The worst part of mascot horror honestly is how repetitive the stories are. It's always something like "OH NO. We put the souls of innocent civilians into our blenders. Now they are mad and want vengeance. Come to the old blenderium and lay these souls to rest. This is totally not a trap."
I mean to be as fair as possible, FNaF was the first and only one to do it like that at the time. Thinking about how to write a story in this subgenre is near impossible, but not futile. I think if they got creative with the gameplay instead of basic traversal and mechanics, something new can emerge that shakes the foundation of indie horror the way FNaF did (even marginally).
I feel a problem with mascot horror is that they commonly put lore and story first, gameplay second. So then they turn into glorified walking simulators, the exact opposite of fnaf 's staggering innovation gameplay wise
Would that make FNaF a sitting simulator? I've heard Joseph Anderson make a similar point about RPGs, in that level restrictions define progression so much that combat mechanics take a backseat
@@davidhong1934 fnaf (well most of them) had gameplay more catered towards surviving and protecting yourself against the animatronics And in a pretty engaging way as you had to be right on your toes to stay alive More recent ones (well ones I can remember) most of the time was spent on ‘hey go over there and complete this boring ass puzzle that’s piss easy!’ Notable example being cannon puzzle for garten of banban Some puzzles had a danger lurking around or next to you but they were only really effective if the puzzle was hard or needed good timings and instinct
@David Hong its 1000% because the gameplay style has become so saturated by both FNAF itself and its fangames, but the horror of being unable to move the playable character was still novel when FNAF 1 came out. The walking simulator (Slender, Amnesia, Outlast) was the shark before FNAF came along and made the sitting simulator the new big thing.
@epicest bacon hair eh, I wouldn't call sliding animations parkour lol. Not like Outlast was Mirror's Edge or anything. I would agree calling it a 'walking sim' was a bit harsh, though. It has more gameplay than either Slender or Amnesia, despite sharing the 'scared dudes walking about in first person' premise.
People really forgot what made Five Nights at Freddy's so special. The animatronics didn't have sharp teeth, claws, or anything like that, but the game used the uncanniness of 1980's animatronics with amazing sound design and excellent camera angles and lighting. The environment makes the monster, not the other way around.
It's honestly kinda insane and also emblematic of the general internet discourse that the harmless tiny project Garten of Banban got heralded as the end of a genre and a cheap cash grab when Poppy Playtime exists and is actually unironically a massive cash grab. The phrase "Lore NFT Drop" is easily the scariest thing to come out of it.
I think Poppy is a soulless game, but at the very least it has original assets and gameplay that has some level of respect for the player, something Banban does not. Basically, Poppy is presented better, but I agree they both feel like a tryhard attempt at mascot horror
@@TONADRIEL I think we’re being a bit dramatic, but Poppy’s dedication towards storylines and tropes in the indie horror genre feels so uninspired and eager to be popular with the younger horror demographic that it comes off as tasteless to many. Paired with its plethora of merch that released basically as soon as chapter 1 came out (generally indie games get merch if they happen to be a success, rather than strategically making a game TO sell merch), it just doesn’t come off as a game that prioritizes telling an enriching story above everything else. As mentioned in this video too, this was also around the time people were getting sick of mascot horror (this was like the biggest game before everyone took their anger out on Banban) and were more critical towards it.
I think the main turning point to "mascot horror" was when those poppy playtime huggy wuggys started to sell in local stores all around the world. It felt so off seeing little kids carrying them around
Went to Greece this summer and they were in every tourist trap gift shop. Imagine taking your kid to Greece and they pick the huggy wuggy doll as their souvenir
I ever understood why a horror game should be dedicated for kids. If GTA or COD never changed to appeal for a younger audience (both licences are still rated 18+), why horror games, or supposed "horror games" should? Even others horror games franchises didn't, Resident Evil, Silent Hill and the rest are still rated 18+ as well..
@@QueSeraSeraaaaanything can be marketed to kids, they're a demographic like any other and a powerful one because they have a ton of free time to consume your bullcrap. A lot of kids like horror, so it makes sense somebody would fill that niche
@@janNowa not everything actually, games based on wars and everything else weren't made or remade to be kids-friendly. They get just graphically updated in most cases. For the case of FNAF, it is rated 12+ (or 15+ in some countries), they weren't meant to be appealing to the younger audience, but due to the designs of the animatronics, it got misunderstood.
@@QueSeraSeraaaaI said anything CAN be, there could absolutely be a specifically kid targeted war game but nobody's bothered yet. A lot of kids do play COD though.
A lot of these games seem to forget that the first FNAF exploded not because it was a dark twisted version of something from people's childhoods, but because animatronics are inherently creepy and live right in the deepest pits of the uncanny valley. FNAF didn't have to do much with the context because being locked in a chuckee cheese where the robots can freely walk and are looking for you is already a nightmare several of us have had before it even came out. Most other types of childhood media needs extra work put in to make creepy, but I feel like a lot of devs see FNAF get away with a series of what were essentially powerpoints and went "wow, it's just that easy"
Yeah, maybe that's why Tattletail was successful too! Ive personally never owned a furby but the reoccurring sentiment i hear being shared by people who did have them as kids was they would wake themselves up in the middle of the night, annoy you to death with repetitive dialogue, and they would break in the most terrifying ways possible.
Really, that's how you create "the next FNAF." Not mascots, not Lore, you just take a simple idea and execute it very well in a way that suits that concept. FNAF wasn't trying to be "the next Amnesia or Slenderman" and didn't use anything from them gameplay-wise at all. Made it stand out hard.
yeah people seem to forget that the classic characters were not at all cute nor cartoony. they were bordering on realism for its time. granted the graphics degrade in quality the longer you stare at it
@@localinternetclown That and also the Teddy Ruxpin (sp?) toys Mama is based on, cassette player-having toys were the horrors of the generation before the furbies. (In case you didn't own one of those enough to have it going wrong and sear itself as a panicked disaster in your mind: they not only would do the playing at demonically low-voiced slowed down speeds thing that furbies did on low power, but cassette players were prone to "eating tapes"-- the tape would unspool and get caught in the reels while still being working, causing hell noises of warp-downs, speed-ups, and random slidey screeches that would send parents into a panic because that usually breaks both the cassette player AND the cassette, so the kids get a two-for-one on hell noises and parents acting as if their "friend" is dying.) Also Tattletale came out when UA-cam had a spike of interest in circuit-bending furbies (aka taking furbies apart and forcing them to glitch and react to random electricity going into their little "brains"). It not only took childhood fears from two eras (the late 80's and late 90's) but also struck when one of those was on a "oh that's CREEPY" resurgence and trending again thanks to youtube deciding to recommend people going mad scientists on furbies (the long furby crafts started around there too, and the furby custom modding as well). In short: Tattletail knew what was scary and used those. The Resident Evil 1 devs explained it best: you need to know fear to make something scary. Scott was scared and haunted by Bonnie from the start. Willing to bet Tattletail was born from a furby-related fear, too.
A lot of new mascot horror games boil down to “guys this kids franchise is holding dark secrets and the company behind it killed 59 CHILDREN AND PUT SOULS IN THE MASCOTS” and has the same look at a big map and get macguffins and items, Garten of Banban is an example and the straw that broke the camel’s back
@@jourdan112map bendy still felt like there was actual heart behind it, especially with Dark Revival. Even Poppy (sometimes) feels like that, and a small bit of SB is that way. Banban has had none of that, going so far as to say the funny Skyrim meme before blasting copyrighted music to fuck over streamers. They're petty
Fun Fact: 40:26 In the Meeting Halfway Podcast, the creator of Baldi's Basics revealed that all of the lore was completely satire and added in purely because it was a recommendation. He also revealed that he had talked with MatPat and that MatPat suggested for Baldi's Basics to release in multiple chapters. In the end, the creator of Baldi's Basics didn't decide to go for a chapter based game since he wanted to release a full game and instead opted for making Baldi's Basics Plus, a complete game that wouldn't be split into multiple chapters/episodes/parts on which he is still working on.
Baldis is that one game that doesnt need lore and never really needed it. Tbh, its the one mascot horror game that I know of that never has any lore of sorts, with the only story being that your friend left notebooks and you have to collect them and the secret story being that the game is like a virus or something that was never supposed to be created. I gotta say, him deciding not to take MatPats suggestion and just wanting to release a game that is pretty much what it is now feels like a huge W for him
I think Baldi's Basics and Bugbo (Digital Horror series by Bensilly) were basically made with the same intention of being 00's based parodies, but were both mistaken by their fanbases as having lore in them. I do have to say though, Baldi's Basics is madly underrated for it's goofy ahh humor. This game could even rival Quandale Dingle if Mystman12 wanted it!
@@My_name_is_bon_ tbh, kinda sucks that there fans out there that are part of some of these fanbases that believe that there is lore in something even though it's just regular story telling and has things that are supposed tell a bit of history of something and that bleieve that if there's something out there that doesn't have owl house or gravity falls level of lore or if it's something that isn't trying to put lore and is not trying to be a lore based story then they would be upset or kinda hate on it. The same thing happened to the cuphead show when it first aired the first season where although it was given positive reviews, I think one or a few criticized it for not having lore or a story, idk about the lore part I could be mis-remembering, but either way the show was supposed to be just like a cartoon where a story starts and ends on the same episode. Tbh, I was glad that they didn't go lore based and all that, they just told stories using the characters and that's it, even during the first season
@@m0istur I bet Mat only reccomended it just so he can make money off his lore videos at the cost of the game's integrity, probably was the best decision the dev made.
@@danpaz9485 I was almost thinking the same thing. I thought mat only suggested it just so he can make more theory and lore videos about the game similar to how he makes videos on poppy playtime and fnaf. It would have been completely pointless either way because really the game is all satire and is just a simple little horror game with just a pretty straight forward story. No hidden lore, no secrets to tell what the story is about, no dark secrets, nothing. No disrespect to mat, but he's just gonna make a complete ass of himself trying to solve mysteries and figure out secrets that don't exist in a game thats all shits and giggles and make up all sorts of theories of why something is weird or out of place
55:30 Last year (or 2021?), Markiplier did a video where he played two games as picked by a random-Steam-game-chooser website. Both games were unknown, both games were bad. Markiplier talked about how they were bad (in his usual way, alluding to the quality plus moments of obvious frustration). After playing each game, though, he did something _incredibly_ important: He left a Steam review on each, but the reviews were tongue-in-cheek high praise. Perhaps the single most important action of either review, though, was marking them "Recommended". After I watched the video, which I didn't get to for a few days, I went to check the Steam reviews for each: They were generally positive. The first game had no reviews prior to his video; the second had two, of which one was negative. After the video, the first game had a dozen more, positive reviews; the second had a few extra positive reviews and one new negative one. (The second game was easily the worst of the two.) There is no doubt in my mind that, had Markiplier left a negative review and/or ragged on them in his Steam review and video (as some other UA-camrs might), many of his viewers would have also lambasted the game. (Some to extreme degrees, I'm sure.) It wouldn't even be his intention, that's just how communities for content creators tend to operate. ll that to say, this warning against drumming up drama or going full-tilt against some unknown devs has tremendous merit.
Which while yeah most people criticizing would leave a negative review. Mark recognizes his larger audience and ultimately he just wants people to improve, not rip them apart. So leaving a nice critical but nice review would help people be positive but criticize, so that the games improve
@@NateBoiBoihello neighbour was literally irredeemable though. It had all the resources and people it needed to at least be decent even without the complicated character AI they promised, and it just blew its opportunity. And even THEN, Mark formulated his criticism in the most positive way he could
I'm in my late 30s and I find the discussions about "ugh this is all for kids" incredibly funny for exactly what you said - the people saying it were kids when they got into it. Maybe they were older kids, maybe teens, but still, very much kids. I have literally never felt or thought "ugh they've sold out/watered this down/etc" about --well, honestly, about most things. I'm old enough now that I know it's kind of always been like this. Not to imply that things aren't always evolving and changing, because of course they are. But I do think people don't recognise their own growth and evolution the same way they notice evolution in genre or medium.
fr i always see people hating on the newest Pokemon games that come out. i know that no new pokemon game will ever compare to the one i played when i was 8, because it has so many memories tied to it and it was the only time i had friends, and played it with them. I've probably spent thousands of hours playing and replaying gen 5 games but despite that, i still love and enjoy every new game, because they're fun. i swear so many people's standards for fun are ridiculously high, or mine are really low (probably both actually haha)
@@micah3331your age matters when you buy a game. Any 18+ games aren't logically for kids but adults. The FNAF games by Clickteam were 12+ (or 15+), so not for anyone uder those ages. I remember than the COD franchise was massively popular for kids, but the age rating never changed, 18+ only, same with GTA and pretty much any games that could be played online.
I think the real issue about mascot horror the ticked people off was how it all moved towards _marketing_ itself to (mostly) children. It wasn't about the horror anymore, the horror aspect was subpar at best or laughably bad at worst, it was about it being shoved out in whatever state and trying to get as much money as possible out of it, and more with merchandise. Doesn't really matter if the game is good or bad, peopel can excuse a horror game being bad, everyone's gotta learn somewhere, and you learn from mistakes. But it becomes a problem when a failure goes all-in on getting as much money outta you. Prolly doesn't help that other gaming genres are going through this too, greed overtaking passion for a game and very poor quality of the games.
Fr. These indie horror games were made for young adults but were still played by kids. That part is fine, but when the industry is flooded with horror games that stops making them for adults first, that’s when it became a problem.
Another issue that I think partly contributes to the negative perception of mascot horror is merchandise looking a bit too childish and fan art unintentionally making the characters look charming and cuddly. In the case of games like Poppy Playtime, the developers themselves are involved with the decision to have kid plushies being made of these supposedly “scary” characters. And in the case of games like FNAF, I don’t think fans are aware but many of them unintentionally hurt the franchise’s image. Which I highly doubt it’s what these fans wanted. But since the first game got released there has been countless fan art depicting these “scary” characters as cute, innocent, etc. Even to the point where the creator made FNAF World. Obviously there are also cute/innocent fan art and merchandise of beloved horror icons, but not only are they a small minority of their respective community, they aren’t officially collaborated by the creators of said horror icon
@@CoOlKyUbI96I think whether the merch veers closer to the “horror” side or the “mascot” side says something about how much the devs think fans care about the lore. Because in-universe these mascots are all “supposed to” be cute, and the fact that they look scary instead is an aspect of the mystery that the game wants you to discover as you play it. As half-assed as BATIM’s lore ended up being, the devs knew that the fans cared about it a lot, and I feel like that might be why most of their merch showcased the “pre-horror” versions of the mascots. By contrast, I don’t know much about the Poppy Playtime fandom but I look at all the Huggy Wuggy plushies with too many teeth that every kid seemed to have for a few months and suspect that they didn’t intend for the lore to be what the fans liked about their game; they’re marketing to the thrill. This is all just my conjecture though and only tangentially related to your point o7
@@a.n.9800 I definitely see what you mean. I do partly agree with you. But also partly disagree. Yes it is true that in universe these mascots are all “supposed” to be cute. However, I do think there is a clear distinction between the in universe characters thinking the mascots are cute and us the player/fan. Because the in universe characters are expected to have very little or sometimes no knowledge of the true nature of these mascots. Whereas us the player/fan would have the external knowledge of these mascots’ true nature. And yet still choosing to portray them as innocent fan art or fan made projects. It does seem disconnected as what emotions the story is trying to make us feel. Once again I emphasize it’s most likely not intentional as I doubt fans want to willingly sabotage their own fan base. As for Poppy Playtime, it’s a bit harder to trust the developers because they have been a bit shady
If anyone wanted to see indie horror games still being played by someone without exaggerated reactions to things, ManlyBadassHero is the channel to go to. Indie horror is still going strong!
and honestly his channel is also useful for getting a look at trends in the wider indie horror scene- he plays a lot of games from a lot of small devs which is really interesting even if they're not to your taste
I do absolutely believe that Poppy Playtime was way worse from a moral standpoint than Banban, but honestly, it's pretty clear what the intentions of Banban were from the start. The sequel was planned right as the first game released, and merch was marketed right away. I don't believe the harassment the devs got was deserved, but that doesn't mean that Banban is completely innocent either. Edit: 1:04:02 This is absolutely correct, and I should've realized this conclusion sooner. The euphoric brothers used to not be a part of this mascot horror craze. Before all of this, they made passions projects. But it wasn't successful enough. They started adopting these somewhat shady business practices, which, considering their situation, is completely fair. Good point, amazing video.
The dumb thing is that they could just have picked up the ball the community tossed them and ran with it. (The "it's satire, it's a parody" ball.) Making deliberately bad design, deliberately bad voice overs (mocking the really really crappy FNAF fangame phone guys), adding more absurdity to the puzzles... they wouldn't even have needed to change the lore, it's so cookie-cutter that ANYTHING they do with it can be spun as parody. Heck, with the car drive scene and Stinger Flynn, I'm wondering if they ARE trying to parody and they're just bad at that too and... maybe should study how to write stories better, if they're gonna make games that are supposed to be narrative-driven instead of gameplay-driven. We can't be good at EVERYTHING and from what I've seen of their games they uh, they're not really good at the story part. They really should sit down and write stories and sharpen that part of their skillset THEN go back to narrative-driven games. Saying this as a fanfic writer who's also an amateur modder.
Yeah, while I believe they shouldn’t be harassed over a game. One of their early “passion projects” before ban ban was a very insensitive game about school shootings. The whole game centered around the player trying to prevent a kid with a mental illness from starting a shooting and it really made some distasteful jokes. So I do believe that most of the criticism they get is definitely warranted but no they should not be harassed over their games.
Saying "Banban isn't completely innocent either" does way too much to equalize the backlash of death threats and constant harassment with the original action of making a lazy cash grab. They aren't even in the same universe, there is no validity whatsoever in developer harassment and never, ever will be.
@@Voingous Shoot, maybe the phrasing was a bit weird there. I was commenting on what the creator of this video said about the Euphoric Brothers, not trying to validate the death threats and harassment made towards them. There is absolutely no excuse for actions like those.
The complaints about "indie horror is dead" always do seem to come from people who entire view is "the thing that is on the front page of youtube". Horror as a genre is more varied and vibrant than ever before.
There's tons of great indie horror content being made still, the issue is spesifically in the mascot side of it we're seeing reocourring instances of corruption and greed with numerous series, some indie serious becoming as corporate as many more contraversial AAA companies and getting into drama with a lack of standards. It instills concern, as traditionally notable Indie studios are known to be more dependable integrity wise, so seeing certian studios become much more captilistic makes people worry how it will affect the future health of the industry because this might become more commonplace one day across the board.
“youtube colonizes your attention span and the attention spans of children” is so real. definitely something we should remind ourselves of daily and goes for other social platforms too. excellent video full of solid points and meaningful insight. gonna keep my eyes peeled for your remake of alphabet! ♥️
duck season and tattletail are my two personal favorite “mascot horror” games. they both have unique concepts and pull off horror flawlessly. it’s a shame both games were not in the spotlight more.
@@mari_golds-bleeding-ink the last thing that was said about it was that they might make an animated show about it. Which I hope happens, but besides that Tattletail is dead, and there hasn’t been an update on that show, so that might be dead as well.
Saying that indie horror is dead because of Garten of Banban is like finding a dead sardine in the ocean and declaring that the entire ocean's ecosystem is doomed
Don't think that's an analogy, there's like 4 mascot horror franchises, so if GOBB's a dead sardine, it means that sardines can't survive without evolving and therefore sardines as they currently are will go extinct
@@tiktok-mc2nq not really, there have been some truly excellent indie horror games I the last few years. Signalis is a great example, fear and hunger 2 isn't necessarily Good but it is amazing, and Echo is excellent. It's just different genres that are less appealing to the algorithm, like survival horror, RPGmaker game and visual novel respectively. You just need to dig deeper to find them!
GOBB didn’t kill indie horror, but it’s grabbed it by its sides and completely milked it for all its worth. Indie horror is now seen as the gen alpha baby genre. Teenagers and Adults are leaving the fandoms and that’s something that started with GOBB. GOBB was the last straw.
literally SHOCKED that the creators of duck season made BONEWORKS. genuinely insane, great for them!!! i used to LOVE duck season when i was young, its really nice to hear the devs are onto greater and bigger things
@@NachozMan should have specified duck season vr in my original comment, i know! im around 19 now so the vr game came out when i was like 13 i think? i was a bit too young for duck hunt when it first came out SHFKDHSKA
@@bigfrog4231 Making me feel old oof, I didn't realize it's been that long since the VR duck hunt game came out. Still one of the better VR experiences tbh. Which is sad to say. We need more good VR titles
What I loved about fnaf's original story and animatronics was that they weren't evil, they were in pain and despite that pain they still wanted to entertain and protect the children from the 'bad man'
We also didn’t even know about the whole Children getting stuffed in the suits angle until way later after the game released when the lore started to come out
@@dmin5782yeah it was, one of the first games posters talk about an awful odour aswell as blood and mucus coming from the suits. So its heavily implied
@@alijahcrichton8234yes, but the posters were pretty much impossible to read in-game, so it was really unlikely for someone to just find it out through playing the game. You had to dig deeper if you wanted the full story
Sagan going through the entire history of internet horror & creepy pastas and somehow avoiding every possible SCP bullet imaginable is somehow both incredibly impressive and offensive to me.
I agree about Banban being sort of the epitome of everyone's general frustration and irritation with the genre but I also want to say that I think a lot of the frustration towards modern mascot horror was amplified substantially by the reception to FNAF: Security Breach, as a lot of people then were saying that their dislike for its stylings and approach to the FNAF formula and the horror genre were because it was trying to chase the trend of modern mascot horror and a lot of people may have seen modern mascot horror "ruining" a franchise that is so beloved
I know the mascot horror trend has spawned an army of homogeneous games featuring kid friendly mascots, but I’ve got to admit how much more I prefer these games to the endless Slender collectathon games.
They're equal in lack of equality, repetitiveness, and utter refusal to do anything interesting or innovative. This is like saying "I prefer the water at the bottom of a trash can to the water at the bottom of a dumpster". They're both trash.
As saturated as the genre/term has been for the past few years, I've always gotten a kick out the concept of mascot horror because twisting something associated with childhood innocence and wonder into a dark, disturbing reflection of itself always brings out the rawest of feelings. Still think that FNAF tackled this the best out of any other game to date.
Right! I always asked stuff like, "Hey what is it with kids stuff that just creeps us out so much?" and some of the mascot horror really just dives into that.
Exactly. I’ve always had a soft spot for mascot horror for the same reasons you just mentioned. Games like FNAF, Bendy and the Ink Machine, and even Poppy Playtime have always intrigued me because of those aspects, especially the lore, as messy and convoluted as it can be. But now we’re getting crap like Rainbow Friends and Garten of Banban that continue to deconstruct the appeal of mascot horror and use the genre as a big marketing scam for gullible children. I feel bad for all the kids who fall for these scummy business practices.
So happy to see a video that isn't just "Garten of Ban Ban bad, we're doomed." As a writer, this has been messing with my brain, so I'm going to dump my own thoughts. There's a concept of "write a big shocking scene to surprise everyone and get them thinking." Often a cliffhanger; it's a way to drum up intrigue and get people thinking and can be a valuable tool. But recently, it is occurring to me that 90% of the time the writers have NO idea what they're planning to happen after that scene in question. Many of these mascot horror games seem mysterious, not because the truth of the story is cleverly hidden, but because 90% of the time it starts off with nothing there. A good example is Bendy and the Ink machine; a game that is now finished, and reveals just how much they had no damn clue what was behind all their mysteries. This led to some plotlines getting no payoff, other's getting too much attention, some popping up out of nowhere with no set up, characters outright forgotten, and the whole story looking and feeling like a mess at the end of it. It's like a warped idea of a cliffhanger that misunderstands the point. The concept is that there's supposed to be something finalized to look forward too- not a scene thats there to impress or intrigue and then vaguely matter later. Good Cliffhangers, even the ones that end a story, usually have a very select handful of ways they could be interpreted because the story is the framework to support it. FNAF2, since you brought that up, does a good job of making the framework. Now there seems to be no framework, leading to the most buckwild, out there theories from fans and even MORE buckwild next chapters from developers. (who often look at these fan theories and take inspiration from them, for better or for worse) Garten of Ban Ban has done this, too- with that monster scene at the end of the first game. but unlike bendy, it wasn't "good"...in the way that the curtain wasn't expertly crafted to perfectly hide the plotholes. Therefore, GOBB "bad" apparently. What? So, if Garten of Ban Ban had a better coat of paint on it, it'd be fine??? If it did the exact same thing but had a "company polish" like Poppy playtime or Bendy it'd be completely okay??? No matter how bad the game is, the people who created it are two brothers. Two human beings, with no company or anonymity to shield them or help them refine their game. Taking out the rage on them just seems...misguided at best, cruel at worst. No one starts as a master of their craft, and people looking for The Next Bad Thing to dunk on misses the point that creation takes trial and error, and no story is perfect. These brothers just wanted to make something cool and used a framework to get started...but because it wasn't visually pretty to hide the flaws of mascot horror (these barely planned "oooh mysterious lore" stories) like Poppy's playtime(probably, we'll see) or Bendy, it got the biggest torrent of hate. Now...all that being said, I don't think this is the developers' fault. As you also said. I really do think this is all happening because the fans want a mystery that's mentally stimulating for them...ASAP. As soon As Possible. Right now. Next Markiplier video. and I hate that, because stories take time. so, so much time. So much effort. So many drafts. So much trial and error. It's nearly impossible to keep up with the demand for engaging stories nowadays. On one hand, I want to get mad at Bendy and the Ink machine for fumbling the ball...but also, there was such a pressure to get the next chapter finished. Get it done. Get it out. Get it to the letsplayers. Set up that next shocking scene that hints at the next chapter. That pressure leads to underbaked, confused, and unrefined stories. And that really is a shame, because so many of these stories could be so good if they were given the time to flourish. I certainly know my stories would be rough, flimsy, and convoluted if I didn't have the time to refine them...and I've been working nearly daily on a novel for two years, rewriting it multiple times, and am not even close to publishing.
Nice to see a fellow writer talking about this stuff. It reminds me of how J.J. Abrams got so big off of his whole “Mystery Box” thing, where he just raised questions that he had no answers to and indefinitely delayed giving the audience answers. People somehow didn’t see how much bullshit that was, and that’s how we got the whole “Rey’s Parents” debacle, where he made such a big deal out of this question in TFA, but then they got Rian Johnson for TLJ so the burden fell on him to actually do something with the scraps JJ left him, we got the whole “Rey’s parents were nobodies, they sold her for drinking money” thing which pissed everyone off so they had to bring JJ back to go “Uhhh, her grandpa was Palpatine” which wasn’t as bad but still irked everyone that in this enormous galaxy there’s only a couple families that really matter. Either way, everyone agreed it wasn’t worth the hype. I remember once in the 2000s when I was like 6 years old, and was just beginning to write, I wrote this silly little action story, and at the end of part 1, two characters are running back to their home base, fleeing from the bad guys base, and I write down that something blocks their way and “what they saw was horrifying… To be Continued”. I had no idea what they saw that was so horrifying, but I was excited to find out in my next writing session… and I never found out. I couldn’t think of a satisfying answer. I would try something out, and my little brain would go, “No it needs to be MORE horrifying” because that’s all I had to go off of. A couple decades later, and I’ve pretty significantly changed my tune. I still like to improvise every now and then, especially in first drafts when I’m just trying to get ideas out there, but now when I write, the question NEVER comes first. The question always comes after I’ve thought of the answer. I don’t slap a scar on a character, draw attention to it, and then try to figure out what the hell happened to them, I come up with a backstory, one that suits the themes and the emotional atmosphere of the story I’m going for, and then I observe this little backstory playing out in its natural habitat and look for ways that evidence of what’s going on here could survive to the present to be discovered by the perspective characters. Safe to say I get a lot more satisfaction out of my stories these days.
a big reason for that kinda thing is, that i don't think most teenagers or even people in their 20s know, this is how business works. you have to get some old guy with money to invest, this is generally how people get money off of these kinds of things, not only does this get you money to hire and buy assets, but if you get big enough, you can sell your portion and walk away. a lot of people will be working to just get their portion so they can sell it and walk away. now they don't have to sell and walk away, they can try to improve things to get a bigger payout, but when you first get that influx or cash and the company hasn't really been "figured out" by the industry, there's a good chance that the assets will be over valued by someone meaning your bang for your buck is probably pretty good in this state. then with the people investing in these companies don't "see the appeal" themselves, you end up with really shallow things being really marketable to investors. generally if you hear some indie thing get backers or funding or the like, it's best to just remember this in your back pocket before investing more of your own time in it.
@@HeadlessZombY Well yes that is how business works, but at the end of the day, it’s profit at the expense of the audience who wants to see their investment pay off, and as with any case of prioritizing profit over the audience, it’s an unsustainable business model, because if you burn them enough times, eventually good will runs out and people stop caring. I mean I already used J J Abrams as an example so I’ll use him again. He very publicly disappointed people with the sequel trilogy and while he’s also famous for Lost, Lost has become pretty much the poster child for shallow mystery that goes nowhere. Then on top of that there’s the Cloverfield movies which, again, disappointed with shallow answers to what looked like intriguing mysteries. All those things considered, I think JJ’s name doesn’t command the respect it used to anymore. The old guys with money have lost a marketable director. And sure they’ve got no shortage of directors, but this problem of repeatedly burning the audience is being felt on the large scale too. I mean just look at how hard it is to get audiences to show up to theaters these days. Sure part of that is because streaming is convenient, but the other reason? Not enough good movies. That’s what I’ve got to say about the good business of good movies. And I think a lot of those young artists you’re talking about do probably get that studios have a way of meddling in the name of what they think will get them more money, but they still care about delivering satisfying answers for the purposes of artistic integrity. That and, while there’s a bunch of endless mystery boxes out there, there are some genuinely well thought out stories out there which gives lots of people hope that they’ll bed able to make their story be one of the ones that escapes Studio interference.
@@Excelsior1937 man that's a block of text, my point was that the industry itself is weighted to have shallow things succeed since shallow proof of concepts can get funding much easier than trying to put time and energy into making something deep. people don't really want to change this because at the end of the day people want to get paid more than put time and energy into something that they don't know will succeed or not.
I appreciate the write up. You highlight an issue with a lot of writing in general. I believe that these kind of paperthin mysteries or 'omg shocking twist' scenes just work really well with children and teenagers. Perhaps it's because of the brain not being fully formed. But take Steins Gate for example, which has an overwhelmingly positive score. It is absolutely rife with plotholes and the main narrative falls apart completely. What are we supposed to think, except that there is an entire subset of people who seemingly do not have a need for things to make sense?
Actually Sagan, there's a slight correction to be made for 20:28. Freddy Fazbear Pizza Massacre is NOT the first fnaf fangame to be made. That would be Creepypasta Castle, a now lost fnaf fangame that came out just a few days after the release of FNAF 1.
@@moonwatcher4047 It was, I don't recall much but BOY do I vividly remember Treasure Island being the first fangame and how janky its first version was, it was CLEAR that it got put together very hurriedly for its first alpha demo. I think Pastra did a fangames retrospective and had a timeline, and Treasure Island's first demo was out within days of FNAF1.
I've started thinking "red means scary!" so often when playing games now because of him, his dry sense of humour really makes any game enjoyable to watch. Still need to finish his album video, I'm about 5 hours in
Enjoying some fine Italian cuisine (pasta with sauce that was on sale) and a glass of wine (minute maid fruit punch) while sat infront of a marvelous show (hour long video essay on mascot horror)
I find it fascinating how fast passed the consumption of this media is. Back then there were less games being made for a specific niche, but not like they were all good. Look at the RPG maker horror era. There were bangers and some really bad ones. The rotation of media nowadays is soo fast that it seems producing more is more important than making it better, or more in depth.
The fact that I can vividly remember the first FNaF game coming out and it now being long enough ago that some of today's teenagers can't even remember that it even existed makes me feel insanely old
I can vividly remember it coming out and being trashed for being a shitty game based on braindead jumpscares during a period where jumpscare horror was already hated. For some reason it blew up with children trying to be edgy via the usual giant youtubers. Now we have 4 year olds drawing Poppy's playhouse characters as a comfort character, teeth and all. What is this timeline.
@Kaweta idk man, I feel its a repeating cycle. In the 90s it was sonic for edgy kids, in the 00s snoop dog, in the 2010s it's FNAF, who knows what's next
@@moxxym the closest we get at the moment is The Backrooms and their stuffs but who knows for sure what else is going to be the next kid trend in the coming years though
I seriously can't believe it's been almost an entire decadesince the first game came out. I was there since the beginning before the second game had even come out at that point. Crazy...
I fully agree with you, that a lot of people seem to go "Unless it's very high quality/industry standard, it is simply a crash grab and deserves to be dunked and bullied" and it sucks. It's a big problem not just in the horror community, but in any community. I remember being on UA-cam when fnaf was huge (2016-ish) and watching countless videos just dunking on kids' drawings, fan songs, fan theories, and the like. I watched them constantly, and told myself "I will not be this cringe, I will not make anything unless it is perfect, and then I won't be bullied". The same goes for things like undertale, batim, and hell I've even been scared to tell my own stories when it comes to my own experience, things like my experience with art, trama, or gender identity, I and many others are scared to tell our stories because we feel like we need to tell them in the most perfect way possible, otherwise we are romanticizing a bad time in our lives, or that our experience was done in the "wrong way". I want to make but I don't feel like I'm good enough to show what I am making, or that what I'm saying will be misinterpreted, or even worse, have my work stolen by ai. It's fucking hard to make stuff, much less for an entire audience. I can't even imagine having a parasocial relationship with an audience, it's fucking scary.
That era of bashing on kids for drawing things that werent literally the mona lisa 2 is what stunted my art progress lol. I stopped drawing for awhile because the idea everything HAD to be perfect just infected my mind so badly
@@tank___worst of all it wasnt only a thing when i got home but even in school my art teacher bullied me for art so i quit, im still terrible to this day meanwhile my little brother who never had this issue got really good at it
i remember year or so ago my cousin, who i think was 8 years old at the time, was talking about poppy playtime, and i was very unfamiliar with it, i just knew it was some sort of mascot horror game and she just kept naming characters and i felt like i was falling into another dimension. i was also unsettled by how these sorts of games market themselves towards children enough that ny own cousin was seemingly intimately familiar with it. idk
I'm sure everybody has this one shop at the very back of their shopping mall that sells vapes and shit and when the teenage moms come to refill their vapes, they also sell rainbow "insert popular game character here" plushies for an extra thing of cash, and what you described is exactly how they make their money.
this is a problem with like, all kids media though. if a kid likes something, its p normal for them to go elbows deep- like im sure most people know a kid who can name like, 30 pokemon off the top of their head
I don't know about you, but I'm having a huge deja vu, from the time when slasher movies were all the rage in the 80s. After Friday the 13th came out, which itself is a copy of Halloween, everyone was wanting to follow the premise of a group of young people who go to the middle of nowhere, and then get killed by some big guy in a mask. And on the bright side, maybe "Mascot horror" will get some kind of metalinguistic satire that reinvents the genre for good. Just like what happened with Scream in the early 90s... I will be notice one day...
I grew up in the late 90s (born in '93), so I can confirm the tail-end of that time period. Halloween was a logistical nightmare growing up; I ended up losing my brother to walk with another Jason, and dad almost had a heart attack trying to find me 😅
I'm someone still working on a mascot horror game. I'm making it because I genuinely love the genre and want to make a love letter to it and to horror games as a whole. I've been playing horror games all my life and FNaF holds a special place in my heart because of an experience I had as a kid with a glitching Chuck E. Cheese animatronic that was stuck repeating one voiceline for nearly an hour. I'm genuinely into this to make something fun, scary (in a classic Resident Evil sort of way) and mildly experimental because I think I can bring something nice into this world based on a genre that has given me over a decade of entertainment and continues to till this day.
Now that I've finished the video, I want to add that this video genuinely has so many good points and I think a lot of people need to share some of these sentiments more. Not even relating to just horror stuff, but we are all just humans. Living, breathing, creating for the first time; Be kind, and be open to each other.
Like I’m so fucking sick of fnaf fans calling these games poor imitators when the fanbases and audiences of fnaf literally have been eating up these games from the start
Might be a hot take: But I thought Amanda the Adventurer was a cool take on Mascot Horror, I didn't play it myself, but I usually don't play horror games, and I get bored of those that are well.. boring.
I think it's a great take on it comparing to the others because of the interaction, plus can still be interesting regardless whether it's scary or not from what I see. I do find humor in making Amanda angry which is interesting, but still it's quite impressive how they still don't hold punches on the disturbing content, love me a good mood whiplash. Also helps that it was a big step up from the game jam version, utilized the hype from it well (which Hello Neighbor did not). Although even if some of the things more so remind me of Duck Season, it still stands out well.
It feels like mascot horror excuses a terrible story by having “lore”. Lore is like the frosting on a cake, it’s nice when it’s there, not all cakes need it and cakes have different amounts of frosting on them. Poppy and banban is like taking the smallest sliver of cake and then dumping a huge glob of anchovy and garlic flavored frosting on it. It’s clear that they don’t understand that the “lore” needs to gel with what little story there is. Either that or it’s not flavored at all. At least like a bendy or a choo choo Charles have some kind of story. I wish we got more diversity in horror games that aren’t trying to rip off bendy
To me, the whole focus on ‘lore’ is to promote a secondary marketing tool of videos trying to decode the game, and since these games come out in chunks, it also works as a JJ Abrams style ‘mystery box’ thing where they can just throw in bits of lore in one part without any particular intention and then just make up something to justify it on a later installment. The lack of traditional stories over lore is one reason I never got into either mascot horror games or souls-like games.
Lore is one of the worst things about the whole genre, 95% of the stories in the genre are absolute trash that is made to make a mutual parastic relationship with crappy Theorists like Matpat. (Just look at how directly desperate Hello Neighbour was) I hate how lore is such a frontpoint in the genre, because it's consistently one of the worst aspects of the genre. There's really only a handful of exceptions like Spooky's and DHMIS that don't take their own story seriously while still having good material there that do Story/Writing well, they don't put focus on their lore and just focus on a fun experience while also having some connected pieces behind the scenes.
A big issue with "lore" that I've seen is that many times it's just a bunch of out-of-context cutscenes and secret codes that vaguely point to some things that might have happened. Like a reply mentioned, it's the worst parts of J.J. Abrams mystery box concept, where they forget to put something in the box to begin with. I feel a better way to tell stories through "lore" is to come up with a story first, and then design your game around the story. Instead of secret codes that have no contextual reason to exist, shape the game's environment around what you put in the box. If there is a cipher to solve, make it so players can learn something about the story if they ask "why is this here?" instead of it solely existing as a lore delivery mechanism. Because people will be able to shake the box when they start theorizing about it, and if the box is empty they'll figure out pretty quick.
@@crylune Any combination of: Pumping out low quality content that makes no logical sense, artifically lengthening it to 10-20 minutes by making it mostly unfunny gags, turning it into a multi part series because you refuse to cut the unfunny gags and actually say your points, garbage clickbait thumbnails, extreme stretches and logical falacies, broken math and reasoning questionable statements about the LBGTQ, actively ignoring the fact that there's already a canonical answer for your "theory" in the exact media you're disecting, exploiting and taking advantage of small creators without crediting them then getting fussy when one of the people involved calls you out, genuinely concerning IRL reasoning and implications for "why cartoonishly evil villian is actually the hero and how their victims are the problem for being forced to accept them in exchange for basic neccsities held hostage", being alergic to any form of constructive criticism, and generally having an unlikable egotistical view of yourself. Basically people like that, Oh, would you look at that, MatPat fits every single catagory, who woulda thunk it.
I loved DAgames’s song about banban because it ridiculed not just the game for being a low quality cash grab, but also the community’s toxicity for exacerbating the problem and being way too mean to the devs for just making a bad game.
@@PersonallyIdonthateyou they deserve very heavy criticism for that, but not death threats and doxing. Besides, people were just harassing them for banban and not their more egregious products.
@@noonedream9333 Good point. Death threats and doxxing weren't even given because of that. I mean they shouldn't have happened over the other game, but still. Over just another cashgrappy game made for children? That's horrible. I would even say the meanies are the bad guys here.
@@PersonallyIdonthateyou >The devs made a game making fun of school shootings and fetishizing disabilities see, this is what sagan meant by "explaining the reasoning backwards". the harassment the euphoric brothers received wasn't done because of that game, it was done because people hated Ban Ban, and only after that did they bother to find a "reason" for them to have done it. Garten of Ban Ban is a bad game, Introvert: A Teenager Simulator, albeit with a legitimately promising art direction and horribly wasted potential for a heartfelt message, is a bad game, but that doesn't mean these developers are (or by this point were considering that they don't even try at this point) completely void of capability to improve their craft. I personally think that the school shooting game was really nothing more than a cringeworthy project made by a few people obviously not living in the USA and therefore not understanding the severity of the situation past the online memes about it edited for better readability and to change "America" to "the USA" because they apparently live in Canada (where school shootings are not even close to being as big of an issue as they are in the US so the point still stands
I know this sounds crazy, but I was like “Wow this is really good!” I went to subscribe and realized I was already subscribed. I looked through the videos. I haven’t watched you for years!!! I’m glad we’ve found each other again! So much good content to binge.
I have to say, as a recent subscriber, I’m wowed by your editing style and ambiance. The style of your videos with the vhs/old digital theme really works and I’m exited to see more from this new, more 90’s style demonstrated in this video. Keep up the great work!
I do wanna admit that as a person trying to get into the game development scene, the viciousness of the internet can get towards people not being top notch at their craft, and especially as of late with making video games scares me. I don't know if I want to make a Mascot Horror game regardless of how serious I'd be doing it cause people's hostility towards the idea (And maybe a personal dissolution towards it) kinda scares me the idea of being a target. In some ways I kinda wonder if these kinds of like, overtly loud and overtly antagonistic responses ruin the games being developed. Like the devs become more focused on these kinds of people than not just the valid criticism but also what would just make a decent product. This is admittedly a conspiracy theory; but I'm wondering if the reason why people comment on how overtly dragged out some parts the next chapters are is in response to people making refund speedruns of their game. To drag things out intentionally so you can't do that. Assuming that's true, then this behavior actively ruined a game because it made the devs more caught up trying combat these people than trying to focus more on what they had in mind. There's one youtube video I remember saying something akin to "We can't make [Garten of Banban] fail anymore" and idk why but that always stuck towards me as like a very misguided thought process. Like yes, telling people to not play a game because it's bad makes sense, but I don't think you make something fail by giving it more attention and adding onto the videos that talk about it. Most games that people want rarely succeed cause they exist and are rarely talked about further. I don't think I would've heard most of the horror stuff on youtube if it wasn't for Sagan Hawkes's channel because I don't personally go looking for these and no one to my knowledge talks about these things as fascinating as they are. Idk why but the last comment of finding new horror experiences reminds me a lot about some folks who say they aren't enjoying games anymore, with the reasoning usually boiling down to them needing to branch out and play something else for once. And in some ways I feel like this is applicable here and should be stated. Maybe folks who are disillusioned from the genre should take a break from the genre and go searching for something different than what most people are doing. If I can add onto the suggestions, maybe try looking at older horror experiences that are well recieved? The Dead Space remake came out and the Resident Evil remakes I heard are pretty top notch. Maybe go looking for older titles like IMSCARED or Close Your Eyes. Just to name something I guess.
To be fair it's not _just_ about a game being bad. A lot of people took Garten of banban as a parody of the genre initially, but it quickly did a 180 into antagonism and hostility when people realised the push towards marketing it to kids, selling merch and very very fast releases of next chapters that felt like they were meant to be way way shorter but got dragged out to prevent refunding. And negativity from that seeped into criticism, like the criticism about ridiculously high polygon count of models and poor gameplay elements turned into ammo for negativity and antagonism.
Edit to be clearer and push a TL:DR; to the top: be aware what undercurrent is going on in the genre you're developing for so you don't step on a genre discontent landmine, and if you HAVE to pad your gameplay (you shouldn't because padding is bad design), think of ways you can "hide" the padding so it's not obvious. The thing is: if your game can be beaten within refund time, the response is NOT to add more empty padding, it's to either NOT release its chapters in separate games and just inform players that this is a chapter-based alpha and set the price from the getgo with maybe the first chapter also being used in a free demo, or to add better fecking padding. As an example: the Slow Selene chase was a wasted opportunity for a GOOD red-light-green-light minigame: she's too predictable and you NEED to beat her game within her first two stops, what kind of tension is that? Most of Garten of Banban (yes, from the free demo itself onward) is just plain bad game design, and I say this as another hopeful designer cutting my level design teeth currently on Elder Scrolls mods, Minecraft adventure maps, RPG Maker games, Fire Emblem and Super Mario World mods, just getting a good feel for what intuitive level design is and subjecting my friends to my tests to take notes. So much of Garten of Banban ought to be cut or reworked, I could honestly write an entire article on how to make a game antagonistic to the players just from Banban examples. You want players to ENJOY, not to be ANGRY (unless you're making a ragegame, but those tend to advertize themselves that way, and they lean harder into antagonistic design). But reception-wise, Garten of Banban's original sin was not noticing how badly Poppy Playtime pissed off the older indie horror fans. It doomed itself by not letting the genre cool down from being pissed off at Poppy Playtime and not deciding to veer into parody when that was what it could have gained criticism immunity with. It happened to be the one holding that malcontent bomb when it finally went off, and it wasn't well-designed enough or using a beloved-enough IP to get a small explosion instead of the huge one.
@@neoqwerty THANK YOU. The BanBan ass patting part of the video made me unreasonably upset because he really glossed over the legitimate criticisms people had towards the game like the ones you mentioned and instead simplified it as 'people sent death threats bc bad game', which tbf people did do but I feel important context was taken away and made Banban out to be an innocent martyr rather than something explicitly manufactured. I still think calling it the death of indie horror is an exaggeration considering stuff like Iron Lung are being made but- yeah.
@@SpookyGhostpeppers There are tons upon thousands of bad horror games. Markiplier is about to reach episode 100 of his 3 random horror games series and a lot of those were obviously beginner projects. The main difference really is that BanBan tried to market itself out of the gate, the merch in the main menu and the non-released sequel in the corner. This already made the creators look arrogant and having watched a lot of the Markiplier let's plays, even beginner devs know the principles of game design and horror. The mascot designs and gameplay are so bad, it made people question the legitimacy of the tone. That doesn't happen with beginner projects. So people saw the alternative, that this was just a cashgrab to profit off of a trend and critique turned to bullying and as always in the internet, bullying turns to harrassment and threats.
I'm glad you mentioned kids loving horror. I got into horror with creepy pastas like slenderman and lost episodes and game stories. They fascinated me to no end and I loved how they made my skin crawl.
Honestly I pretty much agree with everything you said about Banban Except that I also can't agree that they're not money hungry..They had a Merch page when the game got out, before it even got popular
So? I’ve seen UA-camrs with less than 100 subs with merch, like t-shirts. Unless the game forcefully redirects you to their merch page, all this is is them wanting to profit off of their labor and make a career out of it.
@@whothehellarewe Well it depends honestly, is the youtuber putting time and effort into his videos? Do they have quality? If so then I wouldn't mind the merch because the guy clearly knows he's worth it atleast But Garten of Banban? It's very much unpolished, either made really fast or by beginers, it doesn't warrant premature Merch
indie game devs wanting to make money from their work is not actually some horrible sin. don't confuse "money hungry" with "literally, actually hungry and scraping to pay rent." if the game is bad, fine. whatever. don't buy the merch then. it's not being forced on anybody.
Idk, it's not a /bad/ thing to want to monetize your work. Saying that just having merch for a thing that's just came out means you're "money hungry" and the creation is automatically just a cash grab seems silly.
I really loved you nuanced take on the mascot horror genre and how you also point out the algorithm also plays a lot into shaping the genre. The algorithm is more powerful and influential, more than anyone recognizes. I also love how you give suggestions at the end. You're great and analyzing and thoughtfully criticizing, especially as something as you love. Also yeah, kids should always have a kid friendly horror stuff. Millennials had Courage the Cowardly Dog and it's still talked about fondly. Maybe because it wasn't merchandised as much. If it was merchandised as heavily as other medias like today, there's a good chance I wouldn't be too fond of it. Also can't blame for any developers for trying to make more money off of merchandising, especially when you're rewarded with money for doing so. Let them get that bag.
I really like how you approached the topic of Garten of BanBan. Yes, the game is bad, yes it definitely sought to simply ride on the coattails of more successful mascot horror titles...but the reaction of the internet was awful. How much of a loser do you have to be to send death threats to a duo of brothers making a game for children?
The FANF fandom and the Sonic fandom have so much in common. Both are gaming franchise that have many many many issues with quality in terms of actual game releases but birth this widespread fandom of creative and passionate fans.
They also have batsh*t insane universes and contraversies. From Sonic Comics plagurizing WW2 War Poems and making references to Mien Kampf to FNAF having lore about Springtrap MPreg and time travelling ballpits. Both series release rushed garbage like 06 and SB to pump out highly corporate merchandise before christmas. The fandoms are major situations of extreme talent and extreme drama/messes. Etc
One thing you could’ve brought up as a pro throughout all this time is Spooky’s Jumpscare Mansion. It’s been there from the start, releasing after FNaF in 2014 and had slowly updated with dlcs and extra content such as the Katamari Hospital and Dollhouse and everything about the game is absolutely amazing. With Kira making more games currently and seeing the energy and passion he brings I can’t ever agree with “Indie Horror being dead is thanks to mascot horror games”.
Didn't the first version of Spooky come out before FNAF? And yeah, Spooky and Akira's other games are S tier in the genre. No drama, no focus on BS lore, no bad practices, just a fun tribute to Horror as an all around genre that just wants a good time. Plus their games are some of the only actually scary ones in Mascot Horror, just look at stuff like Lisa and Spooper.
@lxbdkghostofculvert2891 Lisa, Spooper, Deer Lord, there are so many specimens/monsters that are quite scary. The you got friends like Wormy Charles who you can’t help but laugh at
Thanks for covering in no insignificant length online bullying and YT's algorithm. In conversations like these, those points don't come up as much as they should. Adding that even folks who work in YT don't have a full understanding of how its algo works reflects such a large issue and another conversation as well. Without getting too into it, online bullying & outright harassment has always appeared very clout-motivated, with users forgoing social etiquette, even online versions of such, and chasing after accessible/easy mic-drop moments. Most of the time, it translates to these variations of "call out's" over topics like indie games or other media to hold much more vitriol than fits the supposed "crime," and at such a point, it stops being actual criticism, especially when it dogpiles/happens en masse. It's also hard not to note that web-wide, algorithms still have a heavy hand in this; algo's focus on viewer retention, and one of the sure-fire ways to obtain that is through bandwagons of however unnecessary vitriol.
as someone who was already out of college when FNAF came out, I remember the hype and watching Markiplier’s playthrough of the series (Mark and i are around the same age and also both mixed Korean so i’ve always been a fan of his) but watching this vid and the retrospectives have been SO cool. watching gen z analyze the media they grow up with is not only super interesting but also SO impressive. i’ve watched your long vids multiple times. and I really appreciate the quality of the research and writing (same with izzyzz, y’all should collab!!)
The way we percieve time is so fascinating. I don't mean this as any sort of "old man yells at cloud" thing or "oh god I feel so old" things. I genuinely think it's fascinating. All of these people are talking about "growing up with fnaf, fnaf being a childhood favourite, being in middle school talking in the schoolyard about fnaf now I'm an adult watching the movie". But for me...fnaf was starting up when I was in my 20s and I'm....still in my 20s
I always thought the term Mascot Horror was meant to be used in the same vein as Mascot Platformer. In that one of the driving points of the design of the game is the focal character of the game, typically the namesake of the game (Sonic, Crash Bandicoot, Alex Kidd, Bubsy, etc.) which is also, coincidentally or deliberately, in tangent with how the game is marketed, i.e. you use the eponymous character to sell your game. Similarly, Mascot Horror's focal characters are the perceived villain of their respective game and more often than not the game's namesake as well, and likewise is also used heavily in the marketing of the game. Obviously, there's more distinctions between the two as you described, but that was one observation I felt I ought to point out.
as someone who hates how security breach came out, the thing that frustrates me most is that i deep down wanted it to be good, and finally give me a chance to get in to the franchise, at the very least it did give me inspiration for how i would do a horror game
My main issue with Banban was how serious it kept trying to be when it didn’t have enough effort put behind it to justify the tone. Chapter 3 on the other hand changes to being more lighthearted and silly while also actually adding some interesting stuff like a decent enough boss fight and a pretty cool puzzle segment with the Jumbo Josh puzzle room, so if they stick more with that idea going forward then Banban will be a guilty pleasure of mine.
Disagree. I’m so tired of seeing this claim. It never took itself as seriously as claimed. I’m saying this as someone who didn’t even particularly enjoy the games at all, too. It’s obvious the devs are having fun with the concept and just throwing things at the wall to see what sticks. From the downright parodical bits of art on the kindergarten walls, the overwhelmingly cartoony design of the drone and its remote, as well as their characters, the voice acting, etc. I have seen *_countless_* indie games take themselves way too seriously, try to force hyper-realism into an aesthetic that really didn’t mesh with it, and even do their best to bait Lets Players purely to leech off of the attention despite having _nothing_ to offer but a 5 minute game made with Unity prefabs. If anything, it felt self-aware.
@@whothehellarewe The only thing going against this self awareness theory is how they will block people over non threatening light hearted jokes, like when uhyeah replied with a picture of a leapfrog console and nothing else. Maybe *now* theyre going the more light hearted/jokey route, but that was never their intention. Just take one good look at Egghead Gumpty (not to be confused with one Night at Flumptys), their other horror game, and you can see the same/similar flaws as GOBB
Regarding the toxicity of the community reaching an all time high in recent years, I feel like it's because of an overall flood of general toxicity everywhere online, probably because of the ukraine war, covid, inflation, all these things back to back. I even had to delete my reddit (good riddance though) to keep my sanity in check. It's like all of a sudden everyone let loose on their worst behavior online. Yes I know it's not everyone and it's just a vocal minority, but it has become so loud it's almost impossible to ignore or brush off.
Kids consumed a single niche of media exhaustively, they developed a sense of taste for said niche, and then they grew up chasing after that nostalgia. The moral of the story of mascot horror isn't "indie horror is dead," it's "kill your nostalgia and expand your horizons"
I've seen a lot of youtubers attempt to do breakdowns of the mascot horror genre like this, but this one is the most in-depth and accurate one I've seen so far. You do a really good job bringing a unique perspective and not just repeating the same shit everyone else has already said.
Im very surprised the mascot horror genre hasent died otu at this point. Its probably been around pre FNAF 1 but FNAF popularized it to a HUGE extent which brought about the rise and maybe future fall of it at some point.
Aslong as fnaf continues to make cash and traction(regardless if it still deserves it or not), there will always be other people trying to profit off its appeal, theres still minecraft rip offs being made to this day
@@twinzzlers I'm fine with both forms of it (sb aside) with some stuff like help wanted being a really good experience. I've only played a little at a friend's once but shit did it scare me. This was highschool and I was still scared
53:25 I think this is the issue with modern internet culture in general. There's a growing obsession with games needing to be OBJECTIVELY good, with gamers presenting game mechanics, monetization schemes, development processes, etc. like they're scientific laws of game development. There are some objective facts you need to follow for certain genres, such as needing 70 or 90 FOV depending on if your FPS is intended for console or PC respectively, but there's a lot of decisions where people assume a specific choice makes an objectively good game when that should be left up to the opinion of the designer. And if you don't make the objectively 'right' choice in your game, or you're experimenting with whether or not that assumption is true? You better hope your game is massively popular otherwise you're getting dumpstered for it. And sometimes not even massive popularity is enough to save you. You really only have to look at UnderTheMayo's review of Ultrakill to see the end result of that mindset.
there definitely is a science behind game development though. a really, really big one with an extensive body of research. certain design decisions _will_ empirically impact the game's effect in ways that any good developer can and should account for. and it's not the basic stuff that gamers think of first, like FOV in shooters or the framerate obsession - it's the more complicated stuff that actually affects gameplay, like how ammunition access is spread across a map, for which weapons, and how much is available. the mechanics/dynamics/aesthetics model for game design is a great place to start your research if you're new at this. if you make weaponry/ammunition readily available in a horror game, thus giving the player more agency and diminishing the "absence of action" component of horror, you _will_ make the game less scary. this is not subjective. it's crucial player psychology. it's fine to make this decision knowingly, but if you don't account for it in some way or use it to further the goals of your game, you will have just pointlessly diminished a core aspect of the game. there _are_ rules, and while they can be broken, it'll usually hurt the game unless you're breaking them _knowingly_ and with good reason. you are right that experimenting is great - but experiments fail. a lot. part of the value of experimentation is examining that failure, and _critique is a part of that._ games _can_ be objectively bad. aka devs can make design choices that hurt the game and make it less effective at its goals and thus a less fun or impactful experience. and people can form those opinions about games, and they _can and should_ share those opinions. there's plenty of value in good, thought-out critique on the merits of gameplay. it turns detrimental when those opinions turn into vitriolic hate mob stuff. everyday criticism against garten of banban would have been a totally different thing from what actually went down.
I find it hilarious that a good portion of the last part of this video goes on and on about how we should take care to be more nice, but all the top comments are still hating on mascot horror. This is such a wonderful video and the only thing the commenters took from it was "let's not change and continue to be negative."
You made this song? I love it. It sounds like something you'd find in an old tony hawk game or guitar hero. Really nostalgic. Its so good. You have more?
Every time you upload i click right away, and i have these videos practically on repeat while I sew or clean my room. The music you compose for the videos, your scripts, and even your voice all work so perfectly together. You're definitely my current favorite youtuber purely because every video you make is of the same high quality, and I know im going to like it!
Thank you for talking about the fear of new creators not wanting to publish their stuff in fear of public scrutiny by the internet for not being able to make a masterpiece right of the bat, as a creator of things myself, that was really needed.
Yes I also really appreciated this part too. It’s so scary making content today because the internet loves to pick you apart if you do something wrong.
@phantasmaGOREYa it was kinda normal back in the day I guess? But you would only see it in video game chats or 4chan, in UA-cam or Twitter it was waaaaay more rare, but those times didn’t last long did they?
I know you said that probably most of your demographic are children, and I don't necessarily disagree. But I'm 22, I'm really interested in game development and I want to thank you so much for all the work you do. Thank you for this thought provoking videos you keep releasing. It's amazing how much I learn from them /gen. Thank you, sincerely. Much love from Latin America!
I feel like saying "Indie horror is dead" is just too negative and incorrect- I feel like people saying this are the same not noticing the cool and bad ass indie games showing up- dark deception being a good example.
This constraint and death grip by algorithms is effecting EVERY artistic pursuit for success. Music, film, videogames, etc… it’s bleeding us dry by forcing us to entertain to be seen, not CREATE to be appreciated. I hope more and more people start to become aware to this otherwise it will only get worse. Thank you so much for pointing this out in this field Sagan!
Can we just appreciate how much effort Sagan puts into his videos? The guy gives us full documentary-length, insanely good-quality videos every couple of weeks, and they're all SO rewatchable. Thank you Sagan - knocked it out of the park once again :) x
I love how much youve grown. I was part of that cringe kid fan base too and I remember some,of your videos because I was so certain that I needed to know the truth about this pizza place.
13:56 this picture is still fucking terrifying, i remember being a 10 year old kid going through all of these, and of course i was scared by the likes of jeff the killer or the rake, but when i came to this one, i immediately closed out of the website, and to this day, i STILL think this picture is by far the scariest to come out of the creepypasta craze, nowadays i laugh at something like jeff the killer, but i still get shivers down my spine when i see that russian sleep experiment picture
fr. i literally could not look at it without wanting to cry and being extremely paranoid afterwards for like... ages i still get extremely paranoid and add my possible psychosis onto that its not fun sbdbdj
It's so weird seeing what mascot horror is nowadays. I've been with it since FNAF 2, and fell off somewhere between Security Breach and Banban. I don't hate what we've gotten lately, I thought BATDR was really good, I just think the genre needs either new life brought into it, or a bit of a break so we can try rediscovering what made it so special in the first place. (I'm just glad DDLC isn't seen as mascot horror.)
for me, i honestly blame that shit hole of a game named “poppy playtime” for ruining it that single shitty ass brang kids channels to mascot horror therefore it being exposed to the kids and therfore making sure mascot horror will be on it’s downfall
I've been around since the first FNaF game and seeing what mascot horror has turned into is kinda melancholy honestly and I hope we experience a mascot horror renaissance soon, also, hee ho
Ironically, my favorite horror games could be classified as “Mascot Horror”. Pony Island is literally “Cute Game is secretly evil”, and it did it in a wonderfully meta way. Inscryption even broke from this by starting off like it isn’t based off of a game with Leshy seeming like the main horror antagonist.
Dev here, and this honestly was an interesting read. We are releasing our own game here soon and excited about what we are debuting and while I would say we fall into this category to some degree, there are a lot of good points. At the very least, this really opens our eyes to the genre and while there are certainly problems with it, having a discussion be brought to the table is a good starting point and determining how we can go about telling stories is important. I think this genre is here to stay, at least for a long time. Look at slasher films, they are a dime a dozen and yet people go back to them and myself as a dev admit I watch many of them including the cheezy horror films out there just because of its unique-non unique take on things. At the end of the day the work artists do is their own and a story to tell. The future is fascinating and regardless if market does well or not with them having a game a dev can look at and say 'hey I made something neat' in the end is great. Regardless if a game gets 1 like or a million, as long as the first like is by the creator I think its a win as long as the work is towards a positive goal.
It’s insane to me we’re the same age. The quality of your videos is phenomenal and you have such a good music taste! Awesome work putting together some genuinely excellent takes
I think the fact that like you said, Garten of Banban exemplified all of the negative aspects of this genre without providing something of benefit, does kinda give people a valid excuse to dunk on it. They don’t want it to become a standard. They don’t want it to become a norm. So they made an example of it. Of course that’s ignoring that There’s hundreds of horror game both better and worse that come out each month, hell it’s been like that before even FNAF with folks using cheap jumpscares to craft youtuber reaction bait. Its just incidental that it came out right when these feelings were all boiling over and reached an audience. While it’s not fun to put oneself in their shoes and imagine what it’s like to deal with that reaction… we don’t create things in a vacuum. This is the third video on this exact topic I’ve seen and it’s recapping the same timeline, the same points I’ve seen others do, for example. It’s impossible for a genre to die so long as someone has a combination of inspiration, motivation, and knowledge to create their vision. But if the bar is set so low, it won’t really matter.
honestly, I'm really *glad* that a lot of mascot horror stuff is repetitive and cringy, because when you find that one outlier, it makes it so much better. there are only so many original ideas in the world, and if people keep making those original ideas for every single game, there won't be any more room for originality. the ideas will run out. it'll all stop. so despite hating content farms, i'm glad they exist. sure they're annoying, but it makes it all the better once you find the special original creation.
At 53:26, I was going to talk about my own experience with this exact problem. I've written stories (never shared them, though), I've made art, and, recently, I realized I wanted to make a game. However, with the backlash Garten of BanBan received (and now recently learning that Amanda The Adventurer got similar treatment), I've been terrified with the thought of being laughed off the internet forever. Especially since my own horror story I've written is based off of popular mascot horror games like FNaF, BaTIM, Poppy Playtime, Tattletail, and the many other titles exploring the same idea. I'm almost tempted to create an entirely new identity just to see what would happen if I did end up making a game. Sorry if this is unrelated, but I just wanted to talk about my personal experience with this!
18:49 yeah I remember watching Mark play it for the first time ever and him being confused as to why he couldn’t get up and walk around lol.,,. such good times fr.
The funny thing is that, when Slender (and later FNAF) came out, the horror niches I was in basically rolled their eyes at it as "crappy shovelware horror for kids" (for reference, Slender came out the summer before I went to college - I was very much outside of the target audience, and the horror streamers and LPers that I was into at the time had different tastes). There's definitely a cycle of people crapping on stuff that's popular with the younger crowd going on here, compounded by the fact that the Internet might as well be expressly engineered as a mean-spirited echo chamber. One thing I find utterly fascinating about mascot horror, though, is that it's a genre almost entirely defined by non-gameplay elements (because, as you brought up in the video, many of the fans don't actually play the games themselves). So you get a lot of "mascot horror" games that are, mechanically, a pretty mediocre example of another horror subgenre (Security Breach totally fits within the same general genre as something like the Clocktower series, for example), which are then transformed by how they handle lore/their character design. Which is actually something that I think is a problem for the genre - I feel like a lot of developers within the space start making mascot horror games because they love mascot horror games, and don't have much experience with horror games outside of that context (especially since a lot of other styles of horror game are increasingly inaccessible to young devs due to age or cost). Which, again, isn't the developers' fault... but boy howdy would I love to see what kind of mascot horror game someone would make after playing Fatal Frame.
Some indie horror projects I've been into: > MOTHERED by Enigma Studios and its prequels and sequels. They're these fascinating and unsettling analogue horror pieces that touch on some pretty heavy philisophical topics. > On the ABSOLUTE flip side, the Cursed trilogy by disastersquad2 are three splatterhouse horror point-and-click games with excellent atmosphere... despite using MS Paint graphics and a soundtrack made entirely up of music "borrowed" from other sources (it's a single-dev non-commercial project made over a decade plus, so that's not terribly surprising). It's not really for lore hounds, but it's a fun romp through a haunted house with a surprisingly solid story. The third game came out at around the same time that FAITH 3 did... and I think I liked Cursed 3 more. > There are a TON of really good RPG Maker horror games (some of which are actually RPGs!) that most people haven't heard of. I'd suggest looking into Acai Corner, Dememorize, END ROLL, Mouth Sweet, Polixiuhs, and Weird And Unfortunate Things Are Happening, as well as oates's games like Nobody's Home and Sorry, We're Open. Honestly, hop onto rpgmaker.net and just take a look at their "horror" tag - you're bound to find something fun or interesting (I'm kinda fascinated by Ghost Suburb 0, but I don't know if I'd necessarily suggest it to people. It's.... aggressive).
That ending made me smile. Thanks Sagan. I’m one of those guys who likes to view the horror genre from afar so I am grateful for the window you provide.
53:30 hit me specially hard. I've been wanting to make a game for a long while, but I know that nobody makes a good game on their first try and I'm afraid that I will be harassed and mocked because of that. And before anyone comes at me, I know that constructive criticism is key for improving, but there's a difference between helpful advice and people being outright mean to you.
Mascot horror isn't dead let alone indie horror (We litteraly are getting a new amnesia game tommorow and it looks great) its just the faces of mascot horror don't give good represnation of quality and what the genre can bring, its the same problem first person shooters had in the 2010's, their was geuinely great shooters to come out of that time but the face of it being call of duty and battlefield, two series that basicaly started good and turned into cheap easy cash basically painted the entire genre at the time as one big old awful cynical mess. Poppy playtime and gartan of ban ban are the call of duty and battlefield of indie horror, cheap, easy cashgrabs with a bizzarely loyal fanbase even tho the deveoplers would probably push you infront of the train if it meant collecting a penny underneath you
I can’t say how glad I am I’ve found your channel like a year back. You’ve got some really original format of videos and you’re just genuinely smart. Your scripts are done very well and I seriously appreciate that and enjoy seeing a new video of yours be uploaded when I get up in the morning. Keep up with the great work man!
Banban LAUNCHED with a merch store and a preview for the sequel. Idk how anyone could say it wasn't made to scoop up mascot horror money from children. Should people not have done speedruns for refunds? Absolutely, but there was a reason it was singled out among all the garbage people could have just let go. The standard isn't "Make good games or we'll shame you" its "Don't make a cash grab so insultingly obvious that people start to clown on you"
Sure, but having problems w/ a cheap/greedy product doesn’t justify permanently traumatizing the people that created it. Like… that’s the actual issue here. It’s not about how overwhelming-to-the-point-of-dysfunction mass-criticism is, nor even how unnecessary & uncomfortable mass-dunking inevitably becomes - it’s that online clown shows like this do *irreparable harm* to real-life, flesh-&-bone human beings. Think what actually happens when you’ve been deemed an “ethical target” during an internet pile-on. Do you really believe the inappropriate conduct is limited to a couple of shitty speed-runs? Hate-stalkers; swatters & doxxers; e-drama (& other tabloid-like) clout-chasers… these are some of the most obvious, most *common* by-products of net mobs, but they only scratch the surface. Please understand that “quality control” is not a good reason to spill blood. It just isn’t.
I think if people were going to go after I think it should’ve been Poppy. Banban is one of those things where it’s so bad that you can’t fully tell whether it’s a shitpost or not
@@bluecayser1498i think it's very obvious now that it's genuine and I think the game derseves all the hate it gets ,do agree that doxxing and screaming at the developers faces is childish and going way too far but a simple rant or harsh critical video is completely fine.
you don't get the point. obviously banban is bad and is a cash grab, however as Sagan said, had the devs continued making games avoiding that kind of thing, they wouldn't have seen any revenue. it's just how youtube works. make a game that doesn't play by its rules and you'll be buried under thousands of videos about a new game called "Binkley in the Factory" with shitty gameplay and the full set of tropes which is either praised or hated depending on whether or not the art direction is good on a side note, i feel like this is a very hypocritical sentiment amongst the indie horror community considering that they have an open mind when it comes to Poppy Playtime, a game that's ACTUALLY maliciously monetized and isn't even that good, I'd even argue it comes close to being as bad as Garten of Banban (compare Pastraspec saying he hates Banban for being passionless and how people blew it up into the mainstream on a stream vs him literally making a video dedicated to poppy playtime) in terms of gameplay. Remember, one of the first things people criticised about the latter is the art direction, bland assets with poorly drawn characters. It's easy to come to the conclusion that most people don't mind the cash grab aspect or the cliches of ANY mascot horror game as long as the game is, not even good, pleasing to look at, which Garten of Banban with its inexperienced developers couldn't have possibly been
@@JaxxMCC I kinda get that but come on now persistents. I don't want to continue to compare fnaf and banban but look at Scott his games were failing for over 10 years he had every right to do what the banban developers were doing and chase a trend but he didn't he continued to try and try until he got his big break with fnaf.
DUDE i am so excited to hear you mention kitty horror show!! ANATOMY is one of my favorite indie horror games and KHS's other works are all so good as well!!
Hands down one the best videos you've made. The script was so flippin good and was sweet, informing, and to the point. The lighting and editing is getting so good too! Very spooky and fitting with the themes. Loved the little sketches for transitions ❤❤❤ definitely excited to see more 😊
Can I just this is one of my favorite channels to watch? Your vids are so entertaining, I've been getting into internet horror but scare easily so your videos make it super accessible for me lol. Love your videos man, keep up the good work!
Loving where your own work is at Sagan! Your video creation has evolved so much in the years since i started following you, you have so much to be proud of!!
Duck season is possibly the best of these. I love the connected universe of the stress level zero games. I also feel that poppy playtime has started to lean more towards the actual adult horror especially with the latest teaser videos. I think they heard the backlash of it being "just another kid friendly horror game" and decided to try harder.
The worst part of mascot horror honestly is how repetitive the stories are. It's always something like "OH NO. We put the souls of innocent civilians into our blenders. Now they are mad and want vengeance. Come to the old blenderium and lay these souls to rest. This is totally not a trap."
“Our blenders”
“Come down to the old Blenderium”🤣 Delightfully dumb.
👀:"YO WRITE THAT DOWN, WRITE THAT DOWN!!!"
I mean to be as fair as possible, FNaF was the first and only one to do it like that at the time. Thinking about how to write a story in this subgenre is near impossible, but not futile. I think if they got creative with the gameplay instead of basic traversal and mechanics, something new can emerge that shakes the foundation of indie horror the way FNaF did (even marginally).
💀
It’s like everyone wants to be FNAF, they can’t.
I feel a problem with mascot horror is that they commonly put lore and story first, gameplay second. So then they turn into glorified walking simulators, the exact opposite of fnaf 's staggering innovation gameplay wise
Would that make FNaF a sitting simulator?
I've heard Joseph Anderson make a similar point about RPGs, in that level restrictions define progression so much that combat mechanics take a backseat
@@davidhong1934 fnaf (well most of them) had gameplay more catered towards surviving and protecting yourself against the animatronics
And in a pretty engaging way as you had to be right on your toes to stay alive
More recent ones (well ones I can remember) most of the time was spent on ‘hey go over there and complete this boring ass puzzle that’s piss easy!’
Notable example being cannon puzzle for garten of banban
Some puzzles had a danger lurking around or next to you but they were only really effective if the puzzle was hard or needed good timings and instinct
@David Hong its 1000% because the gameplay style has become so saturated by both FNAF itself and its fangames, but the horror of being unable to move the playable character was still novel when FNAF 1 came out. The walking simulator (Slender, Amnesia, Outlast) was the shark before FNAF came along and made the sitting simulator the new big thing.
@@UnBR0k3enAngel i can vouch for outlast because it actually had parkour
the other ones i am not so sure
@epicest bacon hair eh, I wouldn't call sliding animations parkour lol. Not like Outlast was Mirror's Edge or anything.
I would agree calling it a 'walking sim' was a bit harsh, though. It has more gameplay than either Slender or Amnesia, despite sharing the 'scared dudes walking about in first person' premise.
People really forgot what made Five Nights at Freddy's so special. The animatronics didn't have sharp teeth, claws, or anything like that, but the game used the uncanniness of 1980's animatronics with amazing sound design and excellent camera angles and lighting. The environment makes the monster, not the other way around.
I like that one camera angle of Bonnie in the west hall corner. He’s just side eyeing the camera, LOL.
@@The.Goblin.King... this is literally the first thing I thought of when I read that comment!
@@eggi4443 Bonnie’s bombastic side eye
@@The.Goblin.King... criminal offensive side eye 🤨
Yeah it was really creepy and nostalgic because it hits that 80-90s Chuck E. Cheese era people really remember
It's honestly kinda insane and also emblematic of the general internet discourse that the harmless tiny project Garten of Banban got heralded as the end of a genre and a cheap cash grab when Poppy Playtime exists and is actually unironically a massive cash grab. The phrase "Lore NFT Drop" is easily the scariest thing to come out of it.
I always thought that Poppy playtime looked like it wanted to try really hard to get the fnaf popularity around children and people didnt belive me
I think Poppy is a soulless game, but at the very least it has original assets and gameplay that has some level of respect for the player, something Banban does not. Basically, Poppy is presented better, but I agree they both feel like a tryhard attempt at mascot horror
Banban just feels like two brothers having fun with making a video game. It doesn't feel serious. And everyone is trying to take it seriously.
are we being dramatic or is there more reason why poppy playtime is a cashgrab
@@TONADRIEL I think we’re being a bit dramatic, but Poppy’s dedication towards storylines and tropes in the indie horror genre feels so uninspired and eager to be popular with the younger horror demographic that it comes off as tasteless to many. Paired with its plethora of merch that released basically as soon as chapter 1 came out (generally indie games get merch if they happen to be a success, rather than strategically making a game TO sell merch), it just doesn’t come off as a game that prioritizes telling an enriching story above everything else. As mentioned in this video too, this was also around the time people were getting sick of mascot horror (this was like the biggest game before everyone took their anger out on Banban) and were more critical towards it.
I think the main turning point to "mascot horror" was when those poppy playtime huggy wuggys started to sell in local stores all around the world. It felt so off seeing little kids carrying them around
Went to Greece this summer and they were in every tourist trap gift shop. Imagine taking your kid to Greece and they pick the huggy wuggy doll as their souvenir
I ever understood why a horror game should be dedicated for kids.
If GTA or COD never changed to appeal for a younger audience (both licences are still rated 18+), why horror games, or supposed "horror games" should?
Even others horror games franchises didn't, Resident Evil, Silent Hill and the rest are still rated 18+ as well..
@@QueSeraSeraaaaanything can be marketed to kids, they're a demographic like any other and a powerful one because they have a ton of free time to consume your bullcrap. A lot of kids like horror, so it makes sense somebody would fill that niche
@@janNowa not everything actually, games based on wars and everything else weren't made or remade to be kids-friendly.
They get just graphically updated in most cases.
For the case of FNAF, it is rated 12+ (or 15+ in some countries), they weren't meant to be appealing to the younger audience, but due to the designs of the animatronics, it got misunderstood.
@@QueSeraSeraaaaI said anything CAN be, there could absolutely be a specifically kid targeted war game but nobody's bothered yet. A lot of kids do play COD though.
A lot of these games seem to forget that the first FNAF exploded not because it was a dark twisted version of something from people's childhoods, but because animatronics are inherently creepy and live right in the deepest pits of the uncanny valley. FNAF didn't have to do much with the context because being locked in a chuckee cheese where the robots can freely walk and are looking for you is already a nightmare several of us have had before it even came out. Most other types of childhood media needs extra work put in to make creepy, but I feel like a lot of devs see FNAF get away with a series of what were essentially powerpoints and went "wow, it's just that easy"
Yeah, maybe that's why Tattletail was successful too! Ive personally never owned a furby but the reoccurring sentiment i hear being shared by people who did have them as kids was they would wake themselves up in the middle of the night, annoy you to death with repetitive dialogue, and they would break in the most terrifying ways possible.
I think this is why Tattletail is one of the better imitators, because furbies also fall into that category.
Really, that's how you create "the next FNAF." Not mascots, not Lore, you just take a simple idea and execute it very well in a way that suits that concept. FNAF wasn't trying to be "the next Amnesia or Slenderman" and didn't use anything from them gameplay-wise at all. Made it stand out hard.
yeah people seem to forget that the classic characters were not at all cute nor cartoony. they were bordering on realism for its time. granted the graphics degrade in quality the longer you stare at it
@@localinternetclown That and also the Teddy Ruxpin (sp?) toys Mama is based on, cassette player-having toys were the horrors of the generation before the furbies.
(In case you didn't own one of those enough to have it going wrong and sear itself as a panicked disaster in your mind: they not only would do the playing at demonically low-voiced slowed down speeds thing that furbies did on low power, but cassette players were prone to "eating tapes"-- the tape would unspool and get caught in the reels while still being working, causing hell noises of warp-downs, speed-ups, and random slidey screeches that would send parents into a panic because that usually breaks both the cassette player AND the cassette, so the kids get a two-for-one on hell noises and parents acting as if their "friend" is dying.)
Also Tattletale came out when UA-cam had a spike of interest in circuit-bending furbies (aka taking furbies apart and forcing them to glitch and react to random electricity going into their little "brains").
It not only took childhood fears from two eras (the late 80's and late 90's) but also struck when one of those was on a "oh that's CREEPY" resurgence and trending again thanks to youtube deciding to recommend people going mad scientists on furbies (the long furby crafts started around there too, and the furby custom modding as well).
In short: Tattletail knew what was scary and used those.
The Resident Evil 1 devs explained it best: you need to know fear to make something scary. Scott was scared and haunted by Bonnie from the start. Willing to bet Tattletail was born from a furby-related fear, too.
A lot of new mascot horror games boil down to “guys this kids franchise is holding dark secrets and the company behind it killed 59 CHILDREN AND PUT SOULS IN THE MASCOTS” and has the same look at a big map and get macguffins and items, Garten of Banban is an example and the straw that broke the camel’s back
I was just watching a video of a guy screaming at kids in Among Us VR and one of the kids mentioned that game
Garten of Banban is truly the YiiK of video games.
But bendy not
@@jourdan112map bendy still felt like there was actual heart behind it, especially with Dark Revival. Even Poppy (sometimes) feels like that, and a small bit of SB is that way. Banban has had none of that, going so far as to say the funny Skyrim meme before blasting copyrighted music to fuck over streamers. They're petty
I have an idea for a mascot horror if anybodys interested.
Fun Fact: 40:26 In the Meeting Halfway Podcast, the creator of Baldi's Basics revealed that all of the lore was completely satire and added in purely because it was a recommendation. He also revealed that he had talked with MatPat and that MatPat suggested for Baldi's Basics to release in multiple chapters. In the end, the creator of Baldi's Basics didn't decide to go for a chapter based game since he wanted to release a full game and instead opted for making Baldi's Basics Plus, a complete game that wouldn't be split into multiple chapters/episodes/parts on which he is still working on.
Baldis is that one game that doesnt need lore and never really needed it. Tbh, its the one mascot horror game that I know of that never has any lore of sorts, with the only story being that your friend left notebooks and you have to collect them and the secret story being that the game is like a virus or something that was never supposed to be created. I gotta say, him deciding not to take MatPats suggestion and just wanting to release a game that is pretty much what it is now feels like a huge W for him
I think Baldi's Basics and Bugbo (Digital Horror series by Bensilly) were basically made with the same intention of being 00's based parodies, but were both mistaken by their fanbases as having lore in them. I do have to say though, Baldi's Basics is madly underrated for it's goofy ahh humor. This game could even rival Quandale Dingle if Mystman12 wanted it!
@@My_name_is_bon_ tbh, kinda sucks that there fans out there that are part of some of these fanbases that believe that there is lore in something even though it's just regular story telling and has things that are supposed tell a bit of history of something and that bleieve that if there's something out there that doesn't have owl house or gravity falls level of lore or if it's something that isn't trying to put lore and is not trying to be a lore based story then they would be upset or kinda hate on it. The same thing happened to the cuphead show when it first aired the first season where although it was given positive reviews, I think one or a few criticized it for not having lore or a story, idk about the lore part I could be mis-remembering, but either way the show was supposed to be just like a cartoon where a story starts and ends on the same episode. Tbh, I was glad that they didn't go lore based and all that, they just told stories using the characters and that's it, even during the first season
@@m0istur I bet Mat only reccomended it just so he can make money off his lore videos at the cost of the game's integrity, probably was the best decision the dev made.
@@danpaz9485 I was almost thinking the same thing. I thought mat only suggested it just so he can make more theory and lore videos about the game similar to how he makes videos on poppy playtime and fnaf. It would have been completely pointless either way because really the game is all satire and is just a simple little horror game with just a pretty straight forward story. No hidden lore, no secrets to tell what the story is about, no dark secrets, nothing. No disrespect to mat, but he's just gonna make a complete ass of himself trying to solve mysteries and figure out secrets that don't exist in a game thats all shits and giggles and make up all sorts of theories of why something is weird or out of place
55:30 Last year (or 2021?), Markiplier did a video where he played two games as picked by a random-Steam-game-chooser website. Both games were unknown, both games were bad. Markiplier talked about how they were bad (in his usual way, alluding to the quality plus moments of obvious frustration). After playing each game, though, he did something _incredibly_ important: He left a Steam review on each, but the reviews were tongue-in-cheek high praise. Perhaps the single most important action of either review, though, was marking them "Recommended".
After I watched the video, which I didn't get to for a few days, I went to check the Steam reviews for each: They were generally positive. The first game had no reviews prior to his video; the second had two, of which one was negative. After the video, the first game had a dozen more, positive reviews; the second had a few extra positive reviews and one new negative one. (The second game was easily the worst of the two.)
There is no doubt in my mind that, had Markiplier left a negative review and/or ragged on them in his Steam review and video (as some other UA-camrs might), many of his viewers would have also lambasted the game. (Some to extreme degrees, I'm sure.) It wouldn't even be his intention, that's just how communities for content creators tend to operate. ll that to say, this warning against drumming up drama or going full-tilt against some unknown devs has tremendous merit.
Mark might have some exaggerated reactions and such, but when it comes to giving actual criticism about things, he's the realest man ever.
Which while yeah most people criticizing would leave a negative review. Mark recognizes his larger audience and ultimately he just wants people to improve, not rip them apart. So leaving a nice critical but nice review would help people be positive but criticize, so that the games improve
@Its_Asteria the one time mark actually called a game bad and didn't even give positives to it, was Hello Neighbor
Dude genuinely is a good person, never has a bad moment.
@@NateBoiBoihello neighbour was literally irredeemable though. It had all the resources and people it needed to at least be decent even without the complicated character AI they promised, and it just blew its opportunity. And even THEN, Mark formulated his criticism in the most positive way he could
I'm in my late 30s and I find the discussions about "ugh this is all for kids" incredibly funny for exactly what you said - the people saying it were kids when they got into it. Maybe they were older kids, maybe teens, but still, very much kids. I have literally never felt or thought "ugh they've sold out/watered this down/etc" about --well, honestly, about most things. I'm old enough now that I know it's kind of always been like this. Not to imply that things aren't always evolving and changing, because of course they are. But I do think people don't recognise their own growth and evolution the same way they notice evolution in genre or medium.
fr i always see people hating on the newest Pokemon games that come out.
i know that no new pokemon game will ever compare to the one i played when i was 8, because it has so many memories tied to it and it was the only time i had friends, and played it with them. I've probably spent thousands of hours playing and replaying gen 5 games
but despite that, i still love and enjoy every new game, because they're fun. i swear so many people's standards for fun are ridiculously high, or mine are really low (probably both actually haha)
@@kai_maceration honestly what a good way for us to be, though! life is a lot chiller with less irrational anger at entertainment haha!
I agree with you but uh what does your age have to do with this?
@@micah3331your age matters when you buy a game.
Any 18+ games aren't logically for kids but adults.
The FNAF games by Clickteam were 12+ (or 15+), so not for anyone uder those ages.
I remember than the COD franchise was massively popular for kids, but the age rating never changed, 18+ only, same with GTA and pretty much any games that could be played online.
Word salad
I think the real issue about mascot horror the ticked people off was how it all moved towards _marketing_ itself to (mostly) children.
It wasn't about the horror anymore, the horror aspect was subpar at best or laughably bad at worst, it was about it being shoved out in whatever state and trying to get as much money as possible out of it, and more with merchandise.
Doesn't really matter if the game is good or bad, peopel can excuse a horror game being bad, everyone's gotta learn somewhere, and you learn from mistakes. But it becomes a problem when a failure goes all-in on getting as much money outta you. Prolly doesn't help that other gaming genres are going through this too, greed overtaking passion for a game and very poor quality of the games.
Fr. These indie horror games were made for young adults but were still played by kids. That part is fine, but when the industry is flooded with horror games that stops making them for adults first, that’s when it became a problem.
thats literally what the video talks about
Another issue that I think partly contributes to the negative perception of mascot horror is merchandise looking a bit too childish and fan art unintentionally making the characters look charming and cuddly. In the case of games like Poppy Playtime, the developers themselves are involved with the decision to have kid plushies being made of these supposedly “scary” characters.
And in the case of games like FNAF, I don’t think fans are aware but many of them unintentionally hurt the franchise’s image. Which I highly doubt it’s what these fans wanted. But since the first game got released there has been countless fan art depicting these “scary” characters as cute, innocent, etc. Even to the point where the creator made FNAF World. Obviously there are also cute/innocent fan art and merchandise of beloved horror icons, but not only are they a small minority of their respective community, they aren’t officially collaborated by the creators of said horror icon
@@CoOlKyUbI96I think whether the merch veers closer to the “horror” side or the “mascot” side says something about how much the devs think fans care about the lore. Because in-universe these mascots are all “supposed to” be cute, and the fact that they look scary instead is an aspect of the mystery that the game wants you to discover as you play it. As half-assed as BATIM’s lore ended up being, the devs knew that the fans cared about it a lot, and I feel like that might be why most of their merch showcased the “pre-horror” versions of the mascots. By contrast, I don’t know much about the Poppy Playtime fandom but I look at all the Huggy Wuggy plushies with too many teeth that every kid seemed to have for a few months and suspect that they didn’t intend for the lore to be what the fans liked about their game; they’re marketing to the thrill.
This is all just my conjecture though and only tangentially related to your point o7
@@a.n.9800 I definitely see what you mean. I do partly agree with you. But also partly disagree. Yes it is true that in universe these mascots are all “supposed” to be cute. However, I do think there is a clear distinction between the in universe characters thinking the mascots are cute and us the player/fan. Because the in universe characters are expected to have very little or sometimes no knowledge of the true nature of these mascots. Whereas us the player/fan would have the external knowledge of these mascots’ true nature. And yet still choosing to portray them as innocent fan art or fan made projects. It does seem disconnected as what emotions the story is trying to make us feel.
Once again I emphasize it’s most likely not intentional as I doubt fans want to willingly sabotage their own fan base. As for Poppy Playtime, it’s a bit harder to trust the developers because they have been a bit shady
If anyone wanted to see indie horror games still being played by someone without exaggerated reactions to things, ManlyBadassHero is the channel to go to. Indie horror is still going strong!
Oh snap, another Manly Enjoyer out in the wild. Good day and/or night to you.
I believe Pastra is also a pretty good choice for this sort of thing?
and honestly his channel is also useful for getting a look at trends in the wider indie horror scene- he plays a lot of games from a lot of small devs which is really interesting even if they're not to your taste
Omg I love his videos
Really? I can't get past a single of his video titles. It's surprising to hear he's not one of those youtubers.
I do absolutely believe that Poppy Playtime was way worse from a moral standpoint than Banban, but honestly, it's pretty clear what the intentions of Banban were from the start. The sequel was planned right as the first game released, and merch was marketed right away. I don't believe the harassment the devs got was deserved, but that doesn't mean that Banban is completely innocent either.
Edit: 1:04:02
This is absolutely correct, and I should've realized this conclusion sooner. The euphoric brothers used to not be a part of this mascot horror craze. Before all of this, they made passions projects. But it wasn't successful enough. They started adopting these somewhat shady business practices, which, considering their situation, is completely fair. Good point, amazing video.
The dumb thing is that they could just have picked up the ball the community tossed them and ran with it. (The "it's satire, it's a parody" ball.)
Making deliberately bad design, deliberately bad voice overs (mocking the really really crappy FNAF fangame phone guys), adding more absurdity to the puzzles... they wouldn't even have needed to change the lore, it's so cookie-cutter that ANYTHING they do with it can be spun as parody.
Heck, with the car drive scene and Stinger Flynn, I'm wondering if they ARE trying to parody and they're just bad at that too and... maybe should study how to write stories better, if they're gonna make games that are supposed to be narrative-driven instead of gameplay-driven.
We can't be good at EVERYTHING and from what I've seen of their games they uh, they're not really good at the story part. They really should sit down and write stories and sharpen that part of their skillset THEN go back to narrative-driven games.
Saying this as a fanfic writer who's also an amateur modder.
Yeah, while I believe they shouldn’t be harassed over a game. One of their early “passion projects” before ban ban was a very insensitive game about school shootings. The whole game centered around the player trying to prevent a kid with a mental illness from starting a shooting and it really made some distasteful jokes. So I do believe that most of the criticism they get is definitely warranted but no they should not be harassed over their games.
Saying "Banban isn't completely innocent either" does way too much to equalize the backlash of death threats and constant harassment with the original action of making a lazy cash grab. They aren't even in the same universe, there is no validity whatsoever in developer harassment and never, ever will be.
@@Voingous Shoot, maybe the phrasing was a bit weird there. I was commenting on what the creator of this video said about the Euphoric Brothers, not trying to validate the death threats and harassment made towards them. There is absolutely no excuse for actions like those.
@@HallowzDev I mean, yeah, that really wasn't a good game whatsoever. From what I remember though, that was years and years ago.
The complaints about "indie horror is dead" always do seem to come from people who entire view is "the thing that is on the front page of youtube".
Horror as a genre is more varied and vibrant than ever before.
There's tons of great indie horror content being made still, the issue is spesifically in the mascot side of it we're seeing reocourring instances of corruption and greed with numerous series, some indie serious becoming as corporate as many more contraversial AAA companies and getting into drama with a lack of standards.
It instills concern, as traditionally notable Indie studios are known to be more dependable integrity wise, so seeing certian studios become much more captilistic makes people worry how it will affect the future health of the industry because this might become more commonplace one day across the board.
“youtube colonizes your attention span and the attention spans of children” is so real. definitely something we should remind ourselves of daily and goes for other social platforms too.
excellent video full of solid points and meaningful insight. gonna keep my eyes peeled for your remake of alphabet! ♥️
It's even more fitting when the games are targetted to children, but alienate the rest..
duck season and tattletail are my two personal favorite “mascot horror” games. they both have unique concepts and pull off horror flawlessly. it’s a shame both games were not in the spotlight more.
So sad that Tattletail never got a sequel, it was such a good game.
It’s a shame about TattleTail, that game deserved more
@@mari_golds-bleeding-ink the last thing that was said about it was that they might make an animated show about it. Which I hope happens, but besides that Tattletail is dead, and there hasn’t been an update on that show, so that might be dead as well.
me too !!!
Same Duck season looks so fun
Saying that indie horror is dead because of Garten of Banban is like finding a dead sardine in the ocean and declaring that the entire ocean's ecosystem is doomed
I think what he meant was that the quality has died. Sure there are gonna be really good ones but the majority is hot garbage
Don't think that's an analogy, there's like 4 mascot horror franchises, so if GOBB's a dead sardine, it means that sardines can't survive without evolving and therefore sardines as they currently are will go extinct
Oh, actually you're precisely stating indie horror and not mascot horror, disregard my previous comment, your analogy works
@@tiktok-mc2nq not really, there have been some truly excellent indie horror games I the last few years. Signalis is a great example, fear and hunger 2 isn't necessarily Good but it is amazing, and Echo is excellent. It's just different genres that are less appealing to the algorithm, like survival horror, RPGmaker game and visual novel respectively. You just need to dig deeper to find them!
GOBB didn’t kill indie horror, but it’s grabbed it by its sides and completely milked it for all its worth. Indie horror is now seen as the gen alpha baby genre. Teenagers and Adults are leaving the fandoms and that’s something that started with GOBB. GOBB was the last straw.
literally SHOCKED that the creators of duck season made BONEWORKS. genuinely insane, great for them!!! i used to LOVE duck season when i was young, its really nice to hear the devs are onto greater and bigger things
Bonesworks is fun but you cagnt ddr rdink oockfjgnr wnso hhfhf libibitiy :/
LOL They made the Duck Season VR GAME, not the classic one you goober.
@@NachozMan should have specified duck season vr in my original comment, i know! im around 19 now so the vr game came out when i was like 13 i think? i was a bit too young for duck hunt when it first came out SHFKDHSKA
@@NachozMan there is no classic duck season, you're thinking of duck hunt lmao
@@bigfrog4231 Making me feel old oof, I didn't realize it's been that long since the VR duck hunt game came out. Still one of the better VR experiences tbh. Which is sad to say. We need more good VR titles
What I loved about fnaf's original story and animatronics was that they weren't evil, they were in pain and despite that pain they still wanted to entertain and protect the children from the 'bad man'
We also didn’t even know about the whole Children getting stuffed in the suits angle until way later after the game released when the lore started to come out
@@cacomeatballmarinara2014 I thought this was already hinted in the 1st game?
@@dmin5782Yup, it was heavily implied in the game!
@@dmin5782yeah it was, one of the first games posters talk about an awful odour aswell as blood and mucus coming from the suits. So its heavily implied
@@alijahcrichton8234yes, but the posters were pretty much impossible to read in-game, so it was really unlikely for someone to just find it out through playing the game. You had to dig deeper if you wanted the full story
Sagan going through the entire history of internet horror & creepy pastas and somehow avoiding every possible SCP bullet imaginable is somehow both incredibly impressive and offensive to me.
I agree about Banban being sort of the epitome of everyone's general frustration and irritation with the genre but I also want to say that I think a lot of the frustration towards modern mascot horror was amplified substantially by the reception to FNAF: Security Breach, as a lot of people then were saying that their dislike for its stylings and approach to the FNAF formula and the horror genre were because it was trying to chase the trend of modern mascot horror and a lot of people may have seen modern mascot horror "ruining" a franchise that is so beloved
I know the mascot horror trend has spawned an army of homogeneous games featuring kid friendly mascots, but I’ve got to admit how much more I prefer these games to the endless Slender collectathon games.
Though they could definitely use less fetch quests
Slender the arrival, and Marble Hornets was my child hood ngl
Combine them.
They're equal in lack of equality, repetitiveness, and utter refusal to do anything interesting or innovative. This is like saying "I prefer the water at the bottom of a trash can to the water at the bottom of a dumpster". They're both trash.
fnaf security breached:
As saturated as the genre/term has been for the past few years, I've always gotten a kick out the concept of mascot horror because twisting something associated with childhood innocence and wonder into a dark, disturbing reflection of itself always brings out the rawest of feelings. Still think that FNAF tackled this the best out of any other game to date.
Right! I always asked stuff like, "Hey what is it with kids stuff that just creeps us out so much?" and some of the mascot horror really just dives into that.
Exactly. I’ve always had a soft spot for mascot horror for the same reasons you just mentioned. Games like FNAF, Bendy and the Ink Machine, and even Poppy Playtime have always intrigued me because of those aspects, especially the lore, as messy and convoluted as it can be.
But now we’re getting crap like Rainbow Friends and Garten of Banban that continue to deconstruct the appeal of mascot horror and use the genre as a big marketing scam for gullible children. I feel bad for all the kids who fall for these scummy business practices.
I think the june archive does a really good job at that kind of horror
Buddy have you ever heard of the movie Child's Play? lmao
The topic is games not movies
So happy to see a video that isn't just "Garten of Ban Ban bad, we're doomed." As a writer, this has been messing with my brain, so I'm going to dump my own thoughts.
There's a concept of "write a big shocking scene to surprise everyone and get them thinking." Often a cliffhanger; it's a way to drum up intrigue and get people thinking and can be a valuable tool. But recently, it is occurring to me that 90% of the time the writers have NO idea what they're planning to happen after that scene in question.
Many of these mascot horror games seem mysterious, not because the truth of the story is cleverly hidden, but because 90% of the time it starts off with nothing there. A good example is Bendy and the Ink machine; a game that is now finished, and reveals just how much they had no damn clue what was behind all their mysteries. This led to some plotlines getting no payoff, other's getting too much attention, some popping up out of nowhere with no set up, characters outright forgotten, and the whole story looking and feeling like a mess at the end of it.
It's like a warped idea of a cliffhanger that misunderstands the point. The concept is that there's supposed to be something finalized to look forward too- not a scene thats there to impress or intrigue and then vaguely matter later. Good Cliffhangers, even the ones that end a story, usually have a very select handful of ways they could be interpreted because the story is the framework to support it. FNAF2, since you brought that up, does a good job of making the framework. Now there seems to be no framework, leading to the most buckwild, out there theories from fans and even MORE buckwild next chapters from developers. (who often look at these fan theories and take inspiration from them, for better or for worse)
Garten of Ban Ban has done this, too- with that monster scene at the end of the first game. but unlike bendy, it wasn't "good"...in the way that the curtain wasn't expertly crafted to perfectly hide the plotholes. Therefore, GOBB "bad" apparently. What? So, if Garten of Ban Ban had a better coat of paint on it, it'd be fine??? If it did the exact same thing but had a "company polish" like Poppy playtime or Bendy it'd be completely okay??? No matter how bad the game is, the people who created it are two brothers. Two human beings, with no company or anonymity to shield them or help them refine their game. Taking out the rage on them just seems...misguided at best, cruel at worst. No one starts as a master of their craft, and people looking for The Next Bad Thing to dunk on misses the point that creation takes trial and error, and no story is perfect. These brothers just wanted to make something cool and used a framework to get started...but because it wasn't visually pretty to hide the flaws of mascot horror (these barely planned "oooh mysterious lore" stories) like Poppy's playtime(probably, we'll see) or Bendy, it got the biggest torrent of hate.
Now...all that being said, I don't think this is the developers' fault. As you also said.
I really do think this is all happening because the fans want a mystery that's mentally stimulating for them...ASAP. As soon As Possible. Right now. Next Markiplier video. and I hate that, because stories take time. so, so much time. So much effort. So many drafts. So much trial and error. It's nearly impossible to keep up with the demand for engaging stories nowadays.
On one hand, I want to get mad at Bendy and the Ink machine for fumbling the ball...but also, there was such a pressure to get the next chapter finished. Get it done. Get it out. Get it to the letsplayers. Set up that next shocking scene that hints at the next chapter. That pressure leads to underbaked, confused, and unrefined stories.
And that really is a shame, because so many of these stories could be so good if they were given the time to flourish. I certainly know my stories would be rough, flimsy, and convoluted if I didn't have the time to refine them...and I've been working nearly daily on a novel for two years, rewriting it multiple times, and am not even close to publishing.
Nice to see a fellow writer talking about this stuff. It reminds me of how J.J. Abrams got so big off of his whole “Mystery Box” thing, where he just raised questions that he had no answers to and indefinitely delayed giving the audience answers. People somehow didn’t see how much bullshit that was, and that’s how we got the whole “Rey’s Parents” debacle, where he made such a big deal out of this question in TFA, but then they got Rian Johnson for TLJ so the burden fell on him to actually do something with the scraps JJ left him, we got the whole “Rey’s parents were nobodies, they sold her for drinking money” thing which pissed everyone off so they had to bring JJ back to go “Uhhh, her grandpa was Palpatine” which wasn’t as bad but still irked everyone that in this enormous galaxy there’s only a couple families that really matter. Either way, everyone agreed it wasn’t worth the hype.
I remember once in the 2000s when I was like 6 years old, and was just beginning to write, I wrote this silly little action story, and at the end of part 1, two characters are running back to their home base, fleeing from the bad guys base, and I write down that something blocks their way and “what they saw was horrifying… To be Continued”. I had no idea what they saw that was so horrifying, but I was excited to find out in my next writing session… and I never found out. I couldn’t think of a satisfying answer. I would try something out, and my little brain would go, “No it needs to be MORE horrifying” because that’s all I had to go off of. A couple decades later, and I’ve pretty significantly changed my tune. I still like to improvise every now and then, especially in first drafts when I’m just trying to get ideas out there, but now when I write, the question NEVER comes first. The question always comes after I’ve thought of the answer. I don’t slap a scar on a character, draw attention to it, and then try to figure out what the hell happened to them, I come up with a backstory, one that suits the themes and the emotional atmosphere of the story I’m going for, and then I observe this little backstory playing out in its natural habitat and look for ways that evidence of what’s going on here could survive to the present to be discovered by the perspective characters.
Safe to say I get a lot more satisfaction out of my stories these days.
a big reason for that kinda thing is, that i don't think most teenagers or even people in their 20s know, this is how business works. you have to get some old guy with money to invest, this is generally how people get money off of these kinds of things, not only does this get you money to hire and buy assets, but if you get big enough, you can sell your portion and walk away. a lot of people will be working to just get their portion so they can sell it and walk away. now they don't have to sell and walk away, they can try to improve things to get a bigger payout, but when you first get that influx or cash and the company hasn't really been "figured out" by the industry, there's a good chance that the assets will be over valued by someone meaning your bang for your buck is probably pretty good in this state.
then with the people investing in these companies don't "see the appeal" themselves, you end up with really shallow things being really marketable to investors.
generally if you hear some indie thing get backers or funding or the like, it's best to just remember this in your back pocket before investing more of your own time in it.
@@HeadlessZombY Well yes that is how business works, but at the end of the day, it’s profit at the expense of the audience who wants to see their investment pay off, and as with any case of prioritizing profit over the audience, it’s an unsustainable business model, because if you burn them enough times, eventually good will runs out and people stop caring. I mean I already used J J Abrams as an example so I’ll use him again. He very publicly disappointed people with the sequel trilogy and while he’s also famous for Lost, Lost has become pretty much the poster child for shallow mystery that goes nowhere. Then on top of that there’s the Cloverfield movies which, again, disappointed with shallow answers to what looked like intriguing mysteries. All those things considered, I think JJ’s name doesn’t command the respect it used to anymore. The old guys with money have lost a marketable director. And sure they’ve got no shortage of directors, but this problem of repeatedly burning the audience is being felt on the large scale too. I mean just look at how hard it is to get audiences to show up to theaters these days. Sure part of that is because streaming is convenient, but the other reason? Not enough good movies. That’s what I’ve got to say about the good business of good movies. And I think a lot of those young artists you’re talking about do probably get that studios have a way of meddling in the name of what they think will get them more money, but they still care about delivering satisfying answers for the purposes of artistic integrity. That and, while there’s a bunch of endless mystery boxes out there, there are some genuinely well thought out stories out there which gives lots of people hope that they’ll bed able to make their story be one of the ones that escapes Studio interference.
@@Excelsior1937 man that's a block of text, my point was that the industry itself is weighted to have shallow things succeed since shallow proof of concepts can get funding much easier than trying to put time and energy into making something deep.
people don't really want to change this because at the end of the day people want to get paid more than put time and energy into something that they don't know will succeed or not.
I appreciate the write up. You highlight an issue with a lot of writing in general. I believe that these kind of paperthin mysteries or 'omg shocking twist' scenes just work really well with children and teenagers. Perhaps it's because of the brain not being fully formed. But take Steins Gate for example, which has an overwhelmingly positive score. It is absolutely rife with plotholes and the main narrative falls apart completely. What are we supposed to think, except that there is an entire subset of people who seemingly do not have a need for things to make sense?
I'm not super familiar with Mascot Horror and indie gaming in general, so this was actually a great introduction.
💀
oh hello, it's you
Actually Sagan, there's a slight correction to be made for 20:28.
Freddy Fazbear Pizza Massacre is NOT the first fnaf fangame to be made.
That would be Creepypasta Castle, a now lost fnaf fangame that came out just a few days after the release of FNAF 1.
Isn't that a mod though?
I thought the first fan game was Treasure Island?
@@moonwatcher4047 same. Didn't even know creepypasta castle was a thing tbh
@@moonwatcher4047 It was, I don't recall much but BOY do I vividly remember Treasure Island being the first fangame and how janky its first version was, it was CLEAR that it got put together very hurriedly for its first alpha demo.
I think Pastra did a fangames retrospective and had a timeline, and Treasure Island's first demo was out within days of FNAF1.
Then when did five-nights-at-fuckbois drop
I’m so happy to see John credited with the term. Dude deserves more recognition he’s such an underrated content creator.
I've started thinking "red means scary!" so often when playing games now because of him, his dry sense of humour really makes any game enjoyable to watch. Still need to finish his album video, I'm about 5 hours in
Yes! He's one of my favorite people on the platform.
- Sincerely, Evil
John is the king.
I can really see your passion for filmmaking in these videos and I’m happy to see you do what you love. Really cool vids, great channel.
Enjoying some fine Italian cuisine (pasta with sauce that was on sale) and a glass of wine (minute maid fruit punch) while sat infront of a marvelous show (hour long video essay on mascot horror)
Glorious
mmm splendid
I find it fascinating how fast passed the consumption of this media is. Back then there were less games being made for a specific niche, but not like they were all good.
Look at the RPG maker horror era. There were bangers and some really bad ones.
The rotation of media nowadays is soo fast that it seems producing more is more important than making it better, or more in depth.
Back in my day, we called them "Fnaf clones".
I got hit with so much nostalgia rn from seeing those words
Facts
Kids these days will never know how beautiful the good old days were… all the way back long ago, in 2014.
My grandma moment
Same way as FPS's used to be called Doom Clones.
Good when a genre gets a dedicated name of it's own.
The fact that I can vividly remember the first FNaF game coming out and it now being long enough ago that some of today's teenagers can't even remember that it even existed makes me feel insanely old
I can vividly remember it coming out and being trashed for being a shitty game based on braindead jumpscares during a period where jumpscare horror was already hated. For some reason it blew up with children trying to be edgy via the usual giant youtubers. Now we have 4 year olds drawing Poppy's playhouse characters as a comfort character, teeth and all. What is this timeline.
@Kaweta idk man, I feel its a repeating cycle. In the 90s it was sonic for edgy kids, in the 00s snoop dog, in the 2010s it's FNAF, who knows what's next
@@moxxym the closest we get at the moment is The Backrooms and their stuffs but who knows for sure what else is going to be the next kid trend in the coming years though
@Eko Subandie true but thankfully the Kane Pixels stuff is good, it's actually decently scary
I seriously can't believe it's been almost an entire decadesince the first game came out. I was there since the beginning before the second game had even come out at that point. Crazy...
finally, a conveniently timed excuse to not go to bed on time
I fully agree with you, that a lot of people seem to go "Unless it's very high quality/industry standard, it is simply a crash grab and deserves to be dunked and bullied" and it sucks. It's a big problem not just in the horror community, but in any community.
I remember being on UA-cam when fnaf was huge (2016-ish) and watching countless videos just dunking on kids' drawings, fan songs, fan theories, and the like. I watched them constantly, and told myself "I will not be this cringe, I will not make anything unless it is perfect, and then I won't be bullied".
The same goes for things like undertale, batim, and hell I've even been scared to tell my own stories when it comes to my own experience, things like my experience with art, trama, or gender identity, I and many others are scared to tell our stories because we feel like we need to tell them in the most perfect way possible, otherwise we are romanticizing a bad time in our lives, or that our experience was done in the "wrong way".
I want to make but I don't feel like I'm good enough to show what I am making, or that what I'm saying will be misinterpreted, or even worse, have my work stolen by ai. It's fucking hard to make stuff, much less for an entire audience. I can't even imagine having a parasocial relationship with an audience, it's fucking scary.
That era of bashing on kids for drawing things that werent literally the mona lisa 2 is what stunted my art progress lol. I stopped drawing for awhile because the idea everything HAD to be perfect just infected my mind so badly
@@tank___ah 2016 cringe culture
@@tank___worst of all it wasnt only a thing when i got home but even in school my art teacher bullied me for art so i quit, im still terrible to this day meanwhile my little brother who never had this issue got really good at it
I know exactly how you feel.
It would be a massive disservice to not mention Welcome Home. The amount of love and care put into that project is palpable.
i remember year or so ago my cousin, who i think was 8 years old at the time, was talking about poppy playtime, and i was very unfamiliar with it, i just knew it was some sort of mascot horror game and she just kept naming characters and i felt like i was falling into another dimension. i was also unsettled by how these sorts of games market themselves towards children enough that ny own cousin was seemingly intimately familiar with it. idk
I'm sure everybody has this one shop at the very back of their shopping mall that sells vapes and shit and when the teenage moms come to refill their vapes, they also sell rainbow "insert popular game character here" plushies for an extra thing of cash, and what you described is exactly how they make their money.
Mascot horror is targeted for the kids it is not targeted for the horror fans.
this is a problem with like, all kids media though. if a kid likes something, its p normal for them to go elbows deep- like im sure most people know a kid who can name like, 30 pokemon off the top of their head
FNAF was not made to sell toys, and it wasn't made for kids. The first game is still genuinely unsettling to play at times, and always will be.
👍🏻
I don't know about you, but I'm having a huge deja vu, from the time when slasher movies were all the rage in the 80s. After Friday the 13th came out, which itself is a copy of Halloween, everyone was wanting to follow the premise of a group of young people who go to the middle of nowhere, and then get killed by some big guy in a mask. And on the bright side, maybe "Mascot horror" will get some kind of metalinguistic satire that reinvents the genre for good. Just like what happened with Scream in the early 90s...
I will be notice one day...
I grew up in the late 90s (born in '93), so I can confirm the tail-end of that time period. Halloween was a logistical nightmare growing up; I ended up losing my brother to walk with another Jason, and dad almost had a heart attack trying to find me 😅
I'm someone still working on a mascot horror game. I'm making it because I genuinely love the genre and want to make a love letter to it and to horror games as a whole. I've been playing horror games all my life and FNaF holds a special place in my heart because of an experience I had as a kid with a glitching Chuck E. Cheese animatronic that was stuck repeating one voiceline for nearly an hour. I'm genuinely into this to make something fun, scary (in a classic Resident Evil sort of way) and mildly experimental because I think I can bring something nice into this world based on a genre that has given me over a decade of entertainment and continues to till this day.
Wish you luck on it 👍
I know this was 4 months ago, but good luck on your games, friend
Hope development is going well friend :D
Now that I've finished the video, I want to add that this video genuinely has so many good points and I think a lot of people need to share some of these sentiments more. Not even relating to just horror stuff, but we are all just humans. Living, breathing, creating for the first time; Be kind, and be open to each other.
This might actually be the best video of this topic. I really love that it isn’t one sided like many other videos of mascot horror
Like I’m so fucking sick of fnaf fans calling these games poor imitators when the fanbases and audiences of fnaf literally have been eating up these games from the start
Lots of the comments in the video are just proving my point and missing the whole point of the video lol
Might be a hot take: But I thought Amanda the Adventurer was a cool take on Mascot Horror, I didn't play it myself, but I usually don't play horror games, and I get bored of those that are well.. boring.
Yeah that was unique.
I think it's a great take on it comparing to the others because of the interaction, plus can still be interesting regardless whether it's scary or not from what I see. I do find humor in making Amanda angry which is interesting, but still it's quite impressive how they still don't hold punches on the disturbing content, love me a good mood whiplash. Also helps that it was a big step up from the game jam version, utilized the hype from it well (which Hello Neighbor did not). Although even if some of the things more so remind me of Duck Season, it still stands out well.
It feels like mascot horror excuses a terrible story by having “lore”. Lore is like the frosting on a cake, it’s nice when it’s there, not all cakes need it and cakes have different amounts of frosting on them. Poppy and banban is like taking the smallest sliver of cake and then dumping a huge glob of anchovy and garlic flavored frosting on it. It’s clear that they don’t understand that the “lore” needs to gel with what little story there is. Either that or it’s not flavored at all. At least like a bendy or a choo choo Charles have some kind of story. I wish we got more diversity in horror games that aren’t trying to rip off bendy
To me, the whole focus on ‘lore’ is to promote a secondary marketing tool of videos trying to decode the game, and since these games come out in chunks, it also works as a JJ Abrams style ‘mystery box’ thing where they can just throw in bits of lore in one part without any particular intention and then just make up something to justify it on a later installment. The lack of traditional stories over lore is one reason I never got into either mascot horror games or souls-like games.
Lore is one of the worst things about the whole genre, 95% of the stories in the genre are absolute trash that is made to make a mutual parastic relationship with crappy Theorists like Matpat. (Just look at how directly desperate Hello Neighbour was)
I hate how lore is such a frontpoint in the genre, because it's consistently one of the worst aspects of the genre.
There's really only a handful of exceptions like Spooky's and DHMIS that don't take their own story seriously while still having good material there that do Story/Writing well, they don't put focus on their lore and just focus on a fun experience while also having some connected pieces behind the scenes.
A big issue with "lore" that I've seen is that many times it's just a bunch of out-of-context cutscenes and secret codes that vaguely point to some things that might have happened. Like a reply mentioned, it's the worst parts of J.J. Abrams mystery box concept, where they forget to put something in the box to begin with. I feel a better way to tell stories through "lore" is to come up with a story first, and then design your game around the story. Instead of secret codes that have no contextual reason to exist, shape the game's environment around what you put in the box. If there is a cipher to solve, make it so players can learn something about the story if they ask "why is this here?" instead of it solely existing as a lore delivery mechanism. Because people will be able to shake the box when they start theorizing about it, and if the box is empty they'll figure out pretty quick.
@@_-Lx-_ what constitutes a 'crappy theorist'? i swear you people get WAY too serious about some guy speculating about a game lmfao
@@crylune
Any combination of:
Pumping out low quality content that makes no logical sense, artifically lengthening it to 10-20 minutes by making it mostly unfunny gags, turning it into a multi part series because you refuse to cut the unfunny gags and actually say your points, garbage clickbait thumbnails, extreme stretches and logical falacies, broken math and reasoning questionable statements about the LBGTQ, actively ignoring the fact that there's already a canonical answer for your "theory" in the exact media you're disecting, exploiting and taking advantage of small creators without crediting them then getting fussy when one of the people involved calls you out, genuinely concerning IRL reasoning and implications for "why cartoonishly evil villian is actually the hero and how their victims are the problem for being forced to accept them in exchange for basic neccsities held hostage", being alergic to any form of constructive criticism, and generally having an unlikable egotistical view of yourself.
Basically people like that,
Oh, would you look at that, MatPat fits every single catagory, who woulda thunk it.
I loved DAgames’s song about banban because it ridiculed not just the game for being a low quality cash grab, but also the community’s toxicity for exacerbating the problem and being way too mean to the devs for just making a bad game.
The devs made a game making fun of school shootings and fetishizing disabilities
@@PersonallyIdonthateyou they deserve very heavy criticism for that, but not death threats and doxing. Besides, people were just harassing them for banban and not their more egregious products.
@@noonedream9333 Good point. Death threats and doxxing weren't even given because of that. I mean they shouldn't have happened over the other game, but still. Over just another cashgrappy game made for children? That's horrible. I would even say the meanies are the bad guys here.
@@PersonallyIdonthateyou >The devs made a game making fun of school shootings and fetishizing disabilities
see, this is what sagan meant by "explaining the reasoning backwards". the harassment the euphoric brothers received wasn't done because of that game, it was done because people hated Ban Ban, and only after that did they bother to find a "reason" for them to have done it.
Garten of Ban Ban is a bad game, Introvert: A Teenager Simulator, albeit with a legitimately promising art direction and horribly wasted potential for a heartfelt message, is a bad game, but that doesn't mean these developers are (or by this point were considering that they don't even try at this point) completely void of capability to improve their craft. I personally think that the school shooting game was really nothing more than a cringeworthy project made by a few people obviously not living in the USA and therefore not understanding the severity of the situation past the online memes about it
edited for better readability and to change "America" to "the USA" because they apparently live in Canada (where school shootings are not even close to being as big of an issue as they are in the US so the point still stands
I know this sounds crazy, but I was like “Wow this is really good!” I went to subscribe and realized I was already subscribed. I looked through the videos. I haven’t watched you for years!!! I’m glad we’ve found each other again! So much good content to binge.
I have to say, as a recent subscriber, I’m wowed by your editing style and ambiance. The style of your videos with the vhs/old digital theme really works and I’m exited to see more from this new, more 90’s style demonstrated in this video. Keep up the great work!
I do wanna admit that as a person trying to get into the game development scene, the viciousness of the internet can get towards people not being top notch at their craft, and especially as of late with making video games scares me. I don't know if I want to make a Mascot Horror game regardless of how serious I'd be doing it cause people's hostility towards the idea (And maybe a personal dissolution towards it) kinda scares me the idea of being a target.
In some ways I kinda wonder if these kinds of like, overtly loud and overtly antagonistic responses ruin the games being developed. Like the devs become more focused on these kinds of people than not just the valid criticism but also what would just make a decent product.
This is admittedly a conspiracy theory; but I'm wondering if the reason why people comment on how overtly dragged out some parts the next chapters are is in response to people making refund speedruns of their game. To drag things out intentionally so you can't do that. Assuming that's true, then this behavior actively ruined a game because it made the devs more caught up trying combat these people than trying to focus more on what they had in mind.
There's one youtube video I remember saying something akin to "We can't make [Garten of Banban] fail anymore" and idk why but that always stuck towards me as like a very misguided thought process. Like yes, telling people to not play a game because it's bad makes sense, but I don't think you make something fail by giving it more attention and adding onto the videos that talk about it. Most games that people want rarely succeed cause they exist and are rarely talked about further. I don't think I would've heard most of the horror stuff on youtube if it wasn't for Sagan Hawkes's channel because I don't personally go looking for these and no one to my knowledge talks about these things as fascinating as they are.
Idk why but the last comment of finding new horror experiences reminds me a lot about some folks who say they aren't enjoying games anymore, with the reasoning usually boiling down to them needing to branch out and play something else for once. And in some ways I feel like this is applicable here and should be stated. Maybe folks who are disillusioned from the genre should take a break from the genre and go searching for something different than what most people are doing. If I can add onto the suggestions, maybe try looking at older horror experiences that are well recieved? The Dead Space remake came out and the Resident Evil remakes I heard are pretty top notch. Maybe go looking for older titles like IMSCARED or Close Your Eyes. Just to name something I guess.
To be fair it's not _just_ about a game being bad.
A lot of people took Garten of banban as a parody of the genre initially, but it quickly did a 180 into antagonism and hostility when people realised the push towards marketing it to kids, selling merch and very very fast releases of next chapters that felt like they were meant to be way way shorter but got dragged out to prevent refunding.
And negativity from that seeped into criticism, like the criticism about ridiculously high polygon count of models and poor gameplay elements turned into ammo for negativity and antagonism.
Edit to be clearer and push a TL:DR; to the top: be aware what undercurrent is going on in the genre you're developing for so you don't step on a genre discontent landmine, and if you HAVE to pad your gameplay (you shouldn't because padding is bad design), think of ways you can "hide" the padding so it's not obvious.
The thing is: if your game can be beaten within refund time, the response is NOT to add more empty padding, it's to either NOT release its chapters in separate games and just inform players that this is a chapter-based alpha and set the price from the getgo with maybe the first chapter also being used in a free demo, or to add better fecking padding.
As an example: the Slow Selene chase was a wasted opportunity for a GOOD red-light-green-light minigame: she's too predictable and you NEED to beat her game within her first two stops, what kind of tension is that?
Most of Garten of Banban (yes, from the free demo itself onward) is just plain bad game design, and I say this as another hopeful designer cutting my level design teeth currently on Elder Scrolls mods, Minecraft adventure maps, RPG Maker games, Fire Emblem and Super Mario World mods, just getting a good feel for what intuitive level design is and subjecting my friends to my tests to take notes.
So much of Garten of Banban ought to be cut or reworked, I could honestly write an entire article on how to make a game antagonistic to the players just from Banban examples. You want players to ENJOY, not to be ANGRY (unless you're making a ragegame, but those tend to advertize themselves that way, and they lean harder into antagonistic design).
But reception-wise, Garten of Banban's original sin was not noticing how badly Poppy Playtime pissed off the older indie horror fans. It doomed itself by not letting the genre cool down from being pissed off at Poppy Playtime and not deciding to veer into parody when that was what it could have gained criticism immunity with.
It happened to be the one holding that malcontent bomb when it finally went off, and it wasn't well-designed enough or using a beloved-enough IP to get a small explosion instead of the huge one.
This comment was good, thank you for writing it :)
@@neoqwerty THANK YOU. The BanBan ass patting part of the video made me unreasonably upset because he really glossed over the legitimate criticisms people had towards the game like the ones you mentioned and instead simplified it as 'people sent death threats bc bad game', which tbf people did do but I feel important context was taken away and made Banban out to be an innocent martyr rather than something explicitly manufactured. I still think calling it the death of indie horror is an exaggeration considering stuff like Iron Lung are being made but- yeah.
@@SpookyGhostpeppers There are tons upon thousands of bad horror games. Markiplier is about to reach episode 100 of his 3 random horror games series and a lot of those were obviously beginner projects. The main difference really is that BanBan tried to market itself out of the gate, the merch in the main menu and the non-released sequel in the corner. This already made the creators look arrogant and having watched a lot of the Markiplier let's plays, even beginner devs know the principles of game design and horror. The mascot designs and gameplay are so bad, it made people question the legitimacy of the tone. That doesn't happen with beginner projects. So people saw the alternative, that this was just a cashgrab to profit off of a trend and critique turned to bullying and as always in the internet, bullying turns to harrassment and threats.
I'm glad you mentioned kids loving horror. I got into horror with creepy pastas like slenderman and lost episodes and game stories. They fascinated me to no end and I loved how they made my skin crawl.
Honestly I pretty much agree with everything you said about Banban
Except that I also can't agree that they're not money hungry..They had a Merch page when the game got out, before it even got popular
So? I’ve seen UA-camrs with less than 100 subs with merch, like t-shirts. Unless the game forcefully redirects you to their merch page, all this is is them wanting to profit off of their labor and make a career out of it.
@@whothehellarewe Well it depends honestly, is the youtuber putting time and effort into his videos? Do they have quality? If so then I wouldn't mind the merch because the guy clearly knows he's worth it atleast
But Garten of Banban? It's very much unpolished, either made really fast or by beginers, it doesn't warrant premature Merch
@@HowardGrump Inherently? Nothing wrong
It only starts getting wrong when you do things that hurt others, like scamming, lying in general, etc
indie game devs wanting to make money from their work is not actually some horrible sin. don't confuse "money hungry" with "literally, actually hungry and scraping to pay rent." if the game is bad, fine. whatever. don't buy the merch then. it's not being forced on anybody.
Idk, it's not a /bad/ thing to want to monetize your work. Saying that just having merch for a thing that's just came out means you're "money hungry" and the creation is automatically just a cash grab seems silly.
I really loved you nuanced take on the mascot horror genre and how you also point out the algorithm also plays a lot into shaping the genre. The algorithm is more powerful and influential, more than anyone recognizes. I also love how you give suggestions at the end. You're great and analyzing and thoughtfully criticizing, especially as something as you love.
Also yeah, kids should always have a kid friendly horror stuff. Millennials had Courage the Cowardly Dog and it's still talked about fondly. Maybe because it wasn't merchandised as much. If it was merchandised as heavily as other medias like today, there's a good chance I wouldn't be too fond of it. Also can't blame for any developers for trying to make more money off of merchandising, especially when you're rewarded with money for doing so. Let them get that bag.
I really like how you approached the topic of Garten of BanBan. Yes, the game is bad, yes it definitely sought to simply ride on the coattails of more successful mascot horror titles...but the reaction of the internet was awful. How much of a loser do you have to be to send death threats to a duo of brothers making a game for children?
The FANF fandom and the Sonic fandom have so much in common. Both are gaming franchise that have many many many issues with quality in terms of actual game releases but birth this widespread fandom of creative and passionate fans.
Another common thing is games. Once the bear and hedgehog went. Came the others falling to their deaths
They also both have a lot of por-
They also have batsh*t insane universes and contraversies.
From Sonic Comics plagurizing WW2 War Poems and making references to Mien Kampf to FNAF having lore about Springtrap MPreg and time travelling ballpits.
Both series release rushed garbage like 06 and SB to pump out highly corporate merchandise before christmas.
The fandoms are major situations of extreme talent and extreme drama/messes.
Etc
@@d0ttxt 💀
And both should leave for greener pastures AS SOON AS POSSIBLE HOW ARE YOU STILL HERE NO ONE IS KEEPING YOU HERE RUN JUST FUCKING GO
One thing you could’ve brought up as a pro throughout all this time is Spooky’s Jumpscare Mansion. It’s been there from the start, releasing after FNaF in 2014 and had slowly updated with dlcs and extra content such as the Katamari Hospital and Dollhouse and everything about the game is absolutely amazing. With Kira making more games currently and seeing the energy and passion he brings I can’t ever agree with “Indie Horror being dead is thanks to mascot horror games”.
Didn't the first version of Spooky come out before FNAF?
And yeah, Spooky and Akira's other games are S tier in the genre.
No drama, no focus on BS lore, no bad practices, just a fun tribute to Horror as an all around genre that just wants a good time.
Plus their games are some of the only actually scary ones in Mascot Horror, just look at stuff like Lisa and Spooper.
@lxbdkghostofculvert2891 Lisa, Spooper, Deer Lord, there are so many specimens/monsters that are quite scary. The you got friends like Wormy Charles who you can’t help but laugh at
That game was genius. Didn’t have to do a huge facility, just did a big mansion.
Thanks for covering in no insignificant length online bullying and YT's algorithm. In conversations like these, those points don't come up as much as they should. Adding that even folks who work in YT don't have a full understanding of how its algo works reflects such a large issue and another conversation as well.
Without getting too into it, online bullying & outright harassment has always appeared very clout-motivated, with users forgoing social etiquette, even online versions of such, and chasing after accessible/easy mic-drop moments. Most of the time, it translates to these variations of "call out's" over topics like indie games or other media to hold much more vitriol than fits the supposed "crime," and at such a point, it stops being actual criticism, especially when it dogpiles/happens en masse.
It's also hard not to note that web-wide, algorithms still have a heavy hand in this; algo's focus on viewer retention, and one of the sure-fire ways to obtain that is through bandwagons of however unnecessary vitriol.
as someone who was already out of college when FNAF came out, I remember the hype and watching Markiplier’s playthrough of the series (Mark and i are around the same age and also both mixed Korean so i’ve always been a fan of his)
but watching this vid and the retrospectives have been SO cool. watching gen z analyze the media they grow up with is not only super interesting but also SO impressive. i’ve watched your long vids multiple times. and I really appreciate the quality of the research and writing (same with izzyzz, y’all should collab!!)
The way we percieve time is so fascinating. I don't mean this as any sort of "old man yells at cloud" thing or "oh god I feel so old" things. I genuinely think it's fascinating. All of these people are talking about "growing up with fnaf, fnaf being a childhood favourite, being in middle school talking in the schoolyard about fnaf now I'm an adult watching the movie". But for me...fnaf was starting up when I was in my 20s and I'm....still in my 20s
I always thought the term Mascot Horror was meant to be used in the same vein as Mascot Platformer.
In that one of the driving points of the design of the game is the focal character of the game, typically the namesake of the game (Sonic, Crash Bandicoot, Alex Kidd, Bubsy, etc.) which is also, coincidentally or deliberately, in tangent with how the game is marketed, i.e. you use the eponymous character to sell your game.
Similarly, Mascot Horror's focal characters are the perceived villain of their respective game and more often than not the game's namesake as well, and likewise is also used heavily in the marketing of the game.
Obviously, there's more distinctions between the two as you described, but that was one observation I felt I ought to point out.
THIS.
@@ethangnasher3848 what do mean by this?
@@yellowstarproductions6743 T H I S.
Remember when platformer mascots had a darker change in tone in the 2000s? Hope the same happens with mascot horror soon
as someone who hates how security breach came out, the thing that frustrates me most is that i deep down wanted it to be good, and finally give me a chance to get in to the franchise, at the very least it did give me inspiration for how i would do a horror game
I guarantee you that FNAF 1 to 6, or to UCN at least, is way more interesting than anything after.
My main issue with Banban was how serious it kept trying to be when it didn’t have enough effort put behind it to justify the tone. Chapter 3 on the other hand changes to being more lighthearted and silly while also actually adding some interesting stuff like a decent enough boss fight and a pretty cool puzzle segment with the Jumbo Josh puzzle room, so if they stick more with that idea going forward then Banban will be a guilty pleasure of mine.
Disagree.
I’m so tired of seeing this claim.
It never took itself as seriously as claimed. I’m saying this as someone who didn’t even particularly enjoy the games at all, too. It’s obvious the devs are having fun with the concept and just throwing things at the wall to see what sticks.
From the downright parodical bits of art on the kindergarten walls, the overwhelmingly cartoony design of the drone and its remote, as well as their characters, the voice acting, etc.
I have seen *_countless_* indie games take themselves way too seriously, try to force hyper-realism into an aesthetic that really didn’t mesh with it, and even do their best to bait Lets Players purely to leech off of the attention despite having _nothing_ to offer but a 5 minute game made with Unity prefabs.
If anything, it felt self-aware.
@@whothehellarewe The only thing going against this self awareness theory is how they will block people over non threatening light hearted jokes, like when uhyeah replied with a picture of a leapfrog console and nothing else. Maybe *now* theyre going the more light hearted/jokey route, but that was never their intention.
Just take one good look at Egghead Gumpty (not to be confused with one Night at Flumptys), their other horror game, and you can see the same/similar flaws as GOBB
Wait wasnt the jumbo Josh segment taken directly from resident evil 7 dlc tho
it could be schlocky fun, and that's a-ok by me
Regarding the toxicity of the community reaching an all time high in recent years, I feel like it's because of an overall flood of general toxicity everywhere online, probably because of the ukraine war, covid, inflation, all these things back to back. I even had to delete my reddit (good riddance though) to keep my sanity in check.
It's like all of a sudden everyone let loose on their worst behavior online. Yes I know it's not everyone and it's just a vocal minority, but it has become so loud it's almost impossible to ignore or brush off.
Kids consumed a single niche of media exhaustively, they developed a sense of taste for said niche, and then they grew up chasing after that nostalgia. The moral of the story of mascot horror isn't "indie horror is dead," it's "kill your nostalgia and expand your horizons"
I've seen a lot of youtubers attempt to do breakdowns of the mascot horror genre like this, but this one is the most in-depth and accurate one I've seen so far. You do a really good job bringing a unique perspective and not just repeating the same shit everyone else has already said.
Im very surprised the mascot horror genre hasent died otu at this point. Its probably been around pre FNAF 1 but FNAF popularized it to a HUGE extent which brought about the rise and maybe future fall of it at some point.
I've no clue how the FNAF "Fandom" still exists outside of furries being REALLY passionate about their Rule34.
@Nachoz Man Same, the new lore is so terrible and lacks what made the first four game's lore so good
Aslong as fnaf continues to make cash and traction(regardless if it still deserves it or not), there will always be other people trying to profit off its appeal, theres still minecraft rip offs being made to this day
@@twinzzlers I'm fine with both forms of it (sb aside) with some stuff like help wanted being a really good experience. I've only played a little at a friend's once but shit did it scare me. This was highschool and I was still scared
@@NachozMan Futa Toy Chica pounding your ass in VR is all you need. And we've had that since FNAF2.
Dude your videos are so professionally made, I love them. Keep up the good work man.
53:25 I think this is the issue with modern internet culture in general. There's a growing obsession with games needing to be OBJECTIVELY good, with gamers presenting game mechanics, monetization schemes, development processes, etc. like they're scientific laws of game development. There are some objective facts you need to follow for certain genres, such as needing 70 or 90 FOV depending on if your FPS is intended for console or PC respectively, but there's a lot of decisions where people assume a specific choice makes an objectively good game when that should be left up to the opinion of the designer. And if you don't make the objectively 'right' choice in your game, or you're experimenting with whether or not that assumption is true? You better hope your game is massively popular otherwise you're getting dumpstered for it. And sometimes not even massive popularity is enough to save you. You really only have to look at UnderTheMayo's review of Ultrakill to see the end result of that mindset.
Yeah, the standards have gone up. I know unfinished games are bad, but maybe they shouldn’t complain so much.
there definitely is a science behind game development though. a really, really big one with an extensive body of research. certain design decisions _will_ empirically impact the game's effect in ways that any good developer can and should account for. and it's not the basic stuff that gamers think of first, like FOV in shooters or the framerate obsession - it's the more complicated stuff that actually affects gameplay, like how ammunition access is spread across a map, for which weapons, and how much is available. the mechanics/dynamics/aesthetics model for game design is a great place to start your research if you're new at this.
if you make weaponry/ammunition readily available in a horror game, thus giving the player more agency and diminishing the "absence of action" component of horror, you _will_ make the game less scary. this is not subjective. it's crucial player psychology. it's fine to make this decision knowingly, but if you don't account for it in some way or use it to further the goals of your game, you will have just pointlessly diminished a core aspect of the game. there _are_ rules, and while they can be broken, it'll usually hurt the game unless you're breaking them _knowingly_ and with good reason. you are right that experimenting is great - but experiments fail. a lot. part of the value of experimentation is examining that failure, and _critique is a part of that._
games _can_ be objectively bad. aka devs can make design choices that hurt the game and make it less effective at its goals and thus a less fun or impactful experience. and people can form those opinions about games, and they _can and should_ share those opinions. there's plenty of value in good, thought-out critique on the merits of gameplay. it turns detrimental when those opinions turn into vitriolic hate mob stuff. everyday criticism against garten of banban would have been a totally different thing from what actually went down.
I find it hilarious that a good portion of the last part of this video goes on and on about how we should take care to be more nice, but all the top comments are still hating on mascot horror. This is such a wonderful video and the only thing the commenters took from it was "let's not change and continue to be negative."
You made this song? I love it. It sounds like something you'd find in an old tony hawk game or guitar hero. Really nostalgic. Its so good. You have more?
His bandcamp and spotify are in the description
Every time you upload i click right away, and i have these videos practically on repeat while I sew or clean my room. The music you compose for the videos, your scripts, and even your voice all work so perfectly together. You're definitely my current favorite youtuber purely because every video you make is of the same high quality, and I know im going to like it!
Thank you for talking about the fear of new creators not wanting to publish their stuff in fear of public scrutiny by the internet for not being able to make a masterpiece right of the bat, as a creator of things myself, that was really needed.
Yes I also really appreciated this part too. It’s so scary making content today because the internet loves to pick you apart if you do something wrong.
@SH☆TO people have been saying that for the longest time lol
@phantasmaGOREYa it was kinda normal back in the day I guess? But you would only see it in video game chats or 4chan, in UA-cam or Twitter it was waaaaay more rare, but those times didn’t last long did they?
I know you said that probably most of your demographic are children, and I don't necessarily disagree. But I'm 22, I'm really interested in game development and I want to thank you so much for all the work you do. Thank you for this thought provoking videos you keep releasing. It's amazing how much I learn from them /gen. Thank you, sincerely. Much love from Latin America!
I think this is your best video. You really added something to the conversation here and argued it well.
Dude that Uhyeah elbow was hilarious. Down to the drawn character and even positioning on the screen.
i'm happy to hear you express passion and empathy towards developers! thank you for bringing up the mobbing, i think this is an important topic.
I feel like saying "Indie horror is dead" is just too negative and incorrect- I feel like people saying this are the same not noticing the cool and bad ass indie games showing up- dark deception being a good example.
i love omori alot too
People call everything 'dead' nowadays. Nothing's fucking 'dead'. Even when it frankly should be!
It's not dead, we're just getting an increasing push of the envelope of lack of corporate and ethical standards which is concerning.
It ain't dead its just asleep
This constraint and death grip by algorithms is effecting EVERY artistic pursuit for success. Music, film, videogames, etc… it’s bleeding us dry by forcing us to entertain to be seen, not CREATE to be appreciated. I hope more and more people start to become aware to this otherwise it will only get worse. Thank you so much for pointing this out in this field Sagan!
Can we just appreciate how much effort Sagan puts into his videos? The guy gives us full documentary-length, insanely good-quality videos every couple of weeks, and they're all SO rewatchable. Thank you Sagan - knocked it out of the park once again :) x
I love how much youve grown. I was part of that cringe kid fan base too and I remember some,of your videos because I was so certain that I needed to know the truth about this pizza place.
13:56 this picture is still fucking terrifying, i remember being a 10 year old kid going through all of these, and of course i was scared by the likes of jeff the killer or the rake, but when i came to this one, i immediately closed out of the website, and to this day, i STILL think this picture is by far the scariest to come out of the creepypasta craze, nowadays i laugh at something like jeff the killer, but i still get shivers down my spine when i see that russian sleep experiment picture
Fun fact about it, it’s just a cheap plastic Halloween prop on a bench in the snow
@@StrawberryBunnyBoba FR? Damn bro, had no idea, still scary af tho, props to whoever made that prop lol
fr. i literally could not look at it without wanting to cry and being extremely paranoid afterwards for like... ages
i still get extremely paranoid and add my possible psychosis onto that its not fun sbdbdj
It's so weird seeing what mascot horror is nowadays. I've been with it since FNAF 2, and fell off somewhere between Security Breach and Banban. I don't hate what we've gotten lately, I thought BATDR was really good, I just think the genre needs either new life brought into it, or a bit of a break so we can try rediscovering what made it so special in the first place. (I'm just glad DDLC isn't seen as mascot horror.)
I bring up DDLC mostly because it's been one of my favorite video games for the past four or five years now, and my favorite horror game ever.
for me, i honestly blame that shit hole of a game named “poppy playtime” for ruining it
that single shitty ass brang kids channels to mascot horror therefore it being exposed to the kids and therfore making sure mascot horror will be on it’s downfall
I mean… ddlc is often paired with these games within fanart and fan comics etc.
I've been around since the first FNaF game and seeing what mascot horror has turned into is kinda melancholy honestly and I hope we experience a mascot horror renaissance soon, also, hee ho
Ironically, my favorite horror games could be classified as “Mascot Horror”. Pony Island is literally “Cute Game is secretly evil”, and it did it in a wonderfully meta way. Inscryption even broke from this by starting off like it isn’t based off of a game with Leshy seeming like the main horror antagonist.
Dev here, and this honestly was an interesting read. We are releasing our own game here soon and excited about what we are debuting and while I would say we fall into this category to some degree, there are a lot of good points. At the very least, this really opens our eyes to the genre and while there are certainly problems with it, having a discussion be brought to the table is a good starting point and determining how we can go about telling stories is important.
I think this genre is here to stay, at least for a long time. Look at slasher films, they are a dime a dozen and yet people go back to them and myself as a dev admit I watch many of them including the cheezy horror films out there just because of its unique-non unique take on things. At the end of the day the work artists do is their own and a story to tell. The future is fascinating and regardless if market does well or not with them having a game a dev can look at and say 'hey I made something neat' in the end is great. Regardless if a game gets 1 like or a million, as long as the first like is by the creator I think its a win as long as the work is towards a positive goal.
It’s insane to me we’re the same age. The quality of your videos is phenomenal and you have such a good music taste! Awesome work putting together some genuinely excellent takes
this is so high quality and i remember when you first started the fnaf retrospectives. you just keep getting better man
I think the fact that like you said, Garten of Banban exemplified all of the negative aspects of this genre without providing something of benefit, does kinda give people a valid excuse to dunk on it. They don’t want it to become a standard. They don’t want it to become a norm. So they made an example of it. Of course that’s ignoring that There’s hundreds of horror game both better and worse that come out each month, hell it’s been like that before even FNAF with folks using cheap jumpscares to craft youtuber reaction bait. Its just incidental that it came out right when these feelings were all boiling over and reached an audience. While it’s not fun to put oneself in their shoes and imagine what it’s like to deal with that reaction… we don’t create things in a vacuum. This is the third video on this exact topic I’ve seen and it’s recapping the same timeline, the same points I’ve seen others do, for example. It’s impossible for a genre to die so long as someone has a combination of inspiration, motivation, and knowledge to create their vision. But if the bar is set so low, it won’t really matter.
honestly, I'm really *glad* that a lot of mascot horror stuff is repetitive and cringy, because when you find that one outlier, it makes it so much better. there are only so many original ideas in the world, and if people keep making those original ideas for every single game, there won't be any more room for originality. the ideas will run out. it'll all stop.
so despite hating content farms, i'm glad they exist. sure they're annoying, but it makes it all the better once you find the special original creation.
At 53:26, I was going to talk about my own experience with this exact problem. I've written stories (never shared them, though), I've made art, and, recently, I realized I wanted to make a game.
However, with the backlash Garten of BanBan received (and now recently learning that Amanda The Adventurer got similar treatment), I've been terrified with the thought of being laughed off the internet forever. Especially since my own horror story I've written is based off of popular mascot horror games like FNaF, BaTIM, Poppy Playtime, Tattletail, and the many other titles exploring the same idea. I'm almost tempted to create an entirely new identity just to see what would happen if I did end up making a game.
Sorry if this is unrelated, but I just wanted to talk about my personal experience with this!
omg i never thought i'd see a Sagan Hawkes crossover with John Wolfe but here we are!
18:49
yeah I remember watching Mark play it for the first time ever and him being confused as to why he couldn’t get up and walk around lol.,,. such good times fr.
The funny thing is that, when Slender (and later FNAF) came out, the horror niches I was in basically rolled their eyes at it as "crappy shovelware horror for kids" (for reference, Slender came out the summer before I went to college - I was very much outside of the target audience, and the horror streamers and LPers that I was into at the time had different tastes). There's definitely a cycle of people crapping on stuff that's popular with the younger crowd going on here, compounded by the fact that the Internet might as well be expressly engineered as a mean-spirited echo chamber.
One thing I find utterly fascinating about mascot horror, though, is that it's a genre almost entirely defined by non-gameplay elements (because, as you brought up in the video, many of the fans don't actually play the games themselves). So you get a lot of "mascot horror" games that are, mechanically, a pretty mediocre example of another horror subgenre (Security Breach totally fits within the same general genre as something like the Clocktower series, for example), which are then transformed by how they handle lore/their character design.
Which is actually something that I think is a problem for the genre - I feel like a lot of developers within the space start making mascot horror games because they love mascot horror games, and don't have much experience with horror games outside of that context (especially since a lot of other styles of horror game are increasingly inaccessible to young devs due to age or cost). Which, again, isn't the developers' fault... but boy howdy would I love to see what kind of mascot horror game someone would make after playing Fatal Frame.
Some indie horror projects I've been into:
> MOTHERED by Enigma Studios and its prequels and sequels. They're these fascinating and unsettling analogue horror pieces that touch on some pretty heavy philisophical topics.
> On the ABSOLUTE flip side, the Cursed trilogy by disastersquad2 are three splatterhouse horror point-and-click games with excellent atmosphere... despite using MS Paint graphics and a soundtrack made entirely up of music "borrowed" from other sources (it's a single-dev non-commercial project made over a decade plus, so that's not terribly surprising). It's not really for lore hounds, but it's a fun romp through a haunted house with a surprisingly solid story. The third game came out at around the same time that FAITH 3 did... and I think I liked Cursed 3 more.
> There are a TON of really good RPG Maker horror games (some of which are actually RPGs!) that most people haven't heard of. I'd suggest looking into Acai Corner, Dememorize, END ROLL, Mouth Sweet, Polixiuhs, and Weird And Unfortunate Things Are Happening, as well as oates's games like Nobody's Home and Sorry, We're Open. Honestly, hop onto rpgmaker.net and just take a look at their "horror" tag - you're bound to find something fun or interesting (I'm kinda fascinated by Ghost Suburb 0, but I don't know if I'd necessarily suggest it to people. It's.... aggressive).
That ending made me smile. Thanks Sagan. I’m one of those guys who likes to view the horror genre from afar so I am grateful for the window you provide.
53:30 hit me specially hard. I've been wanting to make a game for a long while, but I know that nobody makes a good game on their first try and I'm afraid that I will be harassed and mocked because of that. And before anyone comes at me, I know that constructive criticism is key for improving, but there's a difference between helpful advice and people being outright mean to you.
Mascot horror isn't dead let alone indie horror (We litteraly are getting a new amnesia game tommorow and it looks great) its just the faces of mascot horror don't give good represnation of quality and what the genre can bring, its the same problem first person shooters had in the 2010's, their was geuinely great shooters to come out of that time but the face of it being call of duty and battlefield, two series that basicaly started good and turned into cheap easy cash basically painted the entire genre at the time as one big old awful cynical mess. Poppy playtime and gartan of ban ban are the call of duty and battlefield of indie horror, cheap, easy cashgrabs with a bizzarely loyal fanbase even tho the deveoplers would probably push you infront of the train if it meant collecting a penny underneath you
I can’t say how glad I am I’ve found your channel like a year back. You’ve got some really original format of videos and you’re just genuinely smart. Your scripts are done very well and I seriously appreciate that and enjoy seeing a new video of yours be uploaded when I get up in the morning. Keep up with the great work man!
Banban LAUNCHED with a merch store and a preview for the sequel. Idk how anyone could say it wasn't made to scoop up mascot horror money from children. Should people not have done speedruns for refunds? Absolutely, but there was a reason it was singled out among all the garbage people could have just let go.
The standard isn't "Make good games or we'll shame you" its "Don't make a cash grab so insultingly obvious that people start to clown on you"
Sure, but having problems w/ a cheap/greedy product doesn’t justify permanently traumatizing the people that created it.
Like… that’s the actual issue here. It’s not about how overwhelming-to-the-point-of-dysfunction mass-criticism is, nor even how unnecessary & uncomfortable mass-dunking inevitably becomes - it’s that online clown shows like this do *irreparable harm* to real-life, flesh-&-bone human beings. Think what actually happens when you’ve been deemed an “ethical target” during an internet pile-on. Do you really believe the inappropriate conduct is limited to a couple of shitty speed-runs? Hate-stalkers; swatters & doxxers; e-drama (& other tabloid-like) clout-chasers… these are some of the most obvious, most *common* by-products of net mobs, but they only scratch the surface.
Please understand that “quality control” is not a good reason to spill blood. It just isn’t.
I think if people were going to go after I think it should’ve been Poppy. Banban is one of those things where it’s so bad that you can’t fully tell whether it’s a shitpost or not
@@bluecayser1498i think it's very obvious now that it's genuine and I think the game derseves all the hate it gets ,do agree that doxxing and screaming at the developers faces is childish and going way too far but a simple rant or harsh critical video is completely fine.
you don't get the point. obviously banban is bad and is a cash grab, however as Sagan said, had the devs continued making games avoiding that kind of thing, they wouldn't have seen any revenue. it's just how youtube works. make a game that doesn't play by its rules and you'll be buried under thousands of videos about a new game called "Binkley in the Factory" with shitty gameplay and the full set of tropes which is either praised or hated depending on whether or not the art direction is good
on a side note, i feel like this is a very hypocritical sentiment amongst the indie horror community considering that they have an open mind when it comes to Poppy Playtime, a game that's ACTUALLY maliciously monetized and isn't even that good, I'd even argue it comes close to being as bad as Garten of Banban (compare Pastraspec saying he hates Banban for being passionless and how people blew it up into the mainstream on a stream vs him literally making a video dedicated to poppy playtime) in terms of gameplay. Remember, one of the first things people criticised about the latter is the art direction, bland assets with poorly drawn characters. It's easy to come to the conclusion that most people don't mind the cash grab aspect or the cliches of ANY mascot horror game as long as the game is, not even good, pleasing to look at, which Garten of Banban with its inexperienced developers couldn't have possibly been
@@JaxxMCC I kinda get that but come on now persistents. I don't want to continue to compare fnaf and banban but look at Scott his games were failing for over 10 years he had every right to do what the banban developers were doing and chase a trend but he didn't he continued to try and try until he got his big break with fnaf.
DUDE i am so excited to hear you mention kitty horror show!! ANATOMY is one of my favorite indie horror games and KHS's other works are all so good as well!!
Hands down one the best videos you've made. The script was so flippin good and was sweet, informing, and to the point. The lighting and editing is getting so good too! Very spooky and fitting with the themes. Loved the little sketches for transitions ❤❤❤ definitely excited to see more 😊
These videos are always the best can’t wait to finish it!
Can I just this is one of my favorite channels to watch? Your vids are so entertaining, I've been getting into internet horror but scare easily so your videos make it super accessible for me lol. Love your videos man, keep up the good work!
Loving where your own work is at Sagan! Your video creation has evolved so much in the years since i started following you, you have so much to be proud of!!
DUDE!? you made that song at the beginning and it took me forever to find it but holy crap its good!???
Duck season is possibly the best of these. I love the connected universe of the stress level zero games. I also feel that poppy playtime has started to lean more towards the actual adult horror especially with the latest teaser videos. I think they heard the backlash of it being "just another kid friendly horror game" and decided to try harder.