Few memories are fonder to me than attending Chuck E. Cheese with my little brother and sister when we were kids. Stuffing our faces full of pizza, swimming in the ball pit and running around playing the arcade games. Not so fond, I guess, were the memories of the mascots who would come around and bug your table, interrupting the pizza and games or, as you got older and hormones took hold, just generally being totally lame and boring. Chuck E. Cheese’s mascots were a lot of things, but never were would I have thought of them as pure unadulterated nightmare fuel. How nice then that approximately 15 years after I’ve set foot into my last pizza party restaurant that Scott Cawthon’s Five Nights at Freddy’s has twisted the knife into my childhood and placed in me, the fear of God over the mascots I once disrespected.
So let’s start from the beginning. You play a security guard who just landed a sweet, barely minimum wage gig at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza. Your job is simple, report in to work at 12 A.M., knock off at 6 A.M., and make sure all property at Fazbear’s doesn’t go anywhere. Okay your job at Fazbear’s is relatively simple, there is one caveat, the “property” of Fazbear’s likes to come to life at night and move on its own. Think Night at the Museum if the intent of the statues moving at night wasn’t whacky adventure and more-so giving you, the player, sudden heart attacks and seizures.
This game is terrifying, even once you get acquainted to the mechanics and its use of jump scares which are all quite simplistic. It’s just you and one very restrictive ability set you can look a little to your left, look a little to your right, and use your laptop to jump between the various security feeds through out the restaurant. There are one, maybe two cameras that are absolutely essential which you can use to monitor Fazbear’s animatronic mascots remaining relatively lifeless on stage – and you’d frankly better hope they stay that way. Should a mascot “disappear” from stage this is when the real game, and real pants soiling begins.
Once a mascot goes off stage their hunt for you begins. You can monitor their progress by jumping between security cameras and finding where they’ve moved, a handy mini map showing you which room the camera is linked to reveals just how close a mascot is to you. The mascots aren’t very active once spotted by a camera, in fact they’ve got very little going in terms of animation for the most part, but this probably makes them even more unnerving as they’ll be placed in disturbing, static positions often looking directly into a camera and right into your soul.
You’ll want, well need, to keep tabs on their position as once they get close to your room you only have so much time to act. In addition to the visual cues of the security cameras you’ll also get acquainted with the sound cues of each of the four mascots which can give you an idea of their proximity to you. When one gets near you’ll want to shut one of the two doors leading into your vulnerable security room. The security room is also, unfortunately, a blind spot, so once a mascot is outside your door the only way to make sure they’ve gone away is to flick the lights on and off to see their outline or presence in a mirror.
“Fine” you may think to yourself “I’ll just keep the camera on them at all times, shut both my doors and have the lights constantly running.” No you won’t. You only have so much power to work with and using the cameras, doors and lights can drain your generator fast. You have to make the power last until 6 A.M., if you don’t… Let’s say you absolutely don’t want that to happen. You’ll also sometimes hallucinate things, did I mention that?
The appearance of the mascots themselves, Freddy the bear, a duck wearing the oh so inappropriate “Let’s Eat” bib, a purple bunny that looks like a cross between the Grimace and that thing from Donnie Darko, and a piratey Fox which under normal circumstances I would find cool if it weren’t trying to grind me into a pulp with its metal skeleton, don’t really look like they were crafted with love but more a hatred for kids everywhere. Seriously, you have to ask yourself what was going on in the inventor’s head when he decided this was suitable for children’s entertainment. The frankly fucked up look of the mascots, and perhaps even the familiarity to most of our childhoods, adds to the overall sense of terror the game seeks to instill.
I’ve never seen a game quite like Five Nights at Freddy’s. It’s a short game, but you’ll be so busy figuring out the gameplay mechanics and the AI of the mascots it will take you more than a few attempts to safely clear each night. Even once you do have a solid feel for how things operate, that’s no guarantee you’ll make it smoothly to the end. The mechanics are fresh for the genre and I feel the game combines two very effective elements of horror that continue to scare us time and time again, that’s limited perspective (think Paranormal Activity, Slender) and tainted childhood themes (IT, Child’s Play, Last of Us), throw in the cheap jump scares of the internet for an all around underwear wetting good time and you have Five Nights at Freddy’s. At only 5 bucks on Steam and Desura if you’re a horror fan this is definitely worth checking out.
