Five Nights at Freddy's

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

*Five Nights at Freddy's* was first released on August 8, 2014 on Desura. On August 20, 2014, after it was approved by the service's crowd sourcing platform Greenlight, *Five Nights at Freddy's* was also released via Steam. Mobile ports of the game have been released for Android and iOS.

## Summary

Welcome to your new summer job at Freddy Fazbear's Pizza, where kids and parents alike come for entertainment and food as far as the eye can see!

The main attraction is Freddy Fazbear, of course, and histwo friends. They are animatronic robots, programmed to please the crowds!

The robots' behavior has become somewhat unpredictable at night, however, and it was much cheaper to hire you as a security guard than to find a repairman. From your small office you must watch the security cameras carefully. You have a very limited amount ofelectricity that you're allowed to use per night (corporate budget cuts, you know). That means when you run out of power for the night — no more security doors and no more lights! If something isn't right — namely, if Freddy Fazbear or his friends aren't in their proper places, you must find them on the monitors and protect yourself if needed!

Can you survive Five Nights at Freddy's?

## Gameplay

The player sits in an office and monitors security cameras positioned throughout the restaurant to observe the animatronic mascots. The player has a limited amount of power to view camera feeds, light hallways, and close the doors on either side of them.

The player must use the camera feed locations in the building and hold the animatronics off using the doors. If the player fails to do this, they will be jumpscared and receive a *Game Over*. To advance to the next night, the player must survive from 12:00 AM until 6:00 AM (8 minutes and 37 seconds in real-time, 4 minutes 30 seconds on mobile edition).

The four animatronics that the player must avoid are the titular Freddy Fazbear and his three friends: Bonnie the Bunny, Chica the Chicken, and Foxy the Pirate (a broken-down animatronic which is no longer in use, but becomes active during the night). There is an additional animatronic known as Golden Freddy, who only appears when the player experiences a paranoid hallucination.

## Reception

*Five Nights at Freddy's* was well-received. *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.

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." 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.

*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. *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". Ben Croshaw of Zero Punctuation hailed the game as extremely effective, but expressed doubts about using jumpscares as a central game mechanic.

*Five Nights at Freddy's* 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.

## External Links

* Official website

* *Five Nights at Freddy's* on IndieDB