Five Nights at Freddy's

Yeah, right. Everyone has talked about this franchise, everyone has played these games, and everyone knows about Five Nights at Freddy’s. Why am I talking about it, then?

Because it’s a treasure of storytelling, that’s why. Or rather, it did not start that way, but it eventually grew to become this. In light of an actual Five Nights At Freddy’s movie being made, I felt like it was a good time to talk about the franchise. (Also, anything with FNAF in the name will bring in clicks.)

The big fans of the series know the backstory: Scott Cawthon was a video game developer with an impressive output, who yet couldn’t “make it”. At the time, his latest game was “Chipper and Sons Lumber Co.”, about a family of beavers chopping trees and managing their business. It was a cute little game for kids, and the story would normally end there; but then Cawthon received criticism that the characters in his game looked like robots or animatronics given life, which was pure uncanny valley to some. It just didn’t feel right. Following the harsh criticisms, Cawthon fell into a great depression. However, instead of attacking or suing his critics (as the bigger asshole developers on Steam are want to do nowadays), he instead took that criticism to heart… and built a horror game in which the uncanny valley of the foes is the entire point.

Animatronics given life? Yep, that’s Five Nights at Freddy’s alright. Scott Cawthon turned one of his original weaknesses into a massive franchise. Which isn’t to say that the franchise doesn’t have its weaknesses, although they lie more in the setting than in the gameplay itself.

The story for the first game is pretty simple, and merely serves as an excuse plot for said gameplay: You (Mike Schmidt?) find a job as a watchman at Freddy’s through a newspaper ad. You’re told by a guy on the phone that the animatronics are a little… erm, agitated at night and if they see you, they might try to stuff you into an empty animatronic suit. And kill you. But you’ll be fine as long as you can keep a safe amount of electric power for yourself! Oh, but checking the cameras uses power. Closing the doors? Uses power. I mean, they spring open when you run out of electricity, and that’s a real safety measure in some places, but you’ll wish they would close instead.

The concept is full of holes. First off, why not go to work in an animal costume if that’s the problem? I would never wear a fursuit, but if my life hinged on it… Second, we have to save power, so why is that fan running? If I had to choose between aerated death and sweaty survival, I’ll pick the latter and ditch the fan, thank you very much. As a matter of fact, why don’t I guard the place from outside? Problem solved! Oh, and also-

Original page from VG Cats.

ACK!

Long story short, the plot really stretches your suspension of disbelief, but you’re not here to question every element, you're here to play the damn game.

Speaking of game, Scott Cawthon almost made it a separate game to hide clues towards the next sequel on his site and in various promotional images, in a way to get investigative fans running and theorizing about the events of the upcoming title. It’s a nice way to involve the fandom and gets gears turning. Wild mass guesses all over the place. Letting theories run wild is a major reason why FNAF now has the success it does. There’s the horror, then there’s the anticipation at what’s coming next and everyone trying to piece together a mythos that has become more and more complex and labyrinthine as it went. The TVTropes pages for this franchise seem to have more spoiler entries than anywhere else, and that’s because some characters and situations are so ambiguous that nobody is quite sure what’s going on.

This pic doesn't convey much, but that's because you cannot
put sound bites on a picture.

At the start of it all, before the plot became convoluted and messy, we had this first game. Compared to the others, it's fairly simple; the plot is told through images and phone messages, while later games would include mini-games to flesh out the details of the story. Phone Guy offers some additional tidbits of information and implies some past events at the restaurant that add several layers of horror. The Bite of ‘87, as an example, which may or may not have been described in greater detail in a later game.

Anyone who has played this game, its sequels, or has watched Let’s Players reacting live can tell you: The game's horror is surprisingly effective. Yes, it uses the tired-and-trite cliché of the jump scare, but does it well. How? Well, most of the gameplay involves trying to stop the animatronics from reaching you. Pulling up the surveillance cameras takes up the whole screen. If a robot snuck in while you had your eyes glued to the cameras… well, you can guess.

That's an awful lot of rooms for a small pizzeria.

That’s the genius of FNAF: You know that a jump scare is coming. The animatronics are constantly staring at you with their dead eyes, and you can track their progression as they go from their room to yours, walking through the restaurant. You know they’re coming, and you know what will happen once they reach you – and that there are few ways to stop it. Everything you do is in order to prevent the jump scare from happening. And yet, sometimes, it happens. Maybe you kept the cameras pulled up for too long. Maybe you ran out of power to close the doors. After a moment, you spend most of the game in constant fear of the jump scare actually happening. It helps that said scares are very effective, especially when you thought a second ago that you were still fine. As a matter of fact, with a FNAF movie in the works, I wonder if they’ll ever be able to make these jump scares as effective in film – where we don’t have input and know that, by the rules of modern horror, there will be a few jump scares scattered in. The player's input is the reason why they work so well - they have only themselves to blame if an animatronic is suddenly in the security room, scaring the living bajeezus out of them.

Bonnie's messing with us. That, or something diabolical
is going on in there.

They know you're watching.
So they're watching you too.

Then there’s the progressing difficulty of the game, as is normal. From an easy first night, we see more animatronics being added with varying triggers. Bonnie and Chica won’t attack you unless you pull up the cameras first, so you’d think never checking them would save you. However, there’s Foxy, who will not attack you if you keep an eye on him through the cameras… forcing you to look at them, even if you’re being threatened by the other two. Oh, and Freddy joins the party on Night 3. Needless to say, by the end of the fifth night, our watchman is ready for retirement. Oh, and there’s also a final animatronic that is never alluded to…

Those are the titular five nights, but it would be a lie to say that the game ends there. For you see, you then unlock a sixth night, which features a very sudden difficulty spike. As if it wasn’t already hard enough! That’s alright, I’ve gotten used to wearing my brown pants by now. Of course, this is overtime for Mike Schmidt, meaning that he should be paid more than what he was paid for a single night before… Nope! A measly 50 cents is added to his paycheck for this night, the worst one of the lot.

Bad idea. Set them all to 0, that'll make everything
alright.

Allow me to channel the spirit and energy of Billy Mays as I scream, BUT WAIT! THERE’S MORE! Yes, in fact, there’s more. Beat Night 6, and you get access to Night 7, also known as the Custom Night. In it, you can actually set difficulty levels for all four animatronics – Freddy, Chica, Bonnie and Foxy. The difficulty levels go from 1 all the way to 20. Mind you, the animatronics aren’t harmless on Difficulty 0, but the game is outright demonic if you set them all to 20. In fact, very few have managed to beat what the fanbase has called the 4-20 challenge. You know what they say, 4:20 blaze it and all… I mean, to be willing to take on such a challenge, you pretty much have to be high on something. Or an idiot. Or very tenacious, sometimes the two overlap.

Now, to be fair, while the 4-20 custom night is extremely difficult, it’s not impossible. You can beat it, provided you play carefully. Story-wise, however, what does this mean for our protagonist?

Why, he’s fired! Granted, that’s the best thing that could happen to this poor guy after six nights of intense horror. The higher-ups at Freddy’s say he was let off due to “tampering with the animatronics”, “general unprofessionalism” and “odor”. Well, sorry I shat my pants! It happens to the best of us, especially when faced with the prospect of our own bloody, messy, painful death at the hands of robotic monsters! When you think about it, him getting fired is even stupider when you realize that someone smart would set the difficulty setting of every animatronic to 1, making them almost harmless, and were this not a game, that’s what Schmidt would do. But naaaaah, you're a gamer and you want a challenge, so 4-20 it is. And of course, the higher-ups at Freddy Fazbear absolutely want their animatronics to remain dangerous at night. I swear, these folks are the real monsters.

Working night shifts is already hard enough as it is, your sleep schedule gets all kinds of fucked up. I know, I’ve been doing night shifts for seven months and it’s now my reality to mostly sleep during the day and live in the evening. Poor Schmidt will be lucky if he ever sleeps again!

Oh, and there are some revelations in there too, something about children being murdered in the restaurant by a guy in purple, and then the souls of the murdered children going on to inhabit the robots… doesn’t explain why they’ve turned murderous, the explanation that they want to shove the watchman in a deadly suit because they think he’s an uncovered robot seems pretty poor to me. Oh well. I treat this as if it was unimportant, but this is the plot twist that gets built on with every following game. Yes, the Five Nights at Freddy’s franchise is famous for its jump scares, but it’s a perfectly horrifying story in its own right. Every new installment adds a new layer to the horror. Just how many kids did that freaking purple guy kill, anyway? That kind of psychopath is probably too insane to have a family and understand what it’s like to lose a child. (We have another revelation at the end, and we’re told that the restaurant will shut down soon… but that hasn’t stopped sequels from happening.)

What are you trying to do from over there?
Chicken me out?

All in all, a good game, but it does feel like it’s only the first in the series, with its simpler concept and basic gameplay mechanics. A lot of franchises tend to start simple, especially when we’re talking about indie series. Later titles would add new elements that make the games more complex, and some would even contain mini-games in the 8-bit style in order to explain more about the backstory of the Freddy’s pizzeria. I’ve heard that the fifth (technically sixth) game in the franchise, titled Sister Location, basically had new stuff going on every night. In order to explain the entire mythos, I would need to take a look at every game in the series (except maybe FNAF World, technically the fifth game) to explain everything that’s going on…

…and even then, many games end on ambiguous situations or stay unclear on what exactly happened (or who we’re following), so fans are still left guessing until the next installment… which answers two or three questions, and then brings some more to the table.

Another hardly-discussed elemet of this game is how, since
the animatronics move sometimes pretty fast from a room
to the next, there are possible screen images you won't get to
see on your camera. The odds are very low of seeing those -
and yet they can happen. This one, for instance, is an instant
Game Over as soon as you pull down the cameras.

Really, the big flaw of the first FNAF game is that there’s more interest in the plot than in the gameplay. Some people can’t stand the jump scares when it happens to them, so they prefer to watch Let’s Plays. That’s my case, although the gameplay is a part of it as I never got past Night 1. I know, I suck. This is not the kind of game that I like to play, although I admit that the story is fascinating. The images are great and the animatronics are suitably very creepy. There’s very little music, aside from cues that make you fearful of something approaching. I must applaud Scott Cawthon’s performance as Phone Guy as he does recite his lines much like a real person would; stuttering, pausing and using “uh”s, such things. Written as if someone was not reading off a script, basically. The game itself contains a fine layer of black comedy, whether it’s the higher-ups’ incompetence or some innocuous comments from Phone Guy.

Although I really recommend that you try it for yourself, as watching it and playing it are two very different things. In a Let’s Play, someone else is going through the stress of constantly checking up their power reserve, locking and unlocking doors, checking the cameras. When you’re playing, you are in constant fear. Quick, check the cameras. Okay, the three animatronics are at the back of the place… that’s good. Quick checking on Foxy at the Pirate Cove… he’s peeking. In the back… uh oh, Bonnie has left. A minute or two later, Chica has left as well. Checking around the cameras, I see the backstage area… Oh shit, Bonnie is there and staring straight at me with his creepy big eyes. Better watch myself. Okay, maybe look out with those cameras. Oh, but then Foxy may come at me. Gotta watch him! And gotta keep track of Chica too. Ah, there she is, damn she walks fast. A quick check of the cameras and then