Reviews with content warning for Child death - Lally's Game

Reviews tagging 'Child death'

Lally's Game by Andrea Waggener, Kelly Parra, Scott Cawthon

3 reviews

melsage1823's review against another edition

dark mysterious sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.5

A Scrambled Mess Of Short Stories With Only A Few Good Bits.

For this collection being the start of a new series connected to the Pizza Plex games its very disappointing. This collection doesn't do anything to feel fresh or distance itself from the previous Fazbear Frights book. It all ends up feeling hollow. I enjoyed Fraitily and The First Mimic Epilogue but apart from that there's not much to praise. I'd still recommend giving it a go but I didn't like it too much.

From this book alone you can tell the writers are burnout fron having to write 12 Fazbear Frights books. The passion to create genuine authentic horror short stories has been lost. I saw no passion in the stories I was reading especially in the last two stories and it felt way too vague. I don't want stories that solve the lore but I also don't want stories where I can barley understand what's happening. Its a shame that the only bit in the book that was written with genuine passion was the mimic Epilogue.

Unfortunately as much as it pains me to say I only have two positives about this novel as all the stories were very hard to get through. Sorry fnaf fans, this is just my opinion.

First for those who have lost loved ones to cancer please don't read the short story Under Construction it turns Cancer into this mass horror story which is so ableist, harmful and disrespectful. The idea of being lost in the world of vr without being able to tell is horrific and had so much wasted potential. Its like the writers spun a bizzare wheel to come up with the most creative villian they could. Cancer and Jelly babies aren't villians. The writer's wether it was their attention or not should be ashamed of themselves. The story whilst interesting made me very uncomfortable and not at all in the well written horror way. Call me woke, call me a snowflake I don't care it was completely unesssacary.

Secondly I mentioned it before but I felt like all the stories were very dry and style. This also happened in some of the Fazbear Frights stories. It's like the authors can't decide between appealing to middle grade or ya readers and its getting quite annoying as it means that some parts of the story become an absolute annoyance. We're in the fnaf universe I'm here to read tense thrilling horror not someone having dinner and sleeping. The repetive parts of some of the story just get annoying. Lallys Game would have been so much better if the writer's came up with a better way to hide the doll.

Finally the tone. This collection did a really weird thing where it forgot that it was suppose to be a collection of horror short stories minus the Epilogue. It tried to do psychological horror but failed as a result it had all the stories having very sanitised horror with Fraitily's horror only coming through thanks due to it's similarities to Stephen King's Carrie. I sat their puzzled and confused at what I was reading. Horror shouldn't be sanitised down and unfortunately apart from the Epilogue this collection does that. I meant it when I say the Epilogue and Fraitily are the only things worth reading from the collection.

Now with that on the way I do have some elements I liked. For one I like how Lallys Game and Under Construction remembered that they were in a collection about the pizzaplex. Fazbear Frights for some reason went way outside the bounds of the fnaf world, so it makes a change that this series wants to actually connect some of its stories to the Pizza Plex.

First I have to praise the pacing of all the stories in the collection. Fazbear Frights massively suffered from pacing issues and often had uneven poorly fleshed out stories that would have been better as a full story where as Fraitily, Lallys Game and Under Construction are all the perfect length so that despite its flaws you don't lose interest as easily. The stories don't drag on and end at the exact points that they need too. Although the Epilogue is shorter it too is paced really well that we even have a good three act structure squished in. I hope other collections keep this up.

Finally I also have to praise the Epilogue. The first Mimic one has hooked me to the point I want to read all 8 even if I don't like the short stories. Not only does Mimic Epilogue 1 set up the other Mimic Epilogues really well it also is super suspenseful and has a good structure. It reminded me of a black mirror episode. It also wasn't vauge with the audience and was written where you understood what was going on but still didn't have all the answers. The story was also actually engaging and scary as all good horror content should be. Nothing was sanitised in the story which benefited a lot. It props up a collection with some mid stories.

Overall not a good start but a good attempt. I'd say though that it's only worth picking up if your a devoted fan and are interested in the Mimic Epilogues.

My overall rating of this anthology collection would be 3.5 stars. My individual rating would go as followed.

Fraitily: 4 Stars (Slow Burn but its a good sequel to To Be Beautiful from Frights 1)
Lallys Game: 3.5 Stars(Intresting Plot With Sanitised And Boring Horror)
Under Construction: 3 Stars (A basic vr story with wasted potential that thinks turning Cancer into a horror thing is okay)
Mimic Epilogue 1: 5 Stars (A fantastic Epilogue that perfectly sets up the twisted nature of the Mimic)

Content Warnings

smolone13's review

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dark mysterious sad tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? N/A
Loveable characters? N/A
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A

5.0

Lally's Game is a combination of three short stories consisting of the same thing, robotic children, in good Scott Cawthon fashion. Between all the three stories, they were all individually creepy in their own way.

This story was a little more terrifying than I thought it was going to be. The first was a robotic girl killing herself, the second a hide-and-seek robot, and the last was on a girl stuck in an AR simulation that she can't escape and ends up fused to it.

Content Warnings

Graphic: Cancer, Child death, and Death

Moderate: Grief, Pandemic/Epidemic, and Death of parent

Minor: Car accident

Robot children anyone? This is all this book was and it was honestly creepy. I haven’t read the rest of the books that were in the series, I just decided to pick this up because I fell in love with the pizzaplex game. The first little short story is about a girl who is helping other kids but in the process she is actually killing herself. Each time she heals a kid, she starts coughing up these robotic parts. It’s a gift and a curse at the same time because she can’t help herself. She works part-time at a hospital at the children’s wing as well. She first saves a kid that is dying on the side of the road. She then tries to live a normal life but finds a kid in the hospital and gives them a piece of her life. Afterwards, she starts hanging out with a kid in her class and is experiencing a lot of turmoil. While she wants to save people, she knows it is limited and that she can’t live a life for herself. Her last piece of life is given to a child in the hospital wing and that’s the last time she’s seen as she turns into a pile of metal parts. The second story is a little darker. A couple is about to get married near the man’s family home. They’re excited and getting rid of some of their possessions to make room in their new house. However, the man doesn’t want to get rid of one particular chest that has been with him for a long time. The woman is obviously curious about it but doesn’t ask much about the trunk. They move closer to his home and she starts to ask questions to her new mother-in-law about his childhood. She tells the woman that when he was a child the pizzaplex was his favorite place and his favorite attraction was Lally’s Game. But then an accident happened and he stopped going to Lally’s Game. The wife became more curious about her husband not telling her about an important time in his childhood and decided to question him about it but he never talked. The wife went back to her mother-in-law and questioned her a bit more only to get pushed to the side. The wife became curious about the chest and decided she was going to get it open. She manages to open the chest and before she can look inside the chest, her husband finds her and opens the chest to reveal nothing was in it. After a while of her husband constantly going through the house, she asked her husband what was going on. He told her that Lally was infatuated with him and that a kid decided to join them and Lally killed that kid. Afterwards, they attempted to close the attraction but Lally disappeared and started appearing around his home. So, he chose to put the chest in the middle of the room and locked Lally in it, but the wife didn’t believe him. It wasn’t until she spotted Lally that she was distraught by the appearance. She went to her mother-in-law’s house and she told her that Lally didn’t move, the kids had to move him. The wife went back home and started to pack up her belongings, believing her husband was the one who murdered the child. The wife bashed the husband in the head and hid in the closet. When the husband finally woke up he went to the chest and saw that his wife was dead in the chest. In the next scene he was with a new woman who was now asking about the chest. The last story had to be the creepiest for me. This girl is hanging out with her friend’s at the pizzaplex when she wants to go into their newest attraction, the AR simulation. The AR simulation is a combination between VR and the real world. You can touch, taste, hear, smell, and anything you can do in the real world can happen in AR. However, when they go over they realize that the attraction is down, however, it doesn’t stop her from going under and trying the AR attraction because she wants her wish, even if it isn’t real, a big birthday party. When she sits in the AR she gets her wish, leaves the attraction and goes to the themed roller coaster then goes home. However, it isn’t until almost a year goes by that her grandparents have been diagnosed with cancer. After several more months, everyone is getting cancer and dropping dead and the new babies are these weird jelly humanoids. The very end is her thinking that she is still stuck in the AR simulation and gets suffocated by the jelly humanoids. This book was honestly spooky to me for a YA book, this wasn’t what I was expecting. I read Goosebumps as a kid and even some ghost stories. I watched a number of horror movies too and watched a lot of paranormal activity as well, but this book I had to put down several times because it was kind of creepy. I thought this was a pretty good story and I could actually see myself re-reading this story. I can’t wait to read the rest of the stories because I know how creepy they are.

lilacwhisker's review

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mysterious sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

1.0

Probably the last of these books I will ever buy. There’s just so much wrong with them it’s hard to list, but I’ve made some key points.

-The whole “I’m not like other girls” thing keeps being used in like every other girl main character and it is really annoying and poorly written. Every character that is part of this trope is so boring and unlikeable, and I for sure saw this in the first story with Jessica.
-The ending of the first story doesn’t make sense if you haven’t read the first Fazbear Frights book (which is a completely different series so lots of people reading this book probably haven’t read it???) so if you don’t have that prior knowledge, the ending is not a great conclusion.
-The middle story, Lally’s Game was just boring and took me forever to get through (especially with such a forgettable main character who made very strange choices), and even then it’s probably the least bad story.
-The third story started off fine, but then it took the craziest u-turn that was trying to be a scary twist or something:

the whole “everyone dies of cancer” thing was so weird and unneeded… how did that make it into an actual story??? If it was something like she thought robots were haunting her or something similar to that, it would actually be related to the games and stuff, but the blob-people and everyone she knows dying truly made me realize how bad this book was.

-I also would appreciate some better written diversity in these books. Maya, the main character of the last story, was half Puerto Rican, so maybe I should give some credit there, but it always feels like the majority of characters are very white and very beautiful (if I have to read one more story about a white girl with long black hair I will die) and if they are not, it is a major part of the story like in “To Be Beautiful”. Side note: there are also no queer characters at all in these?? In the 36 stories I’ve read (not including The Silver Eyes series, but still) I have seen nothing (gay people love animatronics, it just seems unrealistic lol).

Overall, my favorite part was the epilogue, which does not bode well for these books. Will probably not buy one of these again.

Content Warnings

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