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Five Nights at Freddy’s / Five Nights at Freddy’s 2
Developed by Scott Cawthon
Distributed on iOS and Steam
No ESRB classification
Hey, have you been on YouTube ever? Seen any of those “lettuce plays” that are all the rage? Then you have seen Five Nights at Freddy’s. Seriously, if you live on the internet, it is impossible to avoid bad scare-cam Let’s Plays made by men screaming for the appeasement of children and man-children alike. On the one hand, it seems like this game was specifically made so that men trying to be the real life equivalent of Spongebob could pretend to lose their shit over it. On the other hand… it’s actually kind of a clever and well done indie game. I’ve always held the opinion that you can’t really judge a piece of work by its fans, but there are only so many My Chemical Romance concerts you can be the oldest person at before you start to question your judgement. Five Nights at Freddy’s is among titles like Slender and Happy Wheels in the pantheon of basic bullshit internet antichrists, so believe me when I say how hard it is for me to grit my teeth and give this game a good review.
Don’t get me wrong; I hate Five Nights at Freddy’s, and not in the “guy that talks to me too much and always tries too hard to ask me about my sex life” kind of way. I hate Five Nights at Freddy’s like vegans hate butchers. You take something I love, cut it up into a totally unrecognizable mess, and everyone thinks that’s what it normally looks like. Turkeys do not come with their feathers off and their giblets already stuffed up their cavity, and gamers are not screaming man children who make rape jokes every time it might get them an extra page view. That role is reserved solely for media critics, prostitutes the lot.
I am reviewing these titles together because A) they are basically the same game and B) I have to remove one of my testicles every time I write something nice about Five Nights at Freddy’s, and I might want to spawn someday. To give you a brief overview of the differences between the games, in the first you close doors to stop things from murdering you, and in the second you either wear a mask, turn on a flashlight, or wind up a music box to stop things from murdering you. In the first game there are 4 animatronic things that kill you, and in the second there are like 6 or something. Look up a markiplier let’s play if you really give a shit and want to drown in a puddle of screaming filth.
Okay, okay, sorry. Five Nights at Freddy’s is actually pretty good. Based on your personal gaming preferences, you will think that the game is either that kind of creepy thing you didn’t care to play again or the most terrifying shit ever. The basic premise of the game is that you are a security guard at copyright safe Chuck E. Cheeses, and at night the animatronic figures come to life and walk the halls. You are stationed in a control room, and your only method of tracking the robots is with strategically placed cameras. You do your best to follow their movements, and then either close doors/interact with the environment to keep them at bay. You have to survive for 6 hours game time, and you only have a limited amount of power to check the cameras and keep the doors closed. In the second game you have to do the aforementioned music box/mask/light routine to keep things away, but it’s basically the same concept.
The animatronic figures won’t move while you look at them, so they all have this uncanny mannequin quality to them. At one moment they will be on stage, still lifeless, and at the next the could be looking right into the camera of the hallway outside your door. They are supposed to move around in a logical order, room to connected room, but it seems like this is way more of a factor in the first game than the second. The second is largely about responding to spooky things in your face as fast as possible while winding a music box. If they manage to get to you, they jump in your face and scream in what can only be described as a Newgrounds flash game manner, and you have to start the night over. Make it 6 in game hours, and you pass to the next night. I didn’t time it, but Wikipedia says 6 in game hours takes 8-9 minutes, so let’s go with that.
Each animatronic animal has different behavior, so managing what keeps which at bay and figuring out which one is stalking you from what angle can be an incredibly tense and rewarding task. Some are scared off by lights, while others get angry if you aren’t looking at them. While sometimes the game does fall victim to RBG (random bullshit generator), overall you get a sense that the reason you lose is because you failed to keep your time well managed. There’s nothing quite like running out of power at the last second and praying the clock turns over before the automatic loss triggers.
As for visuals, the camera feeds are staticy and the rooms covered in shadows. It is always a start when you switch to a camera and one of the animatrons is looking right into it, but it can be even more terrifying to switch to one and see it just standing peacefully in the shadows. The environments are all drenched with this surreal “real place gone wrong” feel reminiscent of Silent Hill outside of the dark world, and it would be a disservice to say that it evokes anything other than an uneased choking dread. I mean sure, staticy feeds and characters that only move when you aren’t looking is a cheap trick, but its the kind of cheap trick that wears that special shade of red lipstick that gets you off and the eyeliner just smeared enough to be hot.
On top of being tense and decently challenging, Five Nights at Freddy’s also has a great sense of building a good horror narrative. The right blend of comedic and mysterious, every night before the level begins you are called by the manager, who informs you of the new level conditions. It’s a really great touch, and goes a really long way towards both educating the player and breaking the monotony of the game. If nothing else, at least try to look up a video of the calls, as they are worth listening to.
To top it off, the game is really cheap. The first is $5 normally and currently discounted down to $3.34, and the second is $8 normally and currently discounted down to $6.39. I would be willing to bet these will both go on sale sometime during the sale, so pick them up if you want a good quick but satisfying horror romp. Definitely worth the price, and definitely better than Youtube hype.
If Markiplier were a real human being, he would be the guy that held Hitler’s hand in times of doubt, and told him that if he really just tried, the world would see he had great ideas.
3 1/2 out of 5
Categorized:Horror Gaming News
