The Haunted Hoard: Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 (PC)

No one could have predicted the monumental success that is the first Five Nights at Freddy’s game, but after Youtube videos and word of mouth propelled it to fame, the question became what Scott Cawthon would do next. Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 was a natural step, and with plenty of feedback coming from all sides, the sequel to the horror hit would continue to show how well the creator handled criticism. After some people felt the first game wasn’t interactive enough and could be a bit easy, Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 aimed to address those issues, but even when making adjustments that could help a game improve, it’s important to consider how they’ll change the dynamics at play. Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 may still have the player sitting behind a desk trying to avoid death by animatronic, but the tweaks to the system make it feel far different from the first.

Perhaps the first thing any new player will notice is that when they are plopped in the role of the new night watchman at the entertainment eatery Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza is that the doors from the first game are completely absent. Instead, a yawning dark hallway sits right in the center of your view, and with no way to seal this large opening up even in the most dire of circumstances, you are immediately filled with a sense of dread that you really aren’t safe from the roaming robots who aim to lethally cram you into one of their costumes filled with sharp metal parts. This is certainly an intimidating situation for anyone coming over from the first game, but every animatronic still has a means of keeping them away so it’s not like they’ll just leap out and jump scare you without you having a chance to notice them and stop them. There are also two vents to the left and right level with the floor, and while these aren’t too dangerous, you may still hear the pounding of a robot crawling through them as they seek a less obvious means of entering your office.

As for who these animatronics are, Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 features perhaps too many robots to be worried about. With a grand total of 11 machines that lurk around the premises, your 6 hour nights can lead to danger coming in many forms. The dangers and unsettling appearances of the original four robots lead to them being retired by the company, the head bear Freddy Fazbear, the bird Chica, the bunny Springtrap, and the pirate fox Foxy all kept in a backroom but still able to get up and seek you out all the same. Their retirement has lead to the decay of these animatronics, their uncanny appearances now drifting even more into outright horror. Bonnie has lost the entire top of his faceplate, leaving him with just a lower jaw and red eyes glowing in the back. The felt on their forms has broken off in patches that reveals the metal skeletons underneath their designs, and old effective elements like Chica’s second set of teeth in her beak are even more effective with that element of rot making her look more horrific. The replacements for these retired animatronics are actually four updated versions that take on more plasticine appearances, the “toy” variants all having rosy cheeks and their bodies much smoother and, appropriately, toy-like. They lean much more heavily into the same eeriness something like a porcelain doll holds in their abnormal smoothness juxtaposed with their imitation of life, but these toy robots are mostly not quite as effective save for Toy Chica’s eyes being a surprisingly dark black that leans back into horror and Foxy’s female variant Mangle actually being in such a state of disrepair that it is a tangle of metal endoskeleton and plastic parts that were put together improperly.

There are still three more animatronics in play, and besides the rarely seen Golden Freddy we’ll come back to the last two in a bit. First it is important we understand how a regular night is meant to go in Five Nights at Freddy’s 2. Each night begins with a phone call from a man who helps explain things like how the new version of the restaurant was established, what tools you have to help against the animatronics, and what to expect each night, the goal being to at least survive five nights from start to finish. As you sit behind your desk, you can shine a flashlight down the hallway to see if any animatronics are approaching from that direction, your flashlight having a limited battery but quick flashes not eating up too much of it. Most animatronics who appear in the hallway can have their programming reset by flashing them with the flashlight, but only Foxy absolutely requires this action since otherwise he will jump out of the dark and instantly kill you. This is your first concern, and while you can use power to shine lights on the vents or light up other rooms you can view via camera feeds, it’s certainly prudent to save it for that central hall to avoid the instant loss condition of Foxy slipping through. Your flashlight can seem like it is malfunctioning at times as well, but just like the camera feeds that occasionally cut out, it’s merely to mask the fact the game is swapping out the animatronics in the area because there is very little animation in the title, most machines viewed standing still unless they’re leaping out to scream at you with a high pitched wail that is sure to make you jump in your seat.

Power management is one of the main ways the game keeps things tense, the player having to decide when to use it to avoid running out and thus leaving themselves open to a potential deadly jump scare in the form of a robot slipping past your defenses. However, many of them don’t immediately attack when they enter the office, and so long as you are aware of them early enough, you can slip on a Freddy Fazbear costume mask to hide your own face. Since the flaw in the animatronics’ programming is that they think you’re an endoskeleton without a suit, they’ll dismiss you as one of their own when you have the mask up and eventually leave. One problem with this mask though is that even after they leave, some characters like Bonnie actually seem to linger a little longer than the game shows, meaning lowering it too soon will lead to an instant loss. Your last main tool for anticipating the arrival of animatronics are the camera feeds you can view on a computer pad, this blocking your vision of the office but letting you see where the robots might be roaming. This seems like a good way of preparing yourself for whatever robots might be heading towards you, especially with the feeds that view the air ducts, but there are a few problems that emerge in this system thanks to our two final animatronics.

The last consideration you need to make while you sit in your office is a music box situated in the Prize Corner room. It requires constant winding up in order to keep playing its tune, and this tune is vital to holding off the masked marionette known simply as The Puppet. Should this music box stop playing, the arrival of The Puppet becomes inevitable, and unless the night ends soon, it will appear without warning and immediately end your night. The problems with this system are many, the biggest one being that it basically means that any time you do pull up camera feeds, its hard to justify doing anything but cranking the music box. This seems to be an attempt to evolve upon the idea of monitoring Foxy in the previous game, but you could at least take your eyes off him to see where the other animatronics are roaming about if you’re quick about it. With so many animatronics potentially roaming the halls it’s hard enough to justify devoting time to trying to predict their path around the restaurant, but the need to crank the music box means you are better served just working on that instead of tracking any robots. There is at least an alert that appears when the box has almost run out if you lose track of it, but the music box also runs out more quickly depending on the night you’re on. While some animatronics get more aggressive or even don’t appear until later nights in the five night work week, the music box is always present and becomes more and more strict as the week wears on. Babysitting it becomes a chore, and besides the anxiety of knowing you’re not watching the hallway, it robs Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 of many other avenues for horror as taking the time to see the intimidating still shots of the robots roaming the halls isn’t easy to justify when you’ve got that annoying box to deal with.

The final animatronic is where Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 really sinks your enjoyment levels though, as Balloon Boy introduces one too many factors to an already strained game design. Balloon Boy’s travels cannot be viewed in the same ways as other animatronics, but instead you are meant to rely on sound to determine where he might be. His voice lines are all innocent lines like “Hello” and his child-like voice is definitely creepy as it breaks through the quiet of the night, but this rotund little cartoon kid statue has a terrible impact on your play if he gets into your office. If you don’t accurately predict when he’ll enter the office and put on your mask in time, Balloon Boy will stand to the side, laughing as you can no longer use your flashlight. Since Foxy will quickly kill you if you can’t flicker your light in his face, at this point your fate is practically sealed. Balloon Boy’s margin for error is rough too as you only really know he’s coming based on the sound of banging in the vents, but this could be Toy Chica or Toy Bonnie crawling into the room. The mask may still be a safe bet when you hear this noise, but due to so many factors being in play at once, you might find yourself in what seems like an unwinnable scenario. It is not that difficult to find yourself with Mangle lingering on the ceiling, Balloon Boy on the move, the music box nearly out of juice, Foxy down the hall, and who knows what else the other robots might be up to at the time. Trying to figure out what exactly you’re meant to do here to survive is a guessing game and one you’ll likely get wrong as one of the dangers might have their timer run out and pop in to ruin your run. There are just too many potential dangers that can be active at once and your ability to respond to them is far too limited, so while the first night or two can be tense and scary, soon they’ll become frustrating as the difficulty is cranked up far too high and the losses grow irritating to experience again and again.

It is quite possible the game was designed to kill you a few times regardless of what you do though, because Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 has a few minigames that only appear after you die that flesh out the lore of Freddy Fazbear’s pizzeria some more. These are styled similarly to incredibly rudimentary old video games where characters are nearly unrecognizable blocky shapes, and these four games are definitely meant to eerily allude to backstory more than they are to entertain. They’re slow and their goals are basic, but you’re meant to be noticing the unsettling aspects like a strange man approaching a child, blood stains on the restaurant floor, and the implications of seeing lifeless children that have animatronic heads placed on their bodies. The interpretive nature was definitely meant to feed the fanbase’s growing interest in the hints at the sinister truth besides these oddly dangerous childrens’ restaurants, but the game already plays a few scenes at set points and it feels like death minigames merely existing perhaps encouraged the difficulty increase a bit too much.

Besides an abnormally difficult and optional 6th Night to play after beating the game and a custom night where you can tinker with the difficulties of all the animatronics individually, the last notable elements of Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 are the options referred to as unlocks. Again only available in the Microsoft Store version and console ports rather than the Steam release, the same batch from the first game return here and serve as a way of lowering the difficulty for players who just wish to beat the game. Unlimited power means you are free to use your flashlight as much as you like which doesn’t completely guarantee your safety like keeping the doors closed in the first game did, so it’s a more understandable boon to give yourself if you’re struggling. The radar showing the locations of all the animatronics means you can babysit the music box more, but it still doesn’t completely eliminate the challenge the robots present as you need to be ready with your flashlight or mask when appropriate. The last option is speeding up the night to take less time to complete, this being the simplest change and one that doesn’t dissolve some of the tension in the ways the other options do. However, the thing these three options do most for Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 is show how absurd the difficulty can really get, as even with all three enabled, the later nights can still put up a fight as Balloon Boy or the music box prove to be aggravating annoyances that even these options that are basically cheats can’t completely balance out the pile-up of dangers you’ll face.

THE VERDICT: The eerie atmosphere of sitting at your desk in Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 is certainly strong, the hallway before you instilling a vulnerability that pays off with fright if you any of the animatronics slip past your meager means of defending yourself. Unfortunately the tension and fear present in the early nights gives way to irritation and frustration as the game piles on way too many factors and foes to keep up with. The music box is an incessant worry that must be attended to in order to avoid triggering your imminent doom, Balloon Boy can completely remove your means to defend yourself from the most lethal regular robot despite it being hard to predict the child statue’s approach, and since winding up the music box and wearing the mask both prevent the other from being done, you can find yourself in situations where you are destined to lose because too many robots are active at once. The difficulty and irritating mechanics really rob Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 of its enjoyability, and while the animatronics have some effective designs and the stage was set for an intense set of nights at the pizzeria, the jump scares stop being the payoff to atmospheric build up and become a harsh reality of the game’s variables not accommodating one another.

And so, I give Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 for PC…

A BAD rating. While the neediness of the music box feels like a poor way to add more interactivity to the rather passive concept of sitting in an office and trying to avoid robots popping up to scare you, it was Balloon Boy who pushed this game over the edge. The danger of The Puppet instantly killing you if the music stops is certainly annoying all the same and ruins the appeal of the cameras, but almost every robot will instantly kill you if you don’t respond in the right way. The thing that makes Balloon Boy different is the difficulty in keeping track of his movements and responding at the exact right moment in the right way or else sealing your fate as you are left sitting in a dark office waiting for death. Balloon Boy basically makes every other system a little worse, since now the means of holding off all the other robots can be stripped away. Managing the music box, the hallway, and your mask usage would already make for a hard game with some moments that feel hopeless but could still seem surmountable, but there really are too many active animatronics and despite all the excellence found in making unsettling designs and a creepy setting and tone, Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 just has too much going on that actually playing it switches over from terrifying to nearly terrible. If not for the early nights and how effective the game can be at being scary when there isn’t a danger overload the game would certainly be worse, but most of the trouble builds up the later you get and the game can still be beaten once you have a deeper knowledge of its systems.

Still, it is unfortunate that the sequel to such a smash hit took the criticisms of the first game and overcompensated. The music box isn’t an improvement in interactivity despite demanding more attention, and the difficulty becomes a bit absurd once the cast becomes so plentiful and they don’t account for the immediate failure conditions the other robots are bringing to the table. Scott Cawthon at least didn’t totally tank the game by diving too deep into these design directions and a lot of the aesthetic and tonal elements can still shine before things become frustrating, but this certainly feels like a case where a sequel, despite packing in more content, ends up the lesser game for it.