Five Nights at Freddy’s

Five Nights at Freddy’s is a video game series created in 2014. Since then, so many games have been created – so many BETTER games that you would think nobody would want to play the first game anymore. Well, you would be wrong because I have played it, and here is my review.

The game was created by Scott Cawthon. Cawthon first made a game called Chipper & Sons Lumber Co., but people said his characters looked like creepy animatronics. He was heartbroken and almost gave up game designing, but he had an idea. The idea was to create a first-person game about being stuck in a dark enclosed room, trying not to run out of power, while trying not to get killed by animatronics. That’s right, Five Nights at Freddy’s.

The game starts with you taking a help wanted ad for Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza night guard – seems safe enough, right? I mean who would want to rob a pizza place? But you’re not exactly guarding against humans. When you start, you’re in a little room with little knick knacks from the company, like a Mr. Cupcake, to make you more comfortable. Then, the phone rings, and Phone Guy (that’s not his real name, but nobody knows his real name) tells you that he is going to be retiring in one week, and he’ll be telling you how to get through the job. He tells you that the animatronics get a little “quirky” at night, you know: running around, shoving people into costumes, shoving robotic skeletons into your body like you’re a costume. You know, quirky!

Now for the actual game. Bonnie is very active, and so is Chica. On the first few nights, Freddy himself doesn’t move very often. Foxy occasionally peeks out to look around, until he’s dashing down the halls like an olympic sprinter and the only thing that will stop him is slamming the door in his face, and then he goes back to peeking out. 

On the fourth night, Phone Guy is talking to you, and it’s the last time he does so. He seems to have found his way into the backstage with all of the parts. You can hear Foxy banging on the door, Freddy playing the Toreador March, and you can see Bonnie on the cameras; it seems like they all helped with making Phone Guy’s last week on the job his last week in life. The only person with clean hands is Chica (well, she is not CLEAN, but you get the point.) You still get a phone call on night five, but it’s just a very garbled speech mixed with the jumpscare noise. 

Then comes the custom night, ohh boy. The custom night is where the player can make the animatronics as difficult as they want it to be on a scale of 0 to 20. If an animatronic is set to 0, then it takes one step, and the night is over. At 10, it behaves pretty much like night three: walking around, banging on the door, then going back. At 20, the second an animatronic moves, close the doors. They appear anywhere – by anywhere I mean they can go from one side of the building to another in two seconds. For almost any creature, let alone a slow giant rabbit, this feat is physically impossible.

The end of the game is very interesting; it ends with the iconic Toreador Dance and a paycheck for $120 (Do some quick math and that adds up to… $4 an hour. Below the minimum wage in Utah, where the game supposedly takes place) and it just ends. You don’t know what will happen next week: you could live till retirement (though if you only get $4 an hour, I wonder what your retirement plan is), or you could get killed on Monday. It is unknown what happens to you, but you can assume it won’t be as bad as the last five nights.

The easter eggs built into this game are multiple. First of all, there are a lot of healthcode violations at Freddy’s: recycled pizza, mucus and blood in animatronics, and I think the department of labor might be after them too because of how they pay their workers. Also, there were missing children there. By that I mean the murder of five children (which is probably where the blood and mucus came from). Moving on, another incident happened there: the bite of ‘87, when somebody got their frontal lobe bitten off by one of the animatronics.  It has more easter eggs than an egg hunt with a bunch of three-year-olds. I don’t want to ramble so here are a few more to look out for: “IT’S ME,” Golden Freddy, don’t touch Freddy, honking Freddy’s nose, looking at the camera, and more. Bottom line: PLAY THE GAME!