Charlie and Friends

A fun FNAF-inspired short game with its own twist and a rather accessible ARG-adjacent aspect! What leaps out at you right away is the design of the characters’ monster forms. Not only are they really interesting, but also easily set themselves apart from animatronics by having a distinctly more fleshy and eldritch appearance to them instead of a robotic one. The art style has a cute kind of simplicity to it, which on the one hand makes sense as the characters are supposed to be from a children’s franchise yet on the other hand it unfortunately takes away from their visual scariness. However this is not too much of an issue as the main horror can be found in the story instead with the exception of the faces in the dark as those are quite unsettling. The sound design is really well done too with the levels mostly having no background music only background noises emphasizing the sounds of the characters approaching. This is both functional as well as adding to the atmosphere. Something that stood out to me in particular in terms of style is the tutorial being depicted as a VHS recording with both its filter and its old-timey soundtrack. Perhaps it would have been cool to have that VHS effect throughout the entire game, though I understand why it wasn’t used in the levels as that might also have the potential to become straining for the eyes. The gameplay is mostly completing minigames while keeping an eye out for the characters. This is done quite competently with the minigames not being too difficult while still providing enough challenge when combined with having to keep the characters in check. The amount of refills you get for your method of defence, a spray bottle, is pretty generous as I usually only needed half of them at most. What brings the well-balanced difficulty here is taking time to refill the spray bottle ever so often and making sure to not run out at inconvenient times. The majority of the story is found in some hidden gameplay and the game’s files with little to nothing being provided in the main gameplay mode other than at the very end. The voice over in each level pertains to tutorial messages without further chitchat. Though I mentioned ARG-adjacent material it’s not quite an ARG from what I could figure out, more so it just has a few things to look at outside of the actual game. Technically this is more in line with the definition of the term Easter egg, but that evokes a sense of optionality which I don’t really see here either. Anyway this extra material consists of a hidden gameplay mode, some text files and one video, all of those having a few sentences written in Morse code and one in binary. It’s not as many sentences as to overstay their welcome either. It was great fun decoding them, especially with how you start to get familiar with Morse code by the second or third one! I do believe I even learned some this way, particularly recurring and easier letters like ". E", "- T" and ".- A". While it is entirely possible that I have missed something that leads further down the rabbit hole, I think there has deliberately been some room left for a continuation of some sort with many questions remaining unanswered, such as: [spoiler]What is the book of creation?[/spoiler] [spoiler]Who's Mary?[/spoiler] [spoiler]What happened with Agent Riza?[/spoiler] The only negative thing I noticed was Survival mode being a bit buggy when it came to doing tasks quickly. Some examples would be the Report minigame progress resetting entirely when picking up the spray-bottle after refilling it or the cleaning minigame flat-out breaking. Still as this is only a problem in Survival mode and not the story relevant mode this is not too much of an issue just a bit unfortunate. TLDR: What is even more unfortunate is how little attention this game gets. It is a really good game and it’s completely free too! Not too difficult but not too easy either with out-of-game components that are very accessible and fun to decode even for an amateur in the field such as myself.