The Haunted Hoard: Five Nights at Freddy’s (PC)

When Scott Cawthon showed the world his game Chipper and Sons Lumber Co., he could have let the criticisms drag him down. People were mocking the simple title for its unintentionally creepy character designs, the beaver family looking an awful lot like soulless animatronics in a game that was meant to be cute and pleasant. However, rather than responding negatively to this critique, he instead used that accidental aspect as the basis of his next game, and when Five Nights at Freddy’s was released, it took the internet by storm, becoming one of the biggest new horror franchises in the medium and one of the faces of the rising trend of certain games finding immense popularity due to their success on platforms like Youtube and Twitch.

There is certainly an inspiring success story at the heart of the game’s creation, but the game is a horror game, and it achieves its scares with a devilishly simple approach. The player is the newest employee at a restaurant called Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, tasked with watching over the restaurant at night. However, rather than making sure no one gets in, the player is instead left to keep watch over the restaurant’s four animatronics, these usually friendly figures roaming the pizzeria at night with the mistaken belief anyone they encounter is a suitless animatronic who needs to be violently crammed into one of the back-up robotic bodies. To avoid being mangled, the player needs to sit in the security office and watch the security feeds carefully to keep track of where the robots are, closing the doors whenever the characters appear outside the office.

In some ways, Five Nights at Freddy’s is certainly a “wait to be scared” game. Since your main involvement is just sitting in the office, looking at camera feeds, and pressing buttons that either turn on lights or close electronic doors, the tension arises from the fact that the dark pizzeria’s relative silence can be broken at any moment as one of the animatronics slips through your defenses and leaps out at the screen with an eardrum-piercing scream. These shameless jump scares are the danger you are trying to avoid, and while their abruptness does hit on that startling reflex more than actual terror, the tension as you sit in on that office wondering if they’re in the darkness outside your door is rather effective. You can only view the feed from one security camera at a time, and viewing it requires you to raise a tablet that completely obscures your vision of anything else. Flipping between viewing feeds in search of a missing animatronic can start to put a player on edge, especially if they end up somewhere like the kitchen where there’s only sound to go off of. If multiple animatronics are moving about at once, the danger definitely builds, and when one finally pokes their head in the office to kill you, it can make you jump out of your seat a bit, especially if you thought you had everything under control.

The main limiter to your abilities in Five Nights at Freddy’s is the fact that everything you use to monitor and obstruct the animatronics has a power cost. When the night begins, your power reserves already start to slowly drain, but pulling up the camera feeds use a bit more, keeping the electronic doors shut to prevent animatronic access drains them heavily, and the lights you can use to peer through your office windows for any nearby animatronics have a cost as well. The game makes using any of these helpful tools come with an inherent risk, as running out of power completely will lead to your death. Thankfully, that death isn’t immediate, as I learned when the death cutscene was starting to play but the clock for my shift rolled over right before I would have been terminated. To successfully make it the six in-game hours that act as your shift (about eight and a half minutes in real time) requires careful power management, but getting nervous can lead to you foolishly draining your reserves, your growing fear actually working against you if you give into it and flicker the lights too much or check your cameras too often.

Over the course of the five nights that serve as the game’s main story, each night starts off with a phone call from the guy who worked at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza before you. On the first night he gives you the necessary details on how to protect yourself and cautions you against overuse of your three tools, but he’s also a source for most of the game lore. Voiced by Scott Cawthon himself, this voice is a simple and effective way to provide what little you need to know while sewing some of the more terrifying concepts in the player’s mind, such as the gruesomeness of your fate if you’re caught by the robots and helping to create the unresolved mysteries surrounding the pizzeria. Why do the owners allow these robots to patrol the place at night? Why do they keep them around after the brutal sounding Bite of ’87? While you’re sitting in the office, hoping you won’t be ambushed by a killer robot you didn’t see coming, it gives you something to chew on and think about even though any answers to the mysteries aren’t going to be revealed since you never see a single living person in this game.

Instead, the stars of this title are the four animatronics, and Scott Cawthon’s graphic design skill definitely helped create some designs that straddle the line between believable animatronic and terrifying machines. Perhaps the cuddliest looking character of the bunch is Freddy himself, but while Freddy Fazbear’s sunken eyes and blocky teeth are mildly creepy, it’s the game’s presentation of him that does most of the legwork. Most of the other animatronics, when viewed on camera, are fairly easy to discern. The game does an excellent job with ominous angles that really emphasis the menace of these robots, but when Freddy does finally get involved in the action himself, the main attraction is hidden by shadows, only parts of his face visible in the locations he skulks around in. Foxy is perhaps the next most effective of the bunch, partly because of the intriguing gimmick he introduces. If you think you can just sit in your office and watch the nearby halls to stay safe, Foxy will break that illusion once he starts to creep out of Pirate Cove. The vulpine pirate is usually hidden behind a curtain, but if you don’t check in on his camera feed specifically, he’ll eventually slip out, and while most animatronics only move when you aren’t watching the cameras, once he’s out you can see him barreling towards the office at high speed on the feed. If you close the door in time, he’ll still hit into it, draining it of power, but Foxy is the most dangerous because he requires constant monitoring to keep him at bay, and if you slip up he will quite easily speed over and end your night.

The other two animatronics are actually the most active, Bonnie the purple rabbit and Chica the chicken moving every night and without any special conditions tied to them. These two are the constant threat, and they both rely on a similar design idea to be scary. The endoskeletons that the animatronic suits are placed on have human teeth built into them already, but the suits have their own set of artificial chompers. When you have the right angle on the animatronics, you can see the unusual truth that they have these secondary teeth in the back of their throats, and since Bonnie and Chica are easy to find on camera feeds, many of the still shots you get of them emphasize their uncanny appearance. Chica in particular is probably the most terrifying design independent of context, the yellow chick’s bill full of teeth, dark eyebrows, and bib that says “Let’s Eat” making her far more fearsome when combined with the group’s typical sunken eyes and second set of teeth.

The sound design helps sell the horror as well. Flitting over to the kitchen and hearing a music box play is a strange sensation, hearing the rattling noises in the otherwise quiet pizzeria gives you a clue that someone may be on the move, and hearing Foxy happily hum to himself while you’re watching that Pirate Cove feed closely for action to remind you he’s still there and just like the other animatronics, he’s not actively malicious, he just wants to twist your body in unspeakable ways to justify the simple misunderstanding wired into his brain. The jump scare screams achieve their job of making you jump even if they’re all just high pitched shrieks, and there are some elements of the design that do let the concept down a little. The office you’re in requires you to look left and right to close the adjacent doors, but the office does a poor job of hiding the fact it’s a flat image trying to wrap around your viewing angle as you turn. The rooms the animatronics patrol handle it a bit better since the cameras move automatically and presumably can adjust the images better, and the hallucinations where sometimes you just see flashes of the robots’ faces and some subliminal messages feel a little cheap compared to the constant build up in trying to prevent the animatronics from reaching you.

Interestingly enough though, Five Nights at Freddy’s does have a few small mercies for players who might be made too anxious by its concept. A few options can help players overcome the five nights if they find the limitations and lack of knowledge to constantly result in their untimely demise. One gives you infinite power, which completely removes the challenge as there’s nothing preventing you from keeping the doors closed the entire night, but a slightly more reasonable option instead has the map of the pizzeria you see on the camera feed also show the locations of the animatronics at any time. This does mean you can just close the doors when you know they’re outside, and all you’d really need to do is watch Foxy to keep him in place with this option enabled, so it’s an interesting option but not really one that preserves the difficulty or tension of the experience if used. Speeding up the nights is perhaps one of the few options here that can keep the tension in tact but set the goal posts closer, although it seems these cheats aren’t available in the Steam version but are unlocked by default in the PC version available through the Microsoft Store.

After you do complete the five nights mentioned in the title, there are actually two more available. The sixth night is a very hard night to survive, while the last night is a custom night where you can set the AI difficulty of the robots to make them as difficult or easy as you like. The gameplay alone isn’t really engaging enough to test your might against this custom night too many times save for special challenge runs, but there are a few small secrets to search out in the game if you’re so inclined. Completing the main nights and the challenge night feels like the better way of approaching the title, because while the AI isn’t devilishly clever, its unusual choices in movement almost make it even more intense as you can never really guess what the robots will do. Luckily, dying on a night does not put you back to day 1, so all you need to do is conquer each night once to finish the game, but fear is your real worst enemy as hesitating on when to use your tools or overusing them can both lead to a rather loud and abrupt fate.

THE VERDICT: Despite the premise of sitting in an office and opening and shutting doors based on when robots might be outside them, Five Nights at Freddy’s isn’t just a “wait to be scared” game. Power management is vital to making it through the night, as is watching the camera feeds to know when to use your more costly tools. Having to balance monitoring Foxy also helps the game add a consideration that breaks away from the desire to just always watch the more obvious danger zones. While a death is done via jump scares, that building dread as your power wanes and the animatronics close in is quite strong, with the noises they give off, the character designs, and the angles they’re presented in making for an effective horror title despite its simplicity.

And so, I give Five Nights at Freddy’s for PC…

A GOOD rating. I am legitimately surprised that Five Nights at Freddy’s won me over. The premise always sounded so bare, and I fully believed it was just a game where you sit in place and wait for jump scares. I had played parody games based on Five Nights at Freddy’s that were very much that, but those didn’t have the polish or vision that this simple horror game has going for it. There are definitely corners cut, like most of the animatronics only ever animating when they’re leaping out to kill you and the office’s odd image stretching, but most of its ideas work in its favor. The silent pizzeria’s dark halls complement the character designs, their posing done well to make even the friendlier looking robots ominous as they make their way to murder you. Pirate Cove is a simple but incredibly effective addition when it comes to forcing you out of your comfort zone, reactive play not as easy when you need to break away from monitoring the others to keep the most dangerous animatronic at bay. That idea that one of the robots could be right outside the office at any moment builds up the anticipation incredibly, every time the clock rolls over an hour ratcheting up the tension as you feel your freedom growing ever closer. Greater involvement than just sitting in the office and watching to see if the robots are near could definitely make for a more enjoyable experience, but Five Nights at Freddy’s makes it premise work quite well, and considering how many sequels there are, I’m sure I’ll be able to find ways the later games built off of it, hopefully without losing the core of what made this first title so effective.

Scott Cawthon was thrust into being an overnight sensation, and thanks to its limited presentation and usually keeping its gruesome details mentioned but unseen, this simple indie horror game even managed to catch on with incredibly young kids. Five Nights at Freddy’s taps into a very simple type of terror, the dread that something could suddenly appear to break the simple silence of our lives. I certainly had nights working the night shift where things were eerily quiet and my wandering mind made things a bit unnerving, but Five Nights at Freddy’s shows you the face of your possible killers, these demented robots not monsters but twisted versions of friendly mascots. It may not have the most substance to it, but Five Nights at Freddy’s delivers the horror by executing its basic premise surprisingly well.