000s virtual assistant that wants to be your friend and slowly becomes something else. Hello Puppets! VR puts you in the burnt-out studio of a cancelled 1980s puppet show whose hand puppets have come alive, and Dollmare gives you a night job inspecting dolls on a factory line where some of them should not move.

Duck Season puts the mascot on an old games cartridge: on a summer day in 1988 you play a rented duck-hunting game with a light gun, and its cheerful hunting dog turns out to be able to leave the screen; it was made for VR, and Duck Season PC plays without a headset. Fredbear and Friends: Reboot is a free, fully free-roaming fan game in which four teenagers explore a restaurant closed for 26 years and find its animatronics still there.

OXTORD games' two creepypasta-style games put the grinning mascot on a single screen made to look like an old flash game. In Mr. TomatoS you feed a cheerful cartoon tomato with food, a blender and items from his shop while his anger climbs at every mistake, and in Ms. LemonS a lemon teacher sets you blackboard tasks; each takes about half an hour, can be finished only once and is pay what you want on itch.io. Baby Blues Nightmares makes the toys the monsters: a toddler searches dark playrooms for lost toys while fanged plush creatures listen for every sound.

Two small games do the same in miniature, and both are free in the browser. Bonnie's Bakery opens as a pastel cooking game where you serve the town's animals as Bonnie the baker and insists that is all it is, until a night in her basement has you hiding from her while you find the notes and keycode to escape. Hungry Lamu has you help a grinning cartoon llama find food in a bright forest, and the cheerful world gives way to gore; run from Lamu, and Lamu will get you.

If you only try one, play Bendy and the Ink Machine for the closest mix of puzzles and dread, or Indigo Park if you want something free. For every game of the kind, see the full list of mascot horror games.

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