Video Game / Mr. Hopp's Playhouse 2

As if one murderous creepy plush toy wasn't bad enough...

♫ Mr. Hopp just wants to play. Wants to play, wants to play.
Mr. Hopp just wants to play before he takes your soul away... ♫

Mr. Hopp's Playhouse 2 is a Prequel to the original Mr. Hopp's Playhouse which places you in the shoes of Ruby's late grandmother, Esther, as a young girl who one day receives three mysterious (and creepy-looking) plushies from a box of donated toys: Mr. Hopp, Mr. Stripes, and Miss Bo.

The game was announced in November 2019, and was released on June 14th, 2021. The teasers can be seen here and here and the official trailer here.

The game can be accessed on Steam.

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Mr. Hopp's Playhouse 2 contains examples of:

• The '50s: The game takes place during 1952.
• All There in the Manual: Dee's real name, Isabelle, is never directly revealed in the game. Instead, it could be found in the game's files or in the whispers during the third chapter of the game when played backwards.
  "My name... is Isabelle."
• And Your Reward Is Clothes: Using coins, you can purchase additional skins for Esther to wear.
• Anti-Frustration Feature:
  • If you beat the game without collecting all the medallions, the chapter select screen will show you the location of which chapter each of them are hidden in.
  • In the secret final chapter of the game, your health will automatically replenish each time you move on to the next room. For the boss fight, the game replenishes your health after you take down 2 of the amalgamation's heads.
• Art Evolution: The art style in the cutscenes is far more stylized compared to the first game.
• Bad Powers, Good People: The Six medallions provide the power to control the Entity, an embodiment of sin and evil, to whoever holds them (but also allows the Entity to control them if they're careless). While Isabelle in the backstory used them to kill people before being burned alive and corrupted by the entity upon her revival, when Esther gets her hands on them, she uses them to banish The Entity and its minions, saving everyone it has captured.
• Bait-and-Switch: In the bad ending, Esther manages to escape the manor all by herself, with the girl discovering the Mr. Hopp plushie right behind her afterward. She's understandably freaked out by this. But then...
  Esther: (giggles) Silly rabbit, you will catch a cold just sitting there...
• Big Bad Triumvirate: Mr. Hopp, Mr. Stripes, and Miss Bo haunt the Blacklands Manor orphanage and begin kidnapping the children, seeking out Esther in particular. It is later revealed, however, that they are merely The Heavy, with the Entity and Dee/Isabelle being the true villains.
• Big "NO!": The Entity cries this upon defeat.
• Bizarre Dream Rationalization: As somewhat of a textbook for her future granddaughter, Esther initially insists that the horrors surrounding the manor after the arrival of the dolls are simply just nightmares and tries to awake from them. It takes Isabelle's betrayal for her to snap out of it and decide to handle the problem herself.
• Building of Adventure: Esther goes on an adventure throughout the orphanage when Molly and Isaac go missing.
• Book Ends:
  • For the bad ending, the game begins and ends in a chase sequence.
  • For the true ending, the game begins and ends with Esther playing hide and seek with Molly and Isaac.
• Call-Forward:
  • At the beginning of the game, Esther is chased by a shadowy hand while jumping over shadowy obstacles, similar to the climax of the first game where Ruby is chased by Mr. Hopp's hand.
  • At the climax of the game before either one of the main endings occurs, Esther sees The Three Curses in the fiery dimension, coinciding with the creepy Easter Egg that can be found in the previous game (which this game is a prequel to) "Nana looked into the fires of Hell... and she saw me".
• Cassandra Truth:
  • Molly writes off Esther's repeated nightmares as a sign that she must be going crazy. If anything, this serves as a Call-Forward to how the latter dies of insanity as an old woman prior to the start of the first game.
  • Isaac guesses that Esther's repeated nightmares have a meaning behind them, which eventually becomes true as the plot progresses.
• Catapult Nightmare: Esther has recurring terrifying visions of Mr. Hopp among other things that serves as Foreshadowing to the plot later on.
• Character Portrait: A new addition for when characters are speaking show a portrait of who is talking at the moment.
• Chekhov's Gun: "The Six" medallions that Esther constantly see in her nightmares. If you collect all of them by the end of the last dream sequence, they send Esther to the true final chapter, the underworld and form a necklace that allows Esther to dispel the Entity’s minions, including the amalgam of the Three Curses, Isabelle, and the Entity itself before banishing them altogether... for a time.
• Controllable Helplessness:
  • At the beginning of the game within her nightmare, Esther is chased by a shadowy hand that is impossible to escape from. You can't outrun it no matter what you do.
  • Played With during the face-off against Dee/Isabelle. While you do need to mash the button to avoid being killed when she has Esther at her mercy, there's nothing that can stop her from performing the ritual on Esther as she sends her to the future.
• Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: If you screw up, after getting a failure message, you can pick up right from where you left off. You do lose your recently collected coins if you haven't finished the chapter, however.
• Distant Finale: The good and bad endings both take place 67 years after the plight at the orphanage.
• Doomed by Canon: Given her fate in the first game, Mr. Hopp will find Esther, as she will give him to Ruby and eventually die of insanity no matter what ending you get.
• Dreaming of Things to Come: Esther repeatedly has the same dreams involving Mr. Hopp before she even gets him. Furthermore, it also involves a vision of Isabelle being burned alive alongside "the six" medallions, which is crucial to the storyline later on.
• Endless Running Game: One minigame has Esther jumping and ducking from obstacles as Mr. Hopp chases her.
• Evil Matriarch: There are subtle hints that Miss Beverley has some knowledge about what's going on, as upon Isaac's and Molly's disappearance she has other matrons spread the story that the two are simply hiding while she actually has them locked in a closet, and one of the letters has her warning matrons to catch Esther and bring her to the cellar if they see her roaming around. We never see the full scope of what was she up to, as she's killed by Mr. Hopp after she locks Esther in the cellar.
• Evil Sounds Deep: The Entity has a fittingly deep voice for a demon.
• Foregone Conclusion: We already know that Esther will somehow survive this ordeal and pass Mr. Hopp down to her future granddaughter many, many years later. And as such, this also means that Esther will be unable to fully escape from Mr. Hopp's terror no matter what ending you get, which will lead to her eventual death by insanity after she gives her the toy under the manipulation of The Entity.
• Gone to the Future: After a little struggle against Isabelle, Esther is briefly sent to the future where she is trapped in soon-to-be Ruby's house, with Isabelle constantly trying to break her down over there and Mr. Hopp is on the loose to catch her.
• Have a Nice Death: If you get caught by an enemy, or if you make too much noise, or killed by a trap, a black screen will display this message in red:
  YOU WERE CAUGHT/TOO LOUD/YOU DIED
  TRY AGAIN
• Hell Is That Noise: Mr. Hopp's iconic jingle accompanied by a static noise mixed with whirring of toys and distorted laughter of children, warning you that he or one of his friends is nearby.
• Killed Mid-Sentence: When Beverley is chewing out Esther for her supposed misbehavior after locking the latter in the cellar, a giant Mr. Hopp hand suddenly appears, crushes her in his fist, and snatches her away just as she is about to finish her rant.
• Killer Teddy Bear: The titular antagonist, as usual — and this time, Mr. Hopp's got some friends with him...
• Living Motion Detector: During one certain section, a giant version of the plushie's head will come into view in open space and you will be tasked "Do not move".
• Multiple Endings: There are four endings: one bad ending, one good ending, one Non-Standard Game Over and one joke ending.
  • Bad Ending: After getting chased around the orphanage, Esther finds herself in the bedroom. The Entity is there waiting for her, and despite her best attempts to get away, Esther is caught right as she makes it outside. Esther wakes up in the rain, seemingly forgetting the events of the game, and finds her way to a family who takes care of her. After a 67 year time skip, a news report plays, describing how the other inhabitants of the orphanage disappeared without a trace before a final Jump Scare. The player is then told to "Find The Medallions".
  • True Ending: If Esther can find the Six by the time she would normally get the bad ending, the floor breaks, sending Esther into the Underworld, and after fighting off the final form of the dolls and The Entity, everyone is returned to the orphanage safe and sound. However, as the years pass, Esther finds herself stalked by the Entity again and is eventually manipulated by him to give Mr. Hopp to her granddaughter, setting up the events of the first game.
  • Escape Ending: Esther decides Screw This, I'm Out of Here! and runs away from the orphanage. "Smart girl."
  • Joke Ending: Esther finds the Magic Conch, asks it what to do, and gets the same answer it usually gives: "Nothing". Esther listens "for the Shell had spoken".
• Nostalgia Level: A Call-Forward variety. Late in the game, Esther ends up trapped in Ruby's house from the first game as Mr. Hopp and Isabelle lurks around in the darkness.
• Origins Episode: In addition of exploring Esther's past, the game showcases on how Mr. Hopp came to be and why he ends up terrorizing Ruby in the future.
• Orphanage of Fear: The setting takes place at Blacklands Manor Orphanage, where things become much more dangerous with the introduction of the three creepy plushies.
• Pendulum of Death: Shadowy swinging pendulums are a common obstacle that Esther will have to avoid.
• Pink Girl, Blue Boy: Besides Mr. Hopp wearing blue pants, there is Mr. Stripes wearing a blue tie and Miss Bo with a pink bow, pink pants, and pink markings.
• Prequel: The game takes place in the POV of a young Esther (aka the late grandmother of Ruby from the first game).
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: Out of Esther's friends, Isaac is more level-headed compared to Molly.
• Revision: According to David's tapes in the first game, Mr. Hopp is a knitted doll created by Esther as a gift to Ruby. But this game reveals that Esther is actually the original owner of Mr. Hopp and the reason she gave it away to Ruby in the first place is because it's heavily implied that she's manipulated by the Entity to do so and likely come up with that claim.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: You can escape from the orphanage and the Entity without rescuing anybody; doing this will net you either the bad ending or a Non-Standard Game Over depending on how you escape.
• Shout-Out: Quite a few of them that also count as Easter Eggs.
  • There is a minigame called "Hoppy Bird".
  • The way you earn "the six" medallions by playing special stages is quite similar to the classic Sonic the Hedgehog games with their chaos emeralds. You even need to collect them all to get the true ending. Furthermore, the way the medallions float in mid-air before sending Esther into the underworld is reminiscent to the first game's true ending.
  • The Joke Ending is a big one to SpongeBob SquarePants, specifically, the Magic Conch episode.
  • The official YouTube channel video for the Hopp Horde theme has a comment by the uploader that says “Hopp Eternal”, openly comparing the rock song to the Doom Eternal soundtrack.
  • Interacting with every plant in the house and then going to the last plant will greet you with a large crate; jumping on it will have Esther jump over it several times as wumpa fruits come out of it with every bounce until it breaks.
• The Smurfette Principle: The evil team consists of the female Miss Bo besides the male Mr. Hopp and Mr. Stripes.
• Stealth-Based Game: Not only you still have to jump over toys and hide from the monsters, but you also have to hide in cabinets to avoid being seen by patrolling matrons.
• The Stinger: After the credits roll in the true ending, there is a shot of Esther giving Mr. Hopp to Ruby while the Entity looms right behind the former, manipulating her actions.
• Temporary Platform: There is a section where, when you have to get across a gap, you'll need to time your jumps on the black hand platforms before they can close upon you.
• Town with a Dark Secret: The town of Blacklands apparently has some dark history shrouding it.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change:
  • To collect all "the six" medallions, you need to find their silhouette hidden throughout the game and play a special stage where Esther is facing one of The Three Curses in a challenge course and will reward you with one of the medallions upon completion.
  • In the hidden final chapter, the underworld, the game introduces a combat system in the form of a light blast from the six medallions to fend off against the incoming shadow creatures. It all caps off in a boss battle against The Amalgamation.
• The Very Definitely Final Dungeon: There are two, depending on whether you are on the bad or true end route, which is branched from the final area in a nightmare resembling the original game's setting, Ruby's house, where Esther must collect three keys and follow Isabelle while avoiding Mr. Hopp:
  • In the bad route, a final chase with the Entity occurs as Esther needs to escape the orphanage that is now infested with the shadow creatures.
  • In the true route, Esther falls into The Underworld, the Hell equivalent. The level consists of various rooms Esther must traverse while watching out for traps and unlocking doors by finding torches and putting them in the correct spots. She also needs to fight against mooks via a newly-introduced combat system where she can shoot a circle of light around her by using "the six" medallions.
• Visibility Meter: This has been upgraded to an actual volume meter that will either increase or decrease depending on how much noise you make. That said, some scenarios don't require you to be sneaky.
• What the Hell, Hero?: In the bad ending, the Entity calls Esther out on abandoning her friends.

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