Quick Review: Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria Simulator

Cawthon’s a bit of a troll. Between surprise-releasing games before their announced date, hiding pieces of the plot’s puzzle in his website’s source code, releasing games for free and giving the vaguest answers to fan questions, he clearly has had fun during his career as the creator of FNAF. As an example, today’s game, Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria Simulator, was A) a surprise release (under the pretense of being a mini-game while a bigger title was in production) on December 4th, 2017, and B) free.

Eh... I can't say "managing a pizzeria housing murderous
robots" would be on top of my list.

A vacuum and a balloon on a  trash can?
Hey, when you're short on funds...

Not happy with how the other animatronic restaurants are managed? Well then, manage your own! You are provided with the location, a perfect little donut hole of warmth amidst a sea of insanity. With your starting budget, make adjustments to the place. Upgrade your tools, add entertainment and extra sources of revenue, and be wary of any liabilities that could crop up. You gotta spend money to make money; By spending more, you unlock higher-quality catalogs containing items with improved stats and financial returns. After which, set everything inside your modest little restaurant. Test the arcade games, make some extra revenue, you can even accept some sponsorships for more. Make sure to include a stage with animatronics; they’re the heart and soul of Fazbear’s Entertainment, after all!

I like the little guy on the bottom right.
This one is never trying to KILL ME.

Circus Baby, of Circus Baby's Enterainment,
isn't what she used to be.

Speaking of those… Sometimes, scrapped animatronics kind of just… er… wander towards your new restaurant. Is it because of the smell of pizza, or they're hearing kids having parties here… Heck if I know. However, you can salvage these scraps for parts, and sometimes in their entirety; money’s tight after all. They’re a bit too broken-looking for the main area, but we’ll find them a home. Just be careful, though; they might start wandering the empty rooms and vents in the building around your restaurant and give you the big spook, kinda like the stories you might have heard about the other Freddy’s pizzerias over the last 30 years. They’re likely to do that while you’re busy with the day’s tasks on the computer, too! You’re buying the plates and preparing menus for the next day, and suddenly YAAAAARGH! These animatronics, so inconsiderate. Thankfully, the decrepit computer you use for these tasks also has a system that will play music in another room, sending these robots over there and away from your location.

Even though everything else is more interesting,
THIS is the most important part of your job.

You have a week-long test period, ending on this Saturday, where a big party is planned. Make sure to salvage every animatronic you can, and most importantly, get them all in one place for the big party, just as the guy on your pre-recorded cassettes tells you to. That party is going to be the hottest thing. With some luck, this week could end the curse that befalls the Freddy Fazbear’s Entertainment chain. Manage this place perfectly, take away any remnant of bad luck around our name!

And of course, it has mini-games that you can
play while testing the attractions!

As a proper finale for the series (well… until its creator decided to milk this cash cow further), this ticks all the right boxes. It’s a fresh idea for the series, taking the game in a direction that’s very different from anything else we’ve seen in the franchise before (or since, to be honest). It closes several plot threads in the lore, attempting to offer satisfying answers to the mysteries that remained. It also offers a throwback to the earlier installments, with only a maximum of 4 animatronics going up against you, and a basic concept: Two vents, one on each side of you, and some music to distract the monsters. A bit of a shake-up as well, since you also need to complete some mandatory tasks every night while saying your own ass from a potential jump scarer.

The concept is enhanced by the salvage segments, where you add a new animatronic to your troubles; those parts are tense and genuinely great. You have that unease, that sensation of being alone with a killer. In comparison, there’s something comical about the simulator segments; there’s some horror looming underneath and they're ripe with black comedy, but otherwise harmless and complex enough to actually stand well on their own. I found myself a lot more engaged while playing those! To top it off, there’s 6 possible endings, and most offer answers to questions in the story, meaning that there's an incentive to try and get them all. Really, I think this is the game I’ve liked the most out of the six I’ve covered, probably even more than Sister Location.

You see that big square in the middle? That's
the pizzeria. The "perfect little donut hole of
warmth amidst a sea of insanity."
The vents around it are the insanity.

Now, since this entry closes the lid on the story, anyone unfamiliar with the lore up to that point won’t really understand what’s going on – Heck, it could be confusing even for people who are familiar with it. The "Scrap" animatronics this time are all throwbacks to prior titles. It’s also considered rather easy when compared to previous entries. One annoying mechanic is that sponsorships for the pizzeria will cause pop-up ads to appear on the in-game computer, making the actual scary segments a lot more difficult to get through. So, overall, not a lot of flaws. Of note, the lack of a Custom Night at the end of this one, although that’s because it was getting big enough to be a game all to itself, which Cawthon released as Ultimate Custom Night (and, with it, kept the story going for a brand new arc, with these animatronics and souls going virtual…).

....TABARNAK!

Well! This closes my review of the final FNAF game, and it closes my reviews of FNAF games, period. I can say I’m glad those are done with, even if I found out I liked the games more as I progressed, though ironically it might be because I preferred the ones that did something new and didn’t delve immediately into the gameplay the frachise is most famous for. If I had to rank these six titles from favorite to least favorite, I think I’d say… Pizzeria Simulator, Sister Location, 1, 2, 4 and finally 3. I don’t really intend to keep them now; I am now saying farewell to that series, and I can move on.

And if anyone complains that I did NOT talk in further detail about the current controversy around Cawthon's options... That was my decision. I tried my best to split the art from the artist. I certainly do NOT want to weigh down a quick review with longer talks about stuff like that; and as I said, all of the information about it can be found online.

Stick around, more reviews of horror games will come near the end of October, while I start working through more quick games for reviews.