The Haunted Hoard: Five Nights at Freddy’s 3 (PC)

While Scott Cawthon definitely has a handle on atmospheric horror and uncanny character design, perhaps the eeriest thing about the Five Nights at Freddy’s series is how each sequel seems to so closely address the criticisms of the previous game. As seen with Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 this hasn’t always lead to success, but in the case of Five Nights at Freddy’s 3, the failures of its predecessor benefit it immensely.

 

Rather than dealing with far too many animatronics that you can barely pay attention to as too many tasks demand attention, Five Nights at Freddy’s 3 dials it back to one single animatronic: Springtrap. This weathered green rabbit animatronic is perhaps the creepiest design featured in the series yet, its ragged and worn felt body making it look outright rancid and its stare feeling more like something with true intelligent thought is looking right at you. Its eyeballs featuring detailed irises and the half lowered eyelids evoke the kind of demented stare found in Stanley Kubrick movies, and at times it can seem like he’s toying with the player or aware that he’s being countered by the player’s actions as the night watchman, Springtrap looking right back at the player through the cameras. His goal is to make his way to the office you’re working in and kill you, but since he’s the only threat in the building this time around, it’s a far more intimate struggle, the player directly competing with this AI to keep him at bay and make it to the end of the night. It can be immensely satisfying to trick or trap him because of this, his extra layer of personality despite being a robot making your actions feel more substantial than just shutting out a mindless machine.

 

As for why the player finds themselves up against Springtrap, it turns out that Five Nights at Freddy’s 3 takes place 30 years after Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza is closed for the multiple violent incidents involving its animatronics, and by this point in time the restaurant had developed such a level of infamy that a new horror attraction known as Fazbear’s Frights is built to capitalize on the terrible history of the food franchise. The new attraction is built with bits and pieces of the old pizzeria and made to resemble a real working restaurant, but during your first night working from 12 to 6, there’s nothing to be worried about. You’re given a primer on how things work even though there’s no true threat lurking in these eerie dark halls yet, but on night two, the owners have managed to find one old animatronic and activate it in the attraction. This is of course Springtrap, and for the four remaining nights of the work week you’ll do what you can to survive as the animatronic lurks the halls and tries to make his way towards your office.

Luckily for you, Springtrap is your only real concern, but there are some elements that stand in your way of just keeping an eye on him the whole time. The building features 10 major rooms all with their own camera feeds, some of which are rather dark and Springtrap can easily hide in the corner or blend in if you aren’t looking at a feed carefully. You can only view one feed at a time and Springtrap is often completely still, only really moving when he’s sneaking into your office or pouncing forward to kill you with a horrific shriek. Luckily, those piercing eyes will often expose him if they’re visible in the light, and while Springtrap has to take room connections in a believable manner to make his way towards the office, he can also slip out of sight by crawling into the air vents. You have some camera feeds for these as well in addition to the option to lock off one of the five vent pathways at a time, thus cutting off his shortcuts so long as you pick the one he’s trying to take. You aren’t just passively watching him either, as in a surprise twist, the voice of the ever-annoying Balloon Boy from the previous game is now your most reliable life-saving tool. While viewing a camera feed, you can send out a small clip of the child’s voice, Springtrap drawn to that area so long as he’s in hearing range of it. You need to recharge the sound after each use, but this noise allows you to stop Springtrap’s forward progress and can even make him retreat from standing outside of your office. Oddly enough, it can also seem that locking eyes with Springtrap as he stares in your doorway deters him from attacking, but it’s not a tactic that works permanently for a few reasons because none of these systems are perfectly reliable.

 

Periodically, the ventilation system, camera feeds, and even the audio device you use as a lure will malfunction, the player needing to turn away from the camera feed in their office and reboot the systems on their computer. While a system is rebooting you are left staring at the computer waiting for it to resolve, and since the options are either to reboot them one by one or do a full system reboot that takes quite a while, this gives time for Springtrap to move about and sabotage any attempt to just stare at him and lure him back to the back rooms when necessary. Failing to address these systems being down can have a few adverse side effects as well. Having your ductwork controls down means you can’t close off a vent if he’s inside it, camera feed’s dangers are obvious as you literally won’t be able to keep track of Springtrap, and while it might seem like audio devices can be left to wait if you don’t need to lure Springtrap at the time, the malfunctioning device will soon begin to loudly blare and a red light will flash to lure Springtrap to the office instead. The need to keep your systems active is what gives Five Nights at Freddy’s 3 its tension as Springtrap can and will take advantage of any distractions you must deal with, so even though you don’t need to worry about power or cranking a music box to keep an instant death at bay, Springtrap remains a terrifying and legitimate threat even though he plays by a set of fair rules.

 

While the other animatronics from the first two games won’t be making any physical appearances here, they do return in some capacity in the form of hallucinations that can trigger if you spot something strange on your cameras. Known as Phantom Animatronics, these feature characters like Freddy Fazbear, the bird robot Chica, the child statue Balloon Boy, and the twisted mechanical skeleton Mangle all with blackened versions of their old designs. Already eerie in their original designs for touching on unsettling mixtures of friendliness, wear and tear, and artificiality, the Phantom Animatronics now appear as if they’ve been burnt in a fire and have piercing white eyes to match Springtrap’s. These hallucinations don’t happen randomly though, as you must trigger them by finding the face of one of the robots on a camera feed or spotting them as they’re lurking near your office. Foxy can pop up inside your office for a surprise fright and Freddy Fazbear is actually seen walking outside your office window and, if spotted out of the corner of your eye, might make you think its Springtrap since he pulls the same tactic, so these hallucinations can already make you jumpy just from existing in the game. However, if you do linger too long while looking at one, they’ll suddenly appear in front of you for a jump scare that can get your heart racing with its suddenness, but these aren’t just cheap frights. A Phantom Animatronic jumping out at you will cause systems on the computer to malfunction and require immediate attention, so if one is on your camera feed you need to swap away quickly and if they’re in or around your office you need to quickly turn to avert your gaze. They are mostly a nuisance because of the need to be quick with clicking to avoid a sudden fright, but their function in disabling the computer system is still key in giving Springtrap time to operate so they play an important role all the same.

While surviving the five nights is still your priority and Springtrap makes for an excellent and difficult antagonist during it, there’s some other things going on in Five Nights at Freddy’s 3. Every night ends with a new minigame where you play what appears to be an old-fashioned video game reminiscent of the kind of graphics seen in Atari 2600 games, and while these minigames are rather basic, you actually get some rather concrete lore on Springtrap’s history by sticking with these minigames. There are other similar minigames that can be found during your shifts at the restaurant too by finding coded messages in these minigames and executing certain actions. These secondary minigames tap a little bit into the backstory for the series as well as further hinting at elements surrounding the violent past of the original Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza while also vital for getting one of the game’s two endings. Unfortunately, the two endings are almost identical and it’s not actually satisfying to gun for the marginally better one, but there are a few options unlocked for making it all five nights.

 

You can unlock a sixth much harder night, and one of the unlockable Cheats is to actually make Springtrap far more aggressive for an even tougher night. The other three cheats are, for the first time in the Microsoft Store versions of the Five Nights games, not inexplicably unlocked to begin with, meaning younger players may struggle to make it through all five nights. Besides speeding up the nights so each one is shorter though, the other two cheats definitely make it too easy with the Radar option allowing you to always know where Springtrap is and thus removing the danger he poses while the No Errors cheat means you never have a reason to look away from the task of keeping Springtrap far away. Considering the surprisingly personal battle between the player and Springtrap is the backbone of the experience, it was perhaps wise not to let the player completely remove any chance of Springtrap truly getting the drop on them.

THE VERDICT: Five Nights at Freddy’s 3 may only have one animatronic to contend with, but the battle between the player and Springtrap is a surprisingly compelling one. The robot’s design and posing makes it feel like he’s aware of your efforts to stop him and he relishes in unsettling you or gaining ground, and thus it is rather satisfying to know you’ve locked a vent to trap him or spotted him while he was hiding in a dark room. The phantom hallucinations feel like a bit of a necessary evil for how they impact the systems you need to monitor your target even if cheap scares aren’t the best way to remove some of the advantages you hold over Springtrap, but the rather intimate struggle to try and last all five nights with such an unsettling foe doing its best to kill you manages to remain tense and engaging because the power dynamic is so well balanced.

 

And so, I give Five Nights at Freddy’s 3 for PC…

A GOOD rating. While it has always been implied that the animatronics at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza are a little more than robots on the fritz trying to lethally cram you into mascot suits, Five Nights at Freddy’s 3 not only gives some of the series’s most concrete depictions of what the truth might be but also has its single true animatronic feel like it is more than just a mindless machine following flawed programming. Springtrap seems to enjoy psyching you out, he occasionally looks right into the camera or tries to hide in dark corners of the feed, and while he’s still beholden to functions like following the sounds of a child’s voice, it can feel like you are both trying to figure out what strategy will lead to the other losing in this one on one fight. Springtrap doesn’t really have any direct tools though, the hallucinations and system errors doing the work for him and giving him time to move around and hide. While these time burning distractions are a good way of keeping the player on their toes, it does feel like something more personal would play much better into the relationship the player has with their potential killer. Perhaps Springtrap being in a room could allow him to disable a system with some tie to it or provide some other kind of distraction. An arcade cabinet sits in one camera feed and can trigger the Phantom Chica hallucination, but it would be much more interesting if Springtrap could use his surroundings to his advantage like activating that arcade machine could drown out the noise your audio systems make until you can disable it. This is a bit more of a complex idea than the simple jump scare focused horrors on show, but the battle against Springtrap can still prove thrilling because survival feels so closely tied to your success and personal actions while the dark atmosphere and character designs ensure a foot remains in the horror genre even when you feel you’ve got the upper hand.

 

What seems at first an overcorrection to address complaints about there being too many animatronics in Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 actually turns out to be Five Nights at Freddy’s 3’s greatest strength. Springtrap is a true adversary, one who you must work to stave off and one with some actual subtle personality to him due to his poses and behavior. Other ideas like how hallucinations work and the minigames mostly being there to give small details on the past mean there are some moments that don’t support the battle with Springtrap as well as they could, but Five Nights at Freddy’s 3 has certainly shaken off the idea that you’re sitting in the office waiting to be jump scared as you must actively contend with a single threat to have any hope of surviving to that final night.