Tear Jerker / Poppy Playtime

As a Moments subpage, all spoilers are unmarked as per policy. You Have Been Warned.

The halls of the Playtime Co. factory are filled with sad moments. From the tragic backstory of Playtime Co's fall and the fate of certain characters, you're bound to feel sad at some point.

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Chapter 1: A Tight Squeeze

• The basic plot in general is quite sad. Years ago, the factory closed due to some horrible accident, and the protagonist, after ten years, shows back up because "someone" is still there. And, judging by the note in that game, those people were children.

Chapter 2: Fly in a Web

• Poppy Playtime's original ending, Dummied Out but still in the game's files. She feels a tremendous amount of guilt for all the pain that happened in the factory. Even worse, she knows she was the cause of it.
• Mommy's sad remembrance of the game factory. She mourned watching the children go. Even further, she was the closest thing they had to a mother. And she was left all alone. The actress does a masterful job describing her mournfulness.
• While Mommy Long Legs' death has a pretty disturbing amount of nightmare fuel, there's something heart-wrenching where she is screaming in despair and agony about the fact once she dies, she would be a part of The Prototype, signaling the fact she deeply fears for his intentions. Considering Mommy was once a young orphan named Marie Payne, you might really feel sorry for the girl that has gone through so much pain in all these years...

Chapter 3: Deep Sleep

• During the puzzle missions inside Home Sweet Home, you can spot Kissy Missy in a small room just... sitting there and looking a picture of a little girl who's most likely either the child she used to be or a friend of hers from before her transformation. It does an excellent job of emphasizing the fact Kissy isn't a vicious beast like Huggy or a creepy schemer like Mommy, but a child who's terrified of what she's become and the horrors she's witnessed at such a young age.
• While most of the Smiling Critters cutouts are disturbing, the Bobby BearHug cutout... not so much. She tells the player just how much she loves them, eventually quietly admitting she's "completely lost" without them. It then becomes about how she was abandoned a long time ago and she grows increasingly desperate for someone to take her with them. Most of these living toys were made from orphans...
  Bobby BearHug: [cutout] You won't leave me, will you?
  • Even the disturbing ones have a sad undertone to them:
  • Kickin' Chicken abruptly reveals he's never been outside. And then you remember that all those orphans were kept underground, and weren't even allowed to leave Playcare for an excursion. And even worse because Chapter 1 revealed children could be brought to playcare as young as two months, so it's possible that many of the orphans would actually have no memories of being outside, or know what it would be like.
  • DogDay is a lot like his Bigger Bodies part, telling us to leave in a tone of voice that implies that he's trying to save us while accepting that he can't be saved.
  • Hoppy Hopscotch very much wants to jump to the moon, which is cute at first but then she gets more obsessed with it. Nightmare Fuel suggested that this was a suicide pact or maybe "the moon" was representative of the outside, like with Kickin', but whatever she meant, her desperation is implied to be what got her killed.
• DogDay's Face–Monster Turn. We find DogDay inside the play house, chained up and has the lower half of his body torn off by CatNap (and judging by the tone of his voice, he is clearly in pain). He then reveals that he's the last of the Smiling Critters, meaning that the others got slaughtered by CatNap. And then, the Smiling Critter plushies start taking over his body, with him telling the player to run and get as far away from him as possible.
  DogDay: You... You're Poppy's angel. Come to save us. Nothing left to save, not here... You're in CatNap's home, angel. Their home. A million pairs of eyes are on you now. Watching, waiting, hungry. They want nothing more than to crawl beneath your skin and eat away at you bit by little bit, fill what is empty inside themselves. That...thing...CatNap. The Prototype is his God and this is what he does to heretics. These little toys follow CatNap to avoid that very fate, and in return, they are fed. (pants) We tried to fight it, the Prototype's control. I'm... the last of the Smiling Critters. Listen to me, you need to get out of this place. You need to live! You and Poppy can fix this, end this madness, the torment, the— Oh, no. OH, NO! (the Smiling Critter plushies start to take over) Leave me! Please! JUST GO! RUN!!!
• CatNap's death. Something made abundantly clear both prior to and during Chapter 3 is that CatNap was once a young orphan named Theodore Grambell. The Prototype was his "imaginary friend", using him to arrange an escape from the factory, only for Theo to be injured in the attempt. The Prototype gained Theo's undying loyalty after taking him to the Playcare's counselors for medical attention that led to him becoming CatNap. However, after the boss fight ends with CatNap burned and beaten, how does the Prototype reward his loyal servant? By stabbing him through the head. After that, he takes his body with him to an unknown place.
  • It gets worse when you realize that CatNap saw it coming. When the Prototype's hand shows up, he shuffles back away from it, clearly expecting punishment for failing to kill the player. He only moves closer after the Prototype offers him a hand up, but it's just to lure CatNap close enough to stab.
    • Look closely at CatNap's body language as he approaches the Prototype. His palms are turned upward under the claw, not downward as one would when reaching for a hand at that angle. This gesture is most commonly used in prayer. CatNap offers himself willingly as a final act of worship.
• Poppy's recounting of the massacre at Playtime Co. after showing the protagonist the "Hour of Joy" tape. Despite not having seen it due to being locked in her case, she recalls everything she heard on that horrible day in vivid, disturbing detail, and is on the verge of tears the further she goes.
  Poppy: I remember hearing every moment of it. It went on so long… so agonizingly long. They tried to hide… to run… anything to stay alive… I remember their cries: "What's going on?"… "Why is this happening?"… "What are those things?" (sniffles) Senseless slaughter, that's all it really was. They killed everyone. The guilty, the innocent, didn't matter. All that death… it didn't fix anything. And then, once it was all over, they dragged those corpses down below where they'd never be found. And they… ate the bodies… to stay alive. The Prototype has to die. For this. For everything.
• The ending of Chapter 3 is this mixed with Nightmare Fuel. As you and Poppy begin to descend further into the depths of the facility with the intent on stopping Prototype once and for all, Poppy assures Kissy Missy that they'll send the elevator back up once the two of you reach your destination. However, once the elevator goes down a certain depth... trashing, monstrous roaring and Kissy Missy's horrified screams can be heard above, causing Poppy to panic as she realizes her friend is in trouble, and tries to get the elevator back up only for something to have the hatch closed shut on both of you. Poppy's screams as you're powerless to help Kissy is heartbreaking.
  Poppy: What? …What's she doing? …This isn't- (hears the screams and realizes what's happening) No, no no… NO! We're coming! Just hold on! C'mon, c'mon! Go faster! KISSY!

General

• Elliot Ludwig's whole purpose for the toy factory. He lost someone really important to him.
• Some of the content in the VHS tapes can be quite upsetting to some people.
• Though it can be unnerving at times, in "RESTRICTED_restoration.mp4", watching an innocent employee named Thomas Clark who just wanted to keep living after being diagnosed with lung cancer, only to be attacked by one of the hostile toys can make you feel bad for the poor guy, like how Dawko was when he reacted to the tape. Sure he may have worked with the company for their terrible experiments but still.
• This is for when Playtime Co. was still in business: imagine you're a very young child who lost their family and is all alone. One day, you're told that you're moving to another orphanage, only this one's in a toy factory. Sounds like a dream come true, right? Unfortunately, instead of being adopted by new parents, you're left at the mercy of cruel scientists who perform horrible experiments on you for the sake of making new toys. They got their inventions, you got robbed of not only your childhood, but also your humanity and life.
• Aside from the intimidating Bigger Bodies Bunzo Bunny that serves Mommy Long-Legs, there are two other smaller toy-sized Bunzo Bunnies who make appearances, and both of them show no apparent malice and meet awful fates. One of them is depicted in drawings he made to recount his own situation in which he, while hunting for eggs for Easter, ended up accidentally crushing a real bird egg, to his own horror. He then abruptly fell into an unexplained dark deep hole in the floor and was trapped at the bottom of it, injured and alone with nobody answering his cries for help, for over half a month. He cried for days, and apparently died down there, possibly of starvation. The other small Bunzo is seen in-game through a crack in one of the walls; they are trying to run through a room teeming with dangerous red smoke, and it's not going well. They gasp for breath, topple over onto their face while twitching awfully, and are then scooped up by the monstrous CatNap without warning and spirited away, never to be seen again.
• CG5's song "Sleep Well" and it's two music videos. The song gives the perspective of the experiments, with the lyrics explaining that the toys rose up against the company to free themselves, only to now realize they couldn't live normal lives outside the factory, and deciding a self-imposed containment within the factory was better than living in cages under the yoke of Playtime Co.
  We just wanted to heal, but now our nightmares are real
  And now we'll never wake up, for we've torn apart
• One particular example from Mob Entertainment's music video. CatNap is scratching a recreation of a drawing he made of himself and the Prototype back when he was human into the floorboards of Home Sweet Home. He's clearly saddened by his situation and the fact that he can't be who he once was anymore. Crosses over with Heartwarming when the Prototype puts a comforting hand on his shoulder.
  • Some moments in Mob Entertainment's video that look cute such as Bunzo happily clinging onto Mommy's back and the Prototype comforting CatNap end up as this when in the games Mommy and the Prototype would end up killing Bunzo and CatNap respectively.
  Though life in the shadows isn't much
  It's better than living in a cage
• A glimpse of Poppy is seen during the hour of joy where a wall covered in blood splatters is behind her, she's powerless to stop anything, looks traumatized and is barely holding back her tears. We also see a shot of the glass case she was trapped in, implying she was imprisoned shortly after.
• There are several shots of Huggy peacefully spending time with Kissy Missy. It's sweet learning Huggy had a softer side, but then you remember what happened to him, even though the player really had no choice, Kissy probably missed him and assuming she didn't get a chance to learn what happened, she was probably worried sick about him during gameplay.
• Assuming the music video's events can be taken as canon, it makes the game's current situation even sadder. From how the video and the lyrics frame things, the Hour of Joy was the toys uprising to free themselves from slavery by Playtime Co. Even if not all the toys agreed with it, it's still somewhat understandable. The contrast with the current situation in the factory implies that the toys still lived peacefully in the factory after the Hour of Joy, but when the food ran short, some of the Bigger Bodies turned on the smaller toys they fought for, and even other Bigger Bodies.

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