Where Is Poppy Playtime Going with the Factory?

by Rian

This piece has been sitting in the back burner for some time now. The Chapter 1, though it had some fancy gadgets for a toy factory, it stayed a toy factory (with theme) with toy monsters. Compare that to what is going on in current chapters, the players are well past the point of factory floors. In fact, few assembly lines we do see in Chapter 5 don’t resemble anything like the special toy factory we had seen on the surface.

Playtime Co. is seen as a successful toy company, making TV commercials and sometimes hitting news for its massive recalls in the intro cinematic and VHS tapes we can find. The premise behind the BBI, a corporate project to make toy monsters, is to cut costs — specifically, labor cost. In a way, this was the justification even Portal had used. Likewise, Aperture from Portal had an explanation for going deep. Cave Johnson, a successful entrepreneur had bought a salt mine, which later housed the self-sustaining megastructure that is Aperture Science. Playtime didn’t buy a salt mine. Its only justification for an underground city thus far was for an on site orphanage. An underground biomedical industrial complex is something Resident Evil pulled off, but even Umbrella had a long backlog of company history and products to justify its mansions. And Umbrella didn’t make zombies to save costs.

In fact, the factory itself is the most untenable. Aperture had a nuclear reactor, an assembly line for its products, robots for maintenance and security, and a sophisticated AI to govern them. In Portal 2, the player sees the facility quite literally waking up from slumber, slowly being repaired, destroyed again, and then further expanding in the DLC. The facility was its own character. Whereas in the Playtime factory, the complex is simply sitting in ruin. When the player is in the Playtime factory, everything is static. Nothing is in motion. All the gaps in the walls and HAVC, they all conveniently lead to the next area. It’s like a haunted house in a theme park. It looks deserted on the outside, but it is fully functioning inside, serving the real purpose of scaring people.

Playtime, or better yet, Poppy Playtime, thrives on characters’ incompetence. I’m not arguing characters from other scientists characters were infallible: Aperture failed, InGen failed, Umbrella failed, they all failed. However, part of the fun is on how they still failed: Aperture and morality core, InGen and lysine contingency, Umbrella with its weird obsession over self-destructing labs. As far as I know, Playtime didn’t have any fail-safes. The Prototype was known to manipulate machineries, but everything in the factory was electrical. The end results of BBI were expected to have at least human-level intelligence with strength and dexterity equivalent of human labor, but for the failsafe, the only method which the company used was simply the sleeping gas. Why is it an industrial complex with a prison does not have defenses against a prison breakout?

As it stands, Playtime doesn’t have to be set operating in 1990s America. It could be set in some space stations 200 years in distance future orbiting Earth. I doubt it would make any meaningful differences had Hour of Joy occurred on the Gateway Station. The factory is a set piece. It’s not there to tell a story. It’s to support the narrative of toy haunting an employee in a series of industrial settings. It’s hard to be afraid of cardboard facades, when we know it’s empty in the inside. There won’t be a moment like “this is the part where I kill you” with the Prototype, not because he can’t, but because he is not given a solid environment to tinker with. For an antagonist who can make a laser pointer out of an alarm clock, he is at quite the disadvantage, albeit only in meta.