Meet Your Oshi wears its inspiration proudly on its sleeve. It’s an unabashed Five Nights at Freddy’s clone, or homage, how you choose to call it, aimed at the exact niche that turned that franchise into a colossal success. The shallow gameplay holds no secrets to most fans of this very specific genre, giving space for the Vtuber automatons to shine in their furry and metallic hybrid design, but there’s not much meat on these joints for players who want something more exciting than a random jumpscare.

Five Nights at Oshi’s

Just as it happens with the game series sensation turned movie, Meet Your Oshi also unfolds across five nights. This time, however, the location is the DweebCon convention center and you’re not a security guard, but a kid who failed to purchase a ticket on time and now decided to break in and print a counterfeit one. Obviously, this lore takes a turn for the – more – unbelievable when you get mistaken for the new guard.

From the surveillance room, you are now waiting for the printer to power up, something that takes ages, as the former guard drops recorded messages to you across the five days. In front of you there is a surveillance system, said printer, windows where you can pull the blinders down and turn the lights on, and little else. All of this consumes energy, so you have to keep things under check and an eye out for printer failures, all the while watching the cameras to see where the Oshi are appearing.

A good automaton is a motionless but murdering automaton, it seems. You can look at them, try to understand the way they move from room to room, attempt to prevent it somehow, but suddenly the camera has static and they switch to another place. Before you notice it, they reached the control room and jumped at you, ending the night as a failure.

Apart from checking cameras, the only interaction you have is with the printer. When it malfunctions – and it will malfunction a lot, making your real printer feel like the peak of technology – you will have to change fuses or ink cartridges (by grabbing new ones from the trashcan, of all places), turn some breakers, and not much else.

The game is very much dependent of RNG, so you may find a night to be smooth sailing, but in another go the printer will break almost instantly and consecutively; it’s not about skill, it’s randomness and of the frustrating type as well. Besides, there are bugs rearing their ugly head, from the security camera plan that doesn’t hide while we’re using the printer, or the recorded messages that keep going long after we stopped them.

Fan Content

The Oshi design isn’t bad, taking a furry approach for three of the four automatons: Buffpup, Rosedoodle, and Shiabun. The other one is AiCandii, more of a cybernetic Edward Scissorhands type of creature. All of them are inspired by popular Vtubers, another aspect that makes this a game created by fans and aimed at fans of a very specific niche.

Reviewing this game objectively, it’s hard to find substantial appeal to it. It’s clearly a game that only exists for the FNAF and Vtuber crowd, and anyone else is just going to shrug it off after a few minutes as a game trying to cash in on this particular type of pop culture. The price is very low, and the automatons are nicely designed, especially the extremely brief animation when they jump on you, but with visible bugs and gameplay that is as exciting as watching paint dry, Meet Your Oshi is as fan service as they come.

Pros:

• Automatons are nicely designed
• FNAF inspiration is noticeable
• Low price

Cons:

• Gameplay is extremely shallow
• A FNAF clone, to put it simple
• A few bugs

Rating: 5/10