Five Nights at Freddy's (video game)

Five Nights at Freddy's
Steam storefront header
Developer(s)	Scott Cawthon
Publisher(s)	Scott Cawthon
Designer(s)	Scott Cawthon
Series	Five Nights at Freddy's
Engine	Clickteam Fusion 2.5
Platform(s)	Microsoft Windows, Android, iOS, Windows Phone
Release	Microsoft Windows WW: August 8, 2014 Android WW: August 27, 2014 iOS WW: September 11, 2014
Genre(s)	Survival horror, point-and-click
Mode(s)	Single-player

Five Nights at Freddy's is a point-and-click video game developed and published by Scott Cawthon. The game centers around a fictional pizza restaurant called "Freddy Fazbear's Pizza", where the player must act as a night security guard, defending themselves from the malfunctioning, haunted animatronic characters by tracking their movement through the facility using security cameras.

Cawthon conceived of the game following the negative reception to his previous game, Chipper & Sons Lumber Co. Developed in six months, Five Night's at Freddy's was developed using the Clickteam Fusion 2.5 game engine. The game was first released in August 2014 on Desura and Steam. Mobile ports were later released for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone.

Five Nights at Freddy's received positive reviews from critics, who praised its originality and atmosphere. The game was the top-selling game on Desura for the week ending August 18, 2014, and the game became the subject of a number of popular "Let's Play" videos on YouTube. The game's success led to the launch of an expanded series, including four sequels, a spin-off, and 2 novel adaptations, with one more book and a film in production. ^[1]

Gameplay

The player must check security cameras to find the animatronics.

Five Nights at Freddy's is a survival-horror game with point-and-click elements. Players act as a security guard at Freddy Fazbear's Pizza and must survive their shift, lasting from midnight to 6:00 a.m. (approximately 8 minutes and 36 seconds of real time, 4 minutes and 30 seconds on the mobile and tablet editions),^[2] without being jumpscared by one of the five animatronic animals that inhabit the facility.

The animatronics suddenly popping up in front of the protagonist's view is the cause of most jumpscares.

The player, who sits in an office, is given access to a network of security cameras throughout the facility to track the movement of the animatronics. Each character roams the restaurant and has distinct movement patterns, and most of the characters' movements take place off-screen. The camera feeds are dimly lit and distorted, one of the rooms only contains an audio feed, and the cameras do not cover certain areas of the building, most notably the two hallways directly to the left and right of the player. The player cannot leave the guard room, but can close the doors to defend themselves, and briefly turn on lights in the hallways to check for animatronics.^[2][3] Use of these actions consume the player's limited electrical power; if the power runs out, the cameras become inoperable, the doors open, and the lights go out.^[2] Once these things happen, the Toreador March will play, the screen will go pitch black, and the player will be jumpscared by Freddy, provided they do not reach the end of the night in the meantime. If the player is jumpscared by any of the animatronics, the game ends, and the player must restart from the beginning of the night.

The game has five levels comprising five "nights" in the game, each increasing in difficulty. Completion of the main game unlocks an even more difficult 6th "night", and completion of this level opens up a "Custom Night" level editor where the player can adjust the AI difficulty of each individual character.^[4]

Plot

Three of the animatronics that appear in Five Nights at Freddy's: Freddy Fazbear (center), Bonnie (left) and Chica (right).

The main character, whose name is later revealed to be Mike Schmidt,^[5] has started a job working as a night watch security guard at Freddy Fazbear's Pizza, a restaurant owned by the fictional "Fazbear Entertainment".^[4][6] A voicemail message is left by Mike's predecessor each night (until he is killed on Night 4, after which, there is just garble) and explains different aspects of the history of the restaurant. He explains that the restaurant's animatronic animal characters, Freddy Fazbear, Bonnie the Bunny, Chica the Chicken, the disused Foxy the Pirate Fox, and Golden Freddy, come to life at night, because if they were left off for too long, their servomotors would lock up. The employee warns Mike that if one of the robots encounters a human, they will automatically assume that it is an endoskeleton not in costume, and "forcefully stuff them" into a spare mechanical Freddy Fazbear costume, killing the person in the process.^[7]

It is hinted throughout the game that the restaurant has had a troubled past. The man on the phone mentions an incident called "the Bite of '87", which involved the loss of a person's frontal lobe. Newspaper clippings in the restaurant's east hallway reveal that a reported mass murder occurred on site, when a man lured five children to a back room and supposedly murdered them. Later, the restaurant received complaints that the animatronics began to smell foul, and became stained with blood and mucus around the eyes and mouth, with one customer comparing them to "reanimated carcasses", implying that the children's dead bodies are hidden inside the animatronics and the children's ghosts are possessing them.^[8] After the seventh night, Mike is fired from his job for tampering with the animatronics, general unprofessionalism, and odor.^[9]

Development and release

The idea for Five Nights at Freddy's stems from the negative reception towards Scott Cawthon's previous game, the family friendly Chipper & Sons Lumber Co., as players commented that the main character (a young beaver) as well as the rest of the characters looked like "a scary animatronic animal", with reviewer Jim Sterling calling the game unintentionally "terrifying".^[10][11] Although initially discouraged by the poor reception to Chipper & Sons, Cawthon, who had previously mainly developed Christian-oriented games, eventually used it to inspire himself to make something intentionally scarier.^[10] In the game, the animatronics themselves are rarely seen moving. This was revealed to be a deliberate choice on Cawthon's part, as he believes that in real life, such robots are scarier this way, telling Indie Gamer Mag "it’s when they are turned off that the veil is lifted, and you realize that they were never alive. They are, and always have been, dead."^[10] Cawthon used Clickteam Fusion 2.5 to develop the game and Autodesk 3ds Max to model and render the 3D graphics, and the game took six months to create.^[12]

Five Nights at Freddy's was first released via Desura on August 8, 2014. On August 20, 2014, after it was approved by the service's crowdsourcing platform Greenlight, Five Nights at Freddy's was also released via Steam.^[6][13] A port for Android was released on August 27, 2014, via Google Play Store.^[14] On September 11, 2014, an iOS port was released. A Windows Phone version was published on December 5, 2014,^[15] though it was quickly removed from the store on December 10 due to the port's down-scaled graphical appearance.^[16]

Reception

Reviews
Aggregate scores Aggregator Score GameRankings (PC) 85%[17] (iOS) 80%[18] Metacritic (PC) 78/100[19] Review scores Publication Score Game Revolution [20] PC Gamer (US) 80/100[2]

Five Nights at Freddy's was well received, with aggregating review website GameRankings assigning the PC version a score of 85%,^[17] and the iOS port 80%.^[18] Indie Game Magazine praised Five Nights at Freddy's for its simple take on the horror genre, noting that its artistic direction and gameplay mechanics contributed to a feeling of "brutal tension" — worsened by how a player may be familiar with similar restaurants such as Chuck E. Cheese's, and that "it's an incredibly terrifying experience to try to save yourself from the single jump scare that ends the game". In conclusion, Five Nights at Freddy's was considered a "fantastic example of how cleverness in design and subtlety can be used to make an experience terrifying". However, the game was criticized for taking too long to load when launched.^[4]

Omri Petitte for PC Gamer gave Five Nights at Freddy's a score of 80 out of 100, commenting that the game took a "less-is-more" approach to its design, and that, while "the AI isn't some masterwork of procedural unpredictability, it would [still] head straight to you and eat your face off, or it'll play around like an innocent child before closing in for the kill. Your mind will fill in the rest". The game's overall atmosphere was praised for emphasizing the fear and suspense of an approaching threat, rather than the arrival of the threat itself as in other horror-oriented games. However, the gameplay of Five Nights at Freddy's was criticized for becoming repetitive once a player masters it, as there is "not much more to expect beyond managing battery life and careful timing of slamming doors shut, so those with steely willpower won't find anything else past the atmosphere of it all."^[2] Ryan Bates of Game Revolution gave the game a 4.5 out of 5; comparing its camera-oriented gameplay to the 1992 game Night Trap, he praised the game's minimalistic presentation (with particular emphasis on its audio design and lack of music) for contributing to the terror of the game, along with the fact that the "nervous impulses" of its repetitive gameplay would "[reach] almost OCD-type levels, adding to the tense environment." In conclusion, he felt that the game was "horror done right", but that it was too short.^[20]

Eurogamer's Jeffrey Matulef compared the animatronic animals in the game to Weeping Angels — predatory creatures from the universe of Doctor Who — due to their ability to only move when they are not being observed.^[21] Softpedia gave the game 4 out of 5 stars, with reviewer Cosmin Anton noting that it "drifts away from the classic first-person horror survival titles", but that the "inability to move combined with the limited power available will make you feel quite helpless in front of those relentless robots that just want to share a bit of their 'love' with you".^[3] Ben Croshaw of Zero Punctuation hailed the game as extremely effective, but expressed doubts about using jumpscares as a central game mechanic.^[22]

Five Nights at Freddy's was the top-selling game on Desura for the week ending August 18, 2014; the game's popularity was increased by a number of popular "Let's Play" videos on YouTube.^[23] As of July 2015, the iPhone port of Five Nights at Freddy's is installed an estimated 4,694 times per day, earning a daily revenue of $13,879.^[24]

Legacy

The success of Five Nights at Freddy's led to Cawthon developing several sequels, beginning with the release of Five Nights at Freddy's 2 in November 2014.^[25] A novel adaptation, Five Nights at Freddy's: The Silver Eyes, was released in 2015,^[26] and a spin-off, FNaF World, was released in 2016.^[27]

As of 2017, Blumhouse Productions has acquired the rights to make a film adaptation of Five Nights at Freddy's.^[28]

References

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Five Nights at Freddy's (video game)

• Official website
• Five Nights at Freddy's on IndieDB