The Haunted Hoard: Five Nights at Freddy’s 4 (Xbox One)
After three installments in the Five Nights at Freddy’s franchise, it seemed like the games were all going to be built from the same formula of sitting in a security office and looking at monitors to help avoid being killed by roaming animatronics. However, for the fourth installment, the game that was originally planned to end the series, we find ourselves not in the problem-filled pizzerias but instead the bedroom of a little boy who has no cameras, no mask to hide his identity with, or any sort of technology to assist him save a little flashlight.
Five Nights at Freddy’s 4 is a prequel game focusing on a young child who is being plagued by nightmares of the animatronics found at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza. The unsettling appearances of the unintentionally disturbing restaurant mascots is finally at the root of traumatizing a child rather than being twisted into making these robots legitimately dangerous to a night watchman, but like many things when you’re young, the imagined version is much worse than the reality. As the boy stays up late in fear of being caught by the animatronics, he finds that the original set of four characters have been warped into new nightmare forms. Rather than leaning on the uncanny mix of their plush cartoonish appearance intersecting oddly with the mechanical insides, the animatronics have leaned directly into typical horror tropes with multiple rows of razor sharp teeth, glowing eyes, and multiple patches of felt torn out of their bodies to make them almost zombie-like. Each of the main four robots have something to make them uniquely terrifying, from Freddy Fazbear actually being an amalgamation of tiny versions of the hat-wearing bear to Foxy the pirate fox’s exposed metal frame looking almost like a skeleton. Nightmare Bonnie the rabbit is the most in-tact, but Chica the chicken’s head seems almost split in half by her enormous jaws and she carries a cupcake robot with the same unusual feature. A few other animatronics can appear based on the night you’re on and which difficulty it is set to, but they all rely on this exaggeration of the animal animatronics into something that truly can only be meant for horror.
The main goal of this installment of the franchise is once again to survive five nights that last from midnight to 6 A.M. without being caught by the animatronics, but the kid who must protect himself from these nightmarish manifestations of the pizzeria’s machines isn’t really equipped with much to help him with such a task. There are four areas of attack the robots can come from, there being two hallways to either side of the room, a closet that Foxy can slip into and wait to spring out of, and a bed behind the kid that you need to turn to at times to scare off Freddy’s toy-sized minions. The little Freddy minions that appear on the bed are the simplest to deal with, the player only needing to remember to turn around at regular intervals and turn on a flashlight to make them scatter away, but the other areas of approach the animatronics use are a bit more difficult to manage. This is, unfortunately, in part due to the game’s choice of tutorial. There is no man on a phone explaining things in depth this time, the player instead getting a set of controls and small tips on the first night on what they’re meant to do and how to do it.
If one of the animatronics is in the hallway, your flashlight can send it scampering away, but the tutorial doesn’t tell you the footsteps after are a good indicator of where it’s moving to. However, when you go and check the hallways doors to see if someone is lurking there, if they’re already close to the bedroom, turning on the flashlight will be an instant death. The game does warn you to listen for breathing when you first check the hallway to avoid this, but it does not give you any idea what this breathing sounds like. Rather than something close to human breathing, it’s actually closer to a rhino huffing air out of its nose, a sound that is likely meant to sound like someone wearing a mask’s suppressed breathing. Until you recognize the noise, it can be easy to mistake one of the game’s red herring audio cues for it, there being plenty of ambient noises like clattering in the kitchen or dogs barking in the neighborhood to get you jumpy. Once you can identify the breathing you can at least close the door to keep them out until they walk off, but the focus on listening very closely to sometimes intentionally deceptive audio does threaten to make one of the core parts of playing Five Nights at Freddy’s 4 a bit more frustrating.
Admittedly, Five Nights at Freddy’s 4 may be the installment in the series that scared me the most so far. Part of this comes directly from the fact you need to turn your volume so high to hear those important audio cues, so when one of the robots does leap out to attack you, their abrupt screaming is much more shocking. It feels a little cheap to arrange things this way, but managing the doors and bed at least has a frantic sense to it where it feels like you can’t afford to sit and wait when an animatronic could always be lurking somewhere. Fortunately, at the start of each night the closet before you is empty, but once Foxy manages to slip in, you need to start checking on the door periodically, opening and shutting it to calm the pirate fox down until he’s not reared for an attack. Having him and the Freddy minions tied to visual cues more than audio at least means you aren’t straining your ears the whole game, but there is one night that shifts up the rules dramatically.
Once you’ve survived four nights, the fifth night upends the rules of play without telling you what the new ones are. Some elements like checking the bed are similar, but now laughter is added to the mix of important audio cues you can’t afford to miss, this usually a signal that the night’s unique animatronic has infiltrated the bedroom and now requires more careful monitoring of every avenue of approach. The difficult shift in style does make this one of the more compelling nights, especially as it taps into the same one-on-one fight for survival aspect Five Nights at Freddy’s 3 achieved with only one active animatronic. The lack of instructions is still an issue, but it might also be because realizing how you are meant to respond to each sound or sight does begin to make actually surviving the night feel more like repeating a routine rather than a tense scramble to check all of the locations a robot may attack you from. If you do learn what you need to do and complete all five nights though you can unlock a much more difficult Night 6 as well as Nightmare difficulty, this setting mixing in Night 5’s animatronic with the others for some truly challenging tests of your ability to manage the four areas of importance.
Unlike the first three Five Nights at Freddy’s games on Xbox One, this one holds onto its unlocks and cheats until you’ve done almost all there is to do in the game. If you want to be able to monitor where an animatronic is lurking, speed up the night, or get indicators to tell you if a robot is in the two hallways, you will have already mastered the game’s hardest challenge to earn such options here. Other unlockables consist of viewing character assets and the like or participating in challenges that will do things like have Foxy in the closet at the start of a night or completely render the player blind so they have to do everything by sound despite that removing many important visual cues, but for an optional mode it’s doing no harm by existing.
Between the rounds of anxiously running around the bedroom to ensure you’re safe, there are a few minigames to be found. One of the more interesting ones is Fun with Plushtrap, a little stuffed animal version of the grisly green rabbit robot from Five Nights at Freddy’s 3 now sitting eerily at the end of a dark hallway. The player is given a short time limit with which they are meant to allow Plushtrap to get incredibly close to killing them before they turn on the flashlight to render him inanimate. Plushtrap will only move in the dark and the player will lose time by making Plushtrap come to a stop if they activate the flashlight too early, but what makes this simple concept so interesting is that successfully beating it will skip ahead the next night’s clock to 2 AM, making it easier to complete the night provided you’re able to adjust to whatever tweaks to difficulty or robot behavior have been added.
The other minigames are all tied to this game’s story, the player experiencing moments from the terrified child’s life by way of small interactive moments styled like they were Atari 2600 games. These simplistic scenes reveal why the kid is so terrified of the animatronics as well as giving us a sobering look at his home life and how others treat him, and while the story progression is mostly building up to a big reveal rather than something with a lot of details to follow, it does add an extra layer to the way you see the rest of the game. More clear contextualization from these reproduced events in the boy’s life definitely helps to make the action feel like it has more meaning behind it than a little kid shooing the bad dreams away.
THE VERDICT: By leaning more on audio cues for successfully evading the killer animatronics, Five Nights at Freddy’s 4 assures more effective jumpscares while also leading to more frustrating moments of play. The rather limited tutorial doesn’t give some of the vital info you need to succeed, especially when it comes to how the robot breathing sounds or what other noises to listen for and react to, but the game does still nail a feel of helplessness with its child protagonist struggling to cover all four areas of potential attack with nothing but a flashlight. The animatronic designs have been made truly ghoulish and the story handed out through the minigames connects nicely to these nightmarish nights, but it can sometimes feel like the game prefers exploiting gaps in your knowledge rather than building legitimate challenges.
And so, I give Five Nights at Freddy’s 4 for Xbox One…
An OKAY rating. Teetering on the edge of being too easy when you understand it and too difficult when you don’t, Five Nights at Freddy’s 4 thankfully doesn’t lean in either direction to the degree where game knowledge will either completely trivialize it if present or make it impossible if you don’t have it. You can eventually learn what the breathing sounds like through experimentation, but when the game screams in your face for every failure before you know that information it definitely feels a bit unfair. When you do get to the later nights though, the game at least starts adding a few more variables to the mix so you can’t just cycle through the hallways, bed, and closet in a mindless loop as they all might spring their surprise if you aren’t watching for other cues. I do think the insistence on noises being important does lead to some jump scares feeling like they were mean rather than a payoff to the atmosphere, but at least the game can say it achieves that atmosphere quite well. The dark house at night with the ambient noises does feel eerily empty and the child feels absolutely alone in holding off these nightmarish machines, the sense of dread made only worse by the fact that when you do catch a robot in your flashlight’s beam, they look positively gruesome. The focus on a clear story and other small touches like the high stakes Fun with Plushtrap minigame do a lot to help Five Nights at Freddy’s 4 avoid being done in by the rough patches in its newly implemented concepts, but it really is a shame this is the Five Nights at Freddy’s game where I can’t say that it doesn’t earn its jumpscares due to the unclear tutorial and manipulative reliance on turning your audio up to survive.
While the shift from the formula does lead to some of the better aspects of Five Nights at Freddy’s 4, the sudden interest in having sound play such a huge role in the game puts it on shaky ground. It still can provide a terrifying time once all the relevant information is known by the player, but it is still fortunate that this mediocre installment wasn’t the finale to the series. While it is a franchise that has been chastised for releasing a rather high number of games in a short period of time, the seemingly similar set of four games that constitute what was intended to be the only installments do feel different and end up with differing levels of quality because of Scott Cawthon’s willingness to experiment with the design. While I’ll certainly look at the spin-off games and follow-ups down the road, my time with the four Five Nights at Freddy’s titles I covered this October definitely helped me see that there is a lot more going on in this franchise then sitting around and waiting to be scared.