The Haunted Hoard: Five Nights at Freddy’s: Sister Location (Switch)
After playing the first four Five Nights at Freddy’s games for the Haunted Hoard back in 2021, I decided to spend some time away from the horror game series to avoid its gameplay format growing old, but as I started to play Five Nights at Freddy’s: Sister Location, I realized I should have known better. Scott Cawthon has proven with each entry that he seems to take feedback from the previous games into account when designing a new one, and after four games of sitting in one location and trying to avoid deadly jumpscares, Five Nights at Freddy’s: Sister Location moves away from this formula for its main adventure. You can actually walk around now, performing what could almost be called a set of minigames this time around as the animatronic mascot horror moves into truly new territory for the series.
Rather than taking place at the familiar Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria, Five Nights at Freddy’s: Sister Location makes good on the title’s implication and instead focuses on a nearly unrelated set of animatronics. Also part of the broader company is a family fun center called Circus Baby’s Pizza World which features mascot characters that seem to be angled more towards a female demographic. Their leading lady Circus Baby is a pig-tailed clown girl who spends time with little babies, a ballerina, and some pastel colored variants of the more familiar Freddy Fazbear and even Foxy, the Funtime Foxy variant abandoning pirate theming entirely in favor of bright white fur and lipstick. A new style of animatronic is being utilized at this location as well, forgoing any felt in favor of tough plastic shells that end up having a good degree of visible breaks since separation would be required for motion, construction, and disassembly. On the animal animatronics this looks believable if a bit too clean, Funtime Foxy for instance not looking too uncanny save for in close-ups or under the right lighting. However, the animatronics based on humans can almost take it too far in the other direction, Circus Baby’s heavily segmented face hard to buy as something that would be constructed without clear intent to terrify. Ballora the ballerina feels like she comes out better for being clearly unnerving but a bit more believable, mainly because more focus was put on her oddly shaped but always open smile and closed eyes.
This time around though, the animatronics aren’t only leaning on their looks to make you uneasy and help set the eerie tone. These advanced animatronics almost all have voices, sound used excellently here compared to its abuse for cheap scares in Five Nights at Freddy’s 4. Ballora the ballerina may not look too intimidating, but Michella Moss voices her excellently in a cold, mature, and haunting manner that doesn’t even need to try and be scary but works because of the context that she could kill you if she finds you. Funtime Freddy is not only a bit glitchy, but talking to his underling handpuppet Bon-Bon who replies back gives them an unhinged energy. The Bidybabs that hang around Circus Baby are another example of on-the-nose horror design as the baby dolls looks too intentionally creepy with the big teeth and lipless mouths, but their whispers in a child’s voice are enough to send a chill down your spine. The most important use of voice though is for Circus Baby herself, as she is essentially the main character of the plot to Five Nights at Freddy’s: Sister Location.
While a delightfully malfunctioning corporate AI is responsible for introducing important details and explaining game mechanics to you, your time spent working at the robotics center for Circus Baby’s Pizzeria across five nights is not just a tale of survival. Right at the very beginning we hear some flashback narration of the now infamous William Afton, name dropped with no air of mystery this time, to hook you in on this newest tale exploring the horrific past of this company and the man most responsible for the many animatronic-related deaths it has wracked up over the years. After each night is over, beyond a silly bit spent watching a vampire soap opera that is deliberately corny to contrast the horror, you’ll also hear the voice of William’s daughter and begin piecing together her connection to Circus Baby. In a rare moment for the franchise thus far, the plot seems fairly self-contained and not in huge need of extraneous materials to interpret, but what can make it more interesting is exactly how Circus Baby speaks to you. The animatronic has a level of intelligence close to humanity and will use it to help you at points across the nights, but she also seems to struggle to grasp the more horrific elements of what is going on. She has fear for her own mortality and almost traumatic responses in terms of failing to comprehend specific elements, but she also seems somewhat a slave to her programming too and unable to think too far outside herself. She’s a properly fleshed out character if one in a fairly short game that doesn’t give her too much time to speak, but Five Nights at Freddy’s: Sister Location is able to feed both the wider fan community with more nuggets for broader theorizing while also providing a more self-contained tale if this happens to be your only encounter with the series.
As for what your five nights at Circus Baby’s Entertainment and Rental facility will entail, that changes each night. One night you may have to pop open Funtime Freddy’s internals for fixes while avoiding his still animate puppet, another you need to sneak through the dark while keeping your ears open for how loud the music that accompanies Ballora’s dancing through the hall is so you can freeze up and trick her motion detection. Each minigame is built around some sort of activity that usually tests your ability to manage a task while under threat of immediate death should you slip up or fail to address the active threat often enough to pacify them. These all do somewhat hit on the series’s core idea of trying to keep your calm while doing a somewhat simple job since overdoing it or forgetting a specific aspect will lead to an immediate deadly jumpscare, although Five Nights at Freddy’s: Sister Location is nice in that checkpoints often only leaving you repeating the most recent task most of the time, just not with the option to skip as much of the chatter leading up to it as you might like. Still, whether its little scares seeded into the actual performance of a task, the flicker of a looming threat being nearby that you quickly need to address, or the constant dread as you’re worried about pushing past the point of safety despite the task getting more demanding, Five Nights at Freddy’s: Sister Location lays out a decent set of tasks for inspiring a bit of fear in you even if a few of them are a bit too easy to counter once you understand the idea at play.
On the other hand, that is better than something like Night 4’s hard battle to keep spinning a wide range of dials. Too far apart to view all at once, the dials must be constantly wound back, but Ballora’s little ballerina minions threaten to take you out if you don’t notice them climbing towards you in the darkness and respond appropriately. Random luck ends up being quite a factor because things like how much the dials need winding is somewhat random at first, but it is at least the kind of task that you feel some satisfaction in clearing despite its annoying elements. Night 4 feels a bit better than the game’s alternate Night 5 after all, your first run through the game providing a condensed but decently scary experience but a post-release update added a great deal more content but not in the most intuitive of ways.
Occasionally throughout the adventure you’ll sometimes find your death followed up not with a retry option, but a little minigame meant to look like an old Atari 2600 game. A bit too colorful to be realistic if we weren’t already ignoring that the animatronics are already too advanced for their time, the minigame is actually a bit of a puzzle platformer where you have limited cupcakes to feed to little kids and puzzling out how to do it within the time limit is a solid challenge. However, if you beat it, you won’t unlock the game’s alternate ending and extra mode. Instead, you must perform a fairly unintuitive action to unlock the alternate ending that isn’t hinted at properly within the game itself, but once you have done it, you can then attempt the main story’s final secret challenge which is tough and a rare instance where the checkpoint system sets you back past multiple other actions to make retrying it tedious.
Stick with it and clear that challenge though and you unlock Custom Night, Five Nights at Freddy’s: Sister Location actually containing the more familiar gameplay style for the series of sitting at a desk and trying to keep deadly animatronics from killing you before your shift ends. This was perhaps added after release because the base game was a departure from the norm, but it is a shame it’s made difficult to unlock since the Custom Night has some effective new ideas. You are still sitting in one dark room with a pad you can pull up to view various camera feeds around the area outside your office, the player needing to manage their electricity that gets spent whenever you seal the doors or vents or look at your tablet for information. However, as the name Custom Night implies, you can choose what you go up against, the animatronics from the main game and a few new ones able to be altered to more or less aggressive or even appear in curated pre-sets. Ballora is in top form with her haunting voice and music serving as an effective and eerie clue, but there are more unique and tricky threats like one animatronic that drains your power unless you find him on camera and administer a little shock or the miniature ballerinas being able to suck oxygen out of your room if they aren’t dealt with. Unfortunately, the Minireenas also contain a pretty terrible idea, where they can just cling to your face and block your view for the rest of the night with no counter in place or really any further form of interesting complication. A fairly bland idea that doesn’t enhance much, it’s thankfully the only real stinker in a set of animatronics that otherwise lurk around the area in effective and varied ways to make the survival test one worth seeing even if the game put some unfortunate barriers in front of unlocking this nice extra element to extend the game’s life past the structured story.
THE VERDICT: Five Nights at Freddy’s: Sister Location takes the series gameplay style’s intent and applies it to new activities, the nervousness of trying to keep yourself safe while doing a somewhat demanding task leading to the tension that pays off at times with relief and at others with a startling scare. The new location and characters are helped by the effective voice acting and self-contained story even if some designs strain believability, but it is the somewhat hit or miss nature of the different tasks that make this stay at the sister location a bit of a middle of the road experience in terms of interesting play and effective frights. Adding in the traditional format of managing rogue animatronics from an office to avoid your untimely end is a smart play even if it is buried behind a tough unlock condition, but for the most part it is a nice different direction for the games to take albeit not one that feels like its found exactly what it should do with this sort of minigame format.
And so, I give Five Nights at Freddy’s: Sister Location for Nintendo Switch…
An OKAY rating. I have been talking a bit about Five Nights at Freddy’s: Sister Location as if it was the original release of the game when the Switch version came a few years after its initial release with all updates built in, but beyond a few things like potentially struggling to notice small buttons you need to press if you’re playing in T.V. mode, most elements of its port didn’t bear discussion compared to the actual substance of the game that would be the same across platforms. Having the unlockable Custom Night after the main story allows Five Nights at Freddy’s: Sister Location to have the more familiar and still effective gameplay style in place without it feeling as rote and overdone in the fifth game of what was originally a set of games released across only three years. Having to learn each new interaction during your time with the circus animatronics gives a more specific and sometimes personal way to interact with the specific robot out to kill you, and while Funtime Foxy gets the short end of the stick in basically being a less interesting twist on Ballora’s stealth section, you do get a fair few memorable and tense interactions with the rest of the cast. In Custom Night the Bidybab isn’t too special, but your encounter with it in the main game is better catered towards them even if it is also example of the kind of interaction you won’t struggle too much with once you understand it. On the other hand, Night 4 with the Minireenas can almost tip things too much towards difficulty, but it does better make for a challenge that puts you on edge in a meaningful way. Leaving the desk has lead to a bit of experimentation on how to make these robots scary outside the reliable context the Five Nights games had before, but it works often enough and smart elements like the focused story and voice acting bring it to life even when it’s not hitting too hard elsewhere with the horror.
Five Nights at Freddy’s: Sister Location took the risk of straying from the tried and true and that doesn’t lead it down a bad path. It has its effective moments and it seems the need to be a bit more creative in design might have encouraged other important touches like adding in voice acting that elevates the horror and even the bits of comedy between the scares. Custom Night maybe should have just been your reward for clearing the game normally, but even if it hadn’t been present, you still get a few forms of play that work well. You get the anxious management and the uncanny animatronics like you’d expect from the franchise, but a little something different as is appropriate of a game billing itself not as the Fazbear you know, but as the somewhat similar but still distinct sister.