BenjaminORourke

Five Nights at Freddy’s:

Why it is so popular, and what makes it such a terrifying experience?

The Scariest Game in Years

Five Nights at Freddy’s. A popular and terrifying indie game recently designed by Scott Cawthon that has been widely praised in recent months for being one of the scariest horror games in years; but what exactly makes this game so scary? What design aspects have been cleverly placed in to make this such a psychologically scary game?

And final question - why would anybody make this thing?

Original Concept

The game - and the fear that comes with it - begins with the concept. Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza is basically a mirror of Chuck E. Cheese’s, the main brand of CEC Entertainment, and the animatronic show that Chuck E. Cheese’s does in their restaurants is often known to have scared some children. Cawthon, who was also scared by these animatronics as a child, utilises this fear - and puts it in a situation where the animatronics are now dangerous.

For those that don’t know, Five Nights at Freddy’s details the adventures of a security guard who performs the night shift from 12 AM to 6 AM, protecting Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza. During the day, the animatronic characters by the names of Freddy Fazbear, Bonnie and Chica, perform shows for the children. At night, they are required to move around to keep their servos running - and if you are found, they will not see you as human but as an endoskeleton that does not have a suit on. They will stuff you into a suit - and will probably kill you.

The game does not let you move. You can turn left and right, check the cameras in the building, and close the doors on your left or right but you cannot get up from your chair. You can use lights to light the hallways to the left and right of the office, but everywhere else is plunged into darkness. Your cameras can let you see most of the areas within the pizzeria but only with limited light.

Even on paper, it sounds scary. But what if you knew that you had limited power - and checking cameras, using lights and doors uses up your power? If you run out before 6 AM… what can you do but die?

Now that you are in a situation that many would remember from childhood, you realise that the animatronics are dangerous and scary. In bright daytime, when they are on a stage away from you, some think of them as scary. At night when you are in serious danger? Way more scary. There is no compassion within these technological torturers and you know this. In the dark, at night, they will come for you.

This original concept develops the ideas of childhood, which we know can be very twisted - is there really something in the closet? - and transfers them into an adult environment, which creates a very effective and scary situation for the players of the game - at any age, childhood is something we all remember. And we remember our fears the most. Childhood is an age where we struggle to deal with scary situations and any fears, instead of being dealt with, tend to be regressed - which makes them all the more scary when they are remembered in the future.

Game Feel

The feel of this game is terrifying. The single light in your office, the mysterious posters, the surprise appearances of the animatronics… all of it leads up to no sleep and many nightmares. This game is not nightmare fuel - it’s nightmare diesel.

As you start, you instantly feel scared. It’s dark. A guy is warning you to avoid death. Animatronics are looking for you. What do you do? The fear that is felt in these nights is intense. You can’t move, and your enemies can. In these situations, the idea is put across to you that you cannot win.

Freddy and his friends have the ability to move, You cannot. Freddy and his friends know where you are. You have to search for them. Freddy and his friends scare you. You do not scare them. Freddy and his friends are robots and completely heartless. You are human, and replaceable. There is nothing in this game that gives you an advantage over these robots; even the lights and doors can be disabled by Bonnie and Chica! Everything in Five Nights at Freddy’s is against you, and you have to survive… well, five nights, to be honest.

The feel of the game is terrifying and ominously so. It is all you can do to survive one night, let alone five! As you play, you get a sense of this horror as the advantages of the enemies build up against you.

The sounds in this game add massively to the feel of it. The song Freddy plays when he’s in the kitchen, the sounds of footsteps, the horrifying scream of an animatronic discovering you… every sound is not just designed to be scary, but gives you information about the robots patrolling this hellish pizza restaurant. The song lets you know where Freddy is, the laughs and footsteps can inform you on the locations of the robots, and the harsh noise puts in the perfect tense feeling when you sight one of the beastly figures right outside your door.

As you progress, this game feel increases from simple scariness to mounting tension as you survive throughout your nightmare week. As the animatronics get more vicious and your guide gets much less helpful, you start to realise the true terror behind Five Nights at Freddy’s - everything that causes you to fail is brought upon by your own panics during this fear-fuelled shift.

True Fear

The main thing that most people find incredible about this game is the way it changes up what you knew about the horror genre - there is no way to escape, no item you can find… all you can do is survive, unlike many other games of this genre.

As earlier, too: everything you do in this game causes you to fail. Many horror games reward players for panicking. In a zombie game, when you’re under an onslaught and you panic-tap all of the buttons, it’s likely that many zombies will be killed when you smash those buttons.

In Five Nights at Freddy’s, panicking punishes you instead of helps you. If you’re scared and you check the doors and lights out of fear, you’re using up your precious power, taking you closer and closing to having 0% left and dying. Panicking during this game will cause you to take another step towards a game over instead of succeeding.

This is the true horror behind Five Nights at Freddy’s - the fact that not only is everything against you, but everything you, as the player, does is against you. Where other games give you hints and tips and reward you for being scared, this game will scare you silly and leave you regretting the fact that you were scared and turned on that light when there was no need to do so.

Of course, the jump-scares don’t help at all, when an animatronic bursts into the room and screeches horrifically at you, along with that ‘game over’ message and the creepy image of you, stuffed in a Freddy suit. But worse is the mounting fear when you hear footsteps, check your camera and realise that there is an animatronic in the room. They won’t attack until you put your camera down; and you can decide when to do that. It’s terrifying, realising that you’re going to be scared as soon as you move the mouse - and it is no less scary, knowing that you control the moment when it happens.

I have the game on my phone, and I’ve completed all five nights, plus the extra 6th Night and even the brutally difficult 20/20/20/20 mode (NEVER AGAIN) - and I have also seen other people on YouTube play it, as well as some friends who have got the game. At first after watching these videos I thought, it’s not that scary, but if you’ve seen YouTube videos of it, you’ll know that it doesn’t seem that scary. Playing it yourself, however; everything is much, much different and you get a true feel for the situation you are in and you start to realise what you’re up against, which is something a YouTuber cannot replicate. From research where I got various friends and family to try the game, I saw that over the course of even a short ten minutes playing the game, they started to feel the fear and panic.

Art ’n’ Music

The feel of Five Nights at Freddy’s is an interesting take, simply because of how tense you grow due to the lack of movement. Nothing in this game moves right up until the point where you’re killed. The animatronics stay motionless under the camera’s eye. They move only when you cannot see them, and enter the office only when you are not looking. They damage your lights and doors but never seem to move and it is only the final moment where they move so suddenly, which is one of the contributing factors as to why you jump - the movement is surprising after a tense 5 minutes or so. (The other factor is that horrifying scream. *shudder*)

Because the game is made with models, it feels more alive. More real. You feel like you are actually there, surviving six hours/9 minutes with the most terrifying robots mankind has ever wrought. Probably. Terminator might be on that list somewhere too.

The fact that there is almost a complete lack of music is actually a very interesting design concept. Few games actually lack music in this manner, and this sets Five Nights at Freddy’s apart from a game. No music implies to your mind that you are not in a game environment, and this makes it feel all the more real when you flick up the monitor only to realise that when you put it down, you’re dead.

The sounds in this game are all the more terrifying as you begin to realise that each one means something critical to the gameplay and your success. At first they seem to be simple theming sounds but soon you start to put two and two together as you realise what each sound means and how you can use it to your advantage or to save power. This audial advantage is something that not many games possess - sure, games have sound, but when was the last time different sounds affected your play style?

Critical Eye

A horror game such as this deserves a lot of credit. But as with any other game, there are places where the design or other aspects could have been improved.

My main problem with this game is the similarity of it. Each night - aside from the fiendish difficulty curve - takes place in the same place, with the same cameras. It would have been exciting to change it up each night, perhaps by adding and removing certain cameras. I understand why Cawthon placed the player in the same place for the whole game - it adds to the fear of having the inability to run or escape the animatronics - but overall I think it does lead to stale, repetitive gameplay.

Luckily, the horror aspect of this game does keep your adrenaline up so you would never notice the blasé repetition of the gameplay when you’re just playing it normally. However, I think it would have been interesting to do things like the changing camera idea, and perhaps an AI system where the AI of each animatronic changes based on your play style, making it a scarier and more personal experience.

I cannot, however, fault the storyline and pacing of this game at all. The story - given to you only by brief pictures and the guy on the phone - is deep and thrilling, as well as simple to anyone who’s been in a dead-end job working for $120 a week. However, what I love about this game is the tiny, brief clues hidden around the restaurant that give an incredible depth to the world around Mike (the player) which a lot of games today just can’t match. The stories about the past of Freddy Fazbear’s, the reasoning behind your job and why it is so difficult and even the gruesome story of the murdered children give the game a feel that many games would kill to be able to replicate.

My other problem with Five Nights at Freddy’s (despite the fact that it’s a horror game and my least favourite genre - oh, and the fact that it scares me to the core of my entire being) is the intense difficulty. There are five stages (at least in the main game) - but the difficulty curve is unreal. The first night? Pretty easy. The second? Not too bad. The third? Ridiculous. The fourth? …I think you can see where this is going.

I don’t mind games that have a difficulty curve as such, but the fact that panicking makes you lose and the game grows difficult quickly makes this seem like a cheap, unfair game when you die - despite the fact that it was all your own fault that you failed. The build-up to the first and final jump-scare that ends your game is terrifying and yet the brutal difficulty makes it hard to not complain when you die. Instead of ‘well, sh-‘ it’s more like ‘oh come on!’ - which is never how you want your player to feel.

For this game, my final rating is a fairly high 93% based on a tight and suitably scary horror experience, though the repetition of the gameplay mechanics brings down the score a little. The art and sounds make the game alive and the depth of story brings the world around you into fearful clarity. Overall I feel that Five Nights at Freddy’s is an awe-inspiringly scary game, and full credit to Scott Cawthon for designing and bringing to life this morbid and monstrously difficult indie masterpiece.

Score: 93%