YMMV / My Friendly Neighborhood

• Accidental Aesop:
  • While the main lesson of the game is about being nice and respecting one another, an equally valid lesson could be "never leave any minor or childish character without adult supervision". This is what led to the puppets in the current behaving as they do, they were left alone to watch TV and they were mentally broken by how "mean" the outside world was during wartime, and it eventually led to the creation of the Unfriendly Neighborhood.
  • "Materialism is not the ideal way to happiness". It's telling in the "Bad" Ending which happens if Gordon does not take the time to help the puppets with their issues and just beelines towards his main goal of disabling the antenna. Sure, Gordon saves his job and even receives a promotion along with all the benefits but his PTSD and issues are still lingering beneath the surface.
• Anti-Climax Boss: The Amalgamuppet, the Final Boss of the game, is a very simplistic fight. It's fairly slow, the few melee attacks it has are easily avoided and it doesn't have much health either. You don't even need to defeat it, since all that's required to win is to flip the emergency lockdown switch and run around until the exit gate opens. It doesn't help that while the Unfriendly Neighbors are explained, the Amalgamuppet just seems to exist to give the game a final boss.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The curtain creature that you fight while trying to exit the offices after getting the front door key. It has absolutely ZERO build-up or foreshadowing, looks like a wall of bubblegum with multiple eyes and big lips, attacks you by spitting out puppet carcasses, and after you defeat it, it flies out the window, never to be seen again.
• Crosses the Line Twice: Practically everything the puppets say in their rambling crosses it several times over. They'll do such things as explaining how to eat your own hands, describing a time when they beat up a friend before randomly making up, and commanding kids to smash open their TVs, all in an incredibly dopey voice while waving their arms around like a madman.
  • One of the best examples of this is in one of Junebug's lines, where she mimics a phone call to a 'Mr. Wallace' and gives a lesson about being honest.
  Junebug: Now I know what to say to him... You're ugly, you're boring, you're untalented, you're unpopular, you're useless, you're unintelligent, you're frustrating! YOU'RE NOT MY FRIEND! See? When someone calls, just tell them the truth!
• Disappointing Last Level: After spending the entire game trying to reach the antenna on top of the MFN tower, the game's climax takes place in an abandoned underground studio that Gordon happens to fall into after shutting off the broadcast. While the Unfriendly Neighborhood is an interesting idea, setting up a proper horror scenario by giving you a flashlight to tread through a place filled with puppets that went completely insane after witnessing the cruelty of the world, the area is extremely short. All it consists of is one singular curved corridor that you are chased through, followed by a very easy Final Boss.
• Friendly Fandoms: With Welcome Home, since both involve horror takes on Sesame Street-esque puppet shows whose characters have similar design cues that launched in the same year.
• Game-Breaker: Junebug in Neighborhorde mode (essentially this game's version of Resident Evil's The Mercenaries mode). Her only weapon is The Conclusion with infinite ammo. She may start out as a Mighty Glacier, but just a few chocolate bars turn her into a Lightning Bruiser.
• Genius Bonus: At one point, an uninteractable note features upside-down text which, upon rotation, is revealed to be a section of the Confessions of Saint Augustine regarding the presence of good even in evil things or people. Topical!
  "For corruption injures, but unless it diminished goodness, it could not injure. Either then corruption injures not, which cannot be; or which is most certain, all which is corrupted is deprived of good."
• Informed Wrongness: A lot of notes and newspaper clippings are clearly meant to paint the cynical, selfish adults as in the wrong, but a lot of them make genuine good points. One note from a concerned mother notes that morals from the show like "Always put others before yourself" might be a bad moral to teach as it lacks nuance and opens the impressionable young audience up for being taken advantage of, while a newspaper article reflecting on the war points out that the noble, selfless purposes that said war was fought for turned out to be nothing but lies used to justify the horrors being committed. It's hard to fault the people of the city for abandoning vague "friendliness" in favor of living for themselves after such an event.
• Just Here for Godzilla: Fans of Arlo came in droves when it was revealed that he would be voicing a character in the game.
• Ugly Cute: Pearl the giant bird, especially during the cutscene where Gordon gives her eyes and glasses back to her.
• Woobie Species: The sentient puppets that once starred in the titular show have had it rough since the studio was abandoned. A combination of isolation and witnessing the worst of humanity via television has driven practically all of them insane, leaving them constantly babbling incoherent nonsense to themselves and unknowingly attacking Gordon when he approaches. A few of them even talk about wishing they had friends other than the other puppets they're stuck with.

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