Chapter 1: A Tight Squeeze Walkthrough - Poppy Playtime Guide - IGN (2024)

Looking for help on your journey through Chapter 1 of Poppy Playtime's eerie world of monstrous toys and shady experiments? You've come to the right place. This walkthrough will guide you through completing all of the events in A Tight Squeeze, including solving every power puzzle, finding the red Grab Pack hand, and, of course, facing off against the chapter's big bad.

Looking for a specific section of this chapter? Use the links below to jump between each main section.

Chapter 1: A Tight Squeeze Walkthrough

After watching a particularly convincing advertisement for Playtime Co’s incredibly unsettling Poppy Playtime doll in the opening moments of the game, you’ll gain control in the factory’s reception area. From here, you're ready to begin delving deeper into Playtime Co.

First things first, head to the desk in the center of the room and pick up the green VHS tape on the right-hand side of it. It’ll be added to your inventory, which you can check at any time by hitting TAB to access the menu and selecting items.

When you have the tape, look to the right of the counter and you’ll see a green VHS player below a large television screen. Insert the tape and listen to the warning given by the head of security on it. There isn’t much you can glean here in a practical sense, although it will give us some early hints as to the factory’s true nature. With that done, it’s time to tackle our first puzzle.

How to Solve the Color-Block Door Code

In the reception area, you'll see there are two passages you can go down. The one on the left leads to a locked door that you'll need to bypass to continue our mission, although the lock can only be deactivated by inputting the correct sequence of color blocks.

To solve the puzzle, you'll need to head down the passage on the right. Make your way through the double doors at the end of the passage and you’ll enter a small room with boxed toys, fallen shelves, and a broken robot on a counter opposite where you entered. In this room, look directly above you and you’ll see a red train track running in a circle.

A train will make its way around this loop. Take note of the colors of the train and each of its carriages. That’s the sequence of colors you need to punch into the color-block lock.

• The front train should be green
• The first carriage should be pink
• The second carriage should be yellow
• The third carriage should be red.

Leave the room, return to the color-coded door, and punch in green, pink, yellow, and then red. The door will unlock, allowing you to head inside.

Getting the Grab Pack

Now you're inside, it’s time to get your hands on the most useful piece of kit you'll get in the entire game: The Grab Pack. Pick up the blue VHS tape on the desk to your left and put it into the blue VHS player below the TV on your right.

You’ll activate an informative tutorial on the Grab Pack, which teaches you its various uses. The Blue hand you're about to get is a versatile bit of kit, although the main things you need to know are that it can grab and pull objects, is conductive can be used to transfer energy, and can activate pressure-plated doors.

Once the video is over, the glass case to the left of the TV will open, revealing your Grab Pack. Pick it up and you’ll instantly see the blue hand appear on the screen. Before you get going, practice grabbing and pulling objects, as that’s the main thing you'll be using the pack for. Find an object in the room you want to grab, then press the left mouse button to shoot the hand and grab it. When the hand is grasping it, hold the left mouse button to pull the object towards you.

Now you've had a little trial run with the hand, it's time to get back to the mission. Head back into the reception area and hop over the turnstiles behind the desk. You’ll arrive in a small corridor with a blue hand pressure plate above the locked doorway ahead. Shoot your hand onto the pressure plate and hold it there until the blue bar beneath the hand is full. When it’s full, the door will open, leading you into the Playtime Co. lobby.

Turning On The Power

As you enter, you’ll immediately see a large statue of Playtime Co’s big, loveable, definitely not in any way at all sinister main mascot: Huggy Wuggy.

You can activate a kiosk below the statue to learn more about this big blue ball of fur if you want to know exactly who he is, but to continue with the mission, turn your attention to the door to his left. You’ll see another blue hand pressure pad above this door. However, as you launch the Grab Pack to hit the pressure plate, the power will short out.

As the power cuts, you’ll hear a sound cue of something falling into the lobby. Head back to the Huggy Wuggy statue and look at the hand he’s using to wave at you. In it will be a golden key. Use your grab pack to reach up and take the key out of his hand.

When you have it, look for a door labeled ”Power” to the left of the pressure plate you just tried to activate. With the key in your inventory, you’ll be able to open the door, taking you to a room with a power generator.

Here, you'll need to utilize the Grab Pack’s conductivity feature to reactivate the power and proceed with the mission. Make your way through the power room until you come across a small door with Grab Pack hand stickers plastered across it. Use your Grab Pack to pull this door off and you’ll expose a power generator.

How conductivity works in Poppy Playtime is that the Grab Pack’s wire will glow blue whenever you attach it to a power source. From here, you can walk as far as the wire from the Grab Pack allows you to move and transfer the power running through it to certain objects by touching them with the wire. This puzzle will be a good example of how to use the conductivity ability.

Grab the generator with your Grab Pack hand, then make your way around the lockers behind you until you see the first node in the room. Nodes are large bronze poles with a set of rings circling a sphere on the top of them. Touching the Grab Pack's wire against the node will make the top of it glow blue, indicating that it’s powered up.

Once the first node is activated, head around the lockers to your right, making sure the wire is still touching the first node, and then wrap the wire around the second node close to the entrance of the power room. When both nodes are touching the wire, the power will activate, and the lights in the facility will turn on.

With that done, you can now return to the lobby. When you enter, you’ll see that the Huggy Wuggy statue has disappeared. Now isn’t that peculiar…

Regardless, make your way through the pressure-plated door on the left-hand side of the room that you tried to activate earlier and proceed down the corridor ahead.

Getting the Grab Pack’s Red Hand

At the end of the corridor, you’ll see a mysterious blue and yellow arm slink through a door on your left. As much as you should probably avoid it like the plague, you're going to follow it. Head through that door and continue forward until you reach a storage area.

There’s an orange VHS player below a TV next to the steps here, but for now, you'll need to leave it. Head up the stairs, cross the catwalk and you’ll enter a room with a conveyor belt below you.

For this area, you need to activate the terminal on the catwalk you used to enter the room. To do that, you need to find four glowing color blocks and slot them into the terminal. The first can be found directly to the left of the terminal, in front of the hole in the railing you use to drop down to the floor below.

It’s a blue block. Pick it up and immediately put it into the terminal, then drop down to the floor below.

As soon as you land, you’ll find the yellow block on the bottom of a shelf to your left. Grab it and add it to your inventory.

If you look on the shelf behind where you find the yellow block, you’ll also spot the orange VHS tape. If you’re interested in a bit of extra lore, grab it, then spin around and look for a sliding door opposite where we found the yellow block.

Pull it open to enter the storage area we made our way through moments prior. Slot the orange tape into the orange VHS machine in the corner and watch it for extra information about a recurring character we’ll meet through these tapes. When you’re ready to move on, head back to the conveyor belt room.

You’ll find the final two blocks at the back of the room, near the shutter at the end of the conveyor belt. The red block can be found below the conveyor belt itself.

Meanwhile, the green block is found on a pipe on the back wall next to the shelves on the left-hand side of the room. You’ll need to use the Grab Pack to pull it down.

With all four blocks in your inventory, head through the sliding door opposite where you found the yellow block then make your way back up to the terminal and slot the remaining blocks into it.

You’ll activate a crane, which will move to the opposite side of the room and pull a glass box towards you before dropping it on the conveyor belt and smashing it. Inside is the red hand add-on for the Grab Pack. Pick it up to add it to your arsenal.

With the Red Hand now in our possession, we can utilize two different hands at once, making our grab more powerful and allowing us to open doors that require both hands to operate. To shoot it, press the right mouse button. That means we can finally exit this room. At the end of the conveyor belt, you’ll see blue and red hand pressure plates on either side of a steel door. Attach each hand to its corresponding pressure plate to crack the door open.

Make-A-Friend Factory

Follow the conveyor belt and you’ll slide down to a section in the vents where the door ahead of you is blocked off. To progress onwards, you'll need to do a little bit of power diverting here using your new hand.

When you reach the bottom of the conveyor belt, take your first right to enter a cross-section of vents with a power outlet on the right-hand side. The way this section works is there’s a path leading around a walkway in the center of the vents, with two slopes that you’ll slip down on the right and left-hand side of the walkway. The slope on the left-hand side of the walkway has a power node that you need to activate.

To solve the puzzle, make your way to the middle of the walkway, then look for the power outlet on your right. Grab the outlet with the red hand, then slide down the slope on the left so you can loop your wire around the node in the center of it.

Now, walk back to the vent with the locked door. To the left of the door is another power outlet. Aim the blue hand and shoot it at the outlet to activate the conveyor belt and open the door ahead.

The conveyor belt will drop you in the Make-a-Friend Factory. Our goal in this new area is to, well, make a friend in an effort to proceed with our objective. There’s a problem, however. The factory itself is all out of power and we need to reactivate it.

Spin around and climb the stairs at the back of the room to reach the catwalk running above the Make-a-Friend factory. You’ll spot a TV and a pink VHS player at the top of the stairs, which we’ll need in just a second. For now, continue following the path.

As you round the corner on the catwalk, you’ll see a large gap ahead of you. Use your hand to pull the orange bar on a retractable piece of the catwalk on the other side of the gap towards you, forming a bridge.

Make your way across this piece of catwalk and stop around halfway. On your right, you’ll see the pink VHS tape perched against the color blocks against the wall. Grab it, then shove it into the VHS player we just saw at the top of the stairs for another slice of lore.

With that done, head back across the catwalk to reach another power puzzle. This one is a little trickier than the others. There’s a power outlet at the beginning of a catwalk path that snakes up past two power nodes to a deactivated power outlet. However, our wire isn’t long enough for us to make our way all the way up to the end of the snake.

The knack for solving this puzzle is actually the retractable catwalk in the center of the snake. We can use this to shorten our path significantly and make it from one power outlet to the other while still wrapping up the two nodes along the way.

First things first, pull the retractable path to the bottom of the snaking path. Now, use the blue hand to grab the power outlet. Cross the retractable path, ignore both nodes, and continue following the snaking path until you reach the top of it. Now, turn around and grab the retractable path and pull it towards you. The retractable path should now bridge the gap between the middle and the top of the snaking path.

With the path in place, retrace your steps so you’re on the middle walkway (don’t use the retractable path to get there) and wrap the wire around both nodes. When they’re both activated, cross the retractable path and you should have just enough wire to launch the red hand onto the second power outlet and complete the circuit.

With that done, head back down the stairs to the Make-A-Friend factory and look for the terminal in the center of the room. With the power activated, it should now say “power on.” Click the red button then turn your attention to the capsules on your left.

You’ll see levers next to the three capsules that you can pull using the Grab Pack. Pull all three down and then wait for your new friend to be assembled by the machine.

When it arrives at the end of the conveyor belt, admire the beauty of your wonderful creation, then pick it up. Turn around and, at the back of the room to the left of the stairs up to the catwalk, you’ll see a door with a sign reading “nobody leaves without a toy.” Slot the toy into the console to the right of this door and you’ll crack it open, exposing a long corridor.

Huggy Wuggy Chase

Prepare yourself, because things are about to get intense. Continue up the corridor and, as you reach the end, you’ll come across a vastly less friendly version of Playtime Co’s loveable mascot, Huggy Wuggy.

It seems he’s less about hugs these days and more about devouring human flesh, so spin around and run back into the Make-A-Friend factory. Huggy isn't particularly quick, but we'll need to get out of here fast, so head to the door at the end of the Make A Friend conveyor belt and bolt through it.

For this next section, we’re going to have to make a lot of decisions very quickly, as Huggy will pursue us through the vents relentlessly.

As you slide down the conveyor belt, follow the path and take a left when you see Huggy through the vent ahead of you. Keep moving but don’t blindly run forward, as Huggy will try to cut you off. Instead, take the first right you find and follow the path through the tunnel with the word “don’t” graffitied on the wall.

Follow this route and continue forward until you can no longer follow the path, then take a left through the open vent, drop through a hole in the floor, and continue following that path until you slide down a long slope.

Don’t stop moving. Take an immediate right and go through the snaking path of vents until you reach a long path going forward. Sprint down it until you see a half-open shutter on your left at the end of the route. Crouch under it and continue following the path.

As you reach the end, you’ll see a potential route to freedom in front of you but the door will shut as you reach it. We’ll have to wait for it to open. If you look to the right here while waiting, Huggy will reappear and approach you, but we can’t do anything until that door has opened. Once it has, bolt through it and gun it forward until you slide out of the vents and onto a walkway.

When you’ve landed, spin around. Huggy’s coming but we’ve got a minute to set up a trap to take that vicious blue Stretch Armstrong down for good. If you look above the vent, you’ll see a box with hand prints on it perched above you.

Using both hands, grab it and hold both mouse buttons to pull it down. You’ll need to be quick as Huggy can appear and kill you if you take too long. As it falls, Huggy will jump out of the vents as the box crushes the pathway, causing him to fall to his (potential) death. Congratulations, you can cross “killed a 1ft murderous children’s toy” off your bucket list.

Meeting Poppy

Now Huggy’s plummeted to his doom, we’ll find ourselves deep inside the Playtime Co. factory. If you spin around, you’ll see we’re on a long catwalk leading to a door marked with a large poppy flower. It’s the same area teased during the commercial we watched at the beginning of the episode.

Follow the catwalk until you reach a split in the path. At this crossroads, you’ll find a black tape on the floor. Pick it up, then take the right path until you reach a black VHS player.

Slot the tape in and you’ll learn important lore about a major player in the story of Poppy Playtime; the mysterious entity known only as The Prototype. When the tape is finished, make your way back to the split in the path, and follow the route to your left.

It’ll take you towards the poppy door. Head inside and follow the path through the door, then down the stairs ahead of you. Continue through the strange, child’s bedroom-esque passage until you reach the final room.

Inside, you’ll see a glass box containing the Poppy Playtime doll from the commercial at the start of the episode. Pry the box open with the Grab Pack and the game will cut to black, as Poppy speaks and the credits roll. With that done, it’s time to move on to Chapter 2!