0
0
Five Nights at Freddy’s is an Indie Horror game and this will contain some spoilers. The first thing you will hear in this game is the ring of a telephone. The character you play as named ‘Mike Schmidt’ will automatically pick up the phone. The voice you hear is the voice of the game creator himself, Scott Cawthon, playing the role of ‘Phone guy’. It is revealed that you are working at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria, a sort of parody of Chuck E. Cheese. At this family friendly pizza place you can enjoy the wonderful sight of the terrifying animatronics out to stuff you into an animatronic suit, which as Phone guy says “wouldn’t be so bad except they’re filled with wires and stuff that can and will kill you if you’re wearing it.” So naturally you wouldn’t want that to happen so your job as security guard is not really to watch the restaurant, but to watch robots as they try to hunt you down.
To begin with gameplay, you can’t move. You just sit in your office with your little monitor, fan, and two powered doors with lights. Your main worry on the first night is just your power. Each night you start with 100% power and when you run out of power you basically lose. This gives the player a sense of fear. You can’t escape; instead, you just have to sit there and watch as these things hunt you down.
The second night is when you truly start to see what’s going on, the animatronics. Consisting of Freddy the Brown Bear, Bonnie the Purple Bunny, Chica the yellow Chicken, and Foxy the Red Pirate Fox, they start moving around. Bonnie and Chica can be stopped by shutting the doors on either side of your office, Foxy, however, is much different. The reason Foxy is so different is that he only stays at the Cove as long as you watch him. If you don’t check enough then he slowly starts coming out of the curtain until he rushes down the hall and into your office. If you change the camera as he is running down the hall then you can see one of the only times that the animatronics move. If you can shut the door fast enough then you can avoid Foxy if you forget to watch him. Lastly is Freddy; each night gets harder as you go on, and for Freddy this means becoming much more active. He hides in the shadows and the only way to know he is moving is to hear the laughter he omits when moving. Once he reaches your office he waits a random amount of time to jumpscare you.
After you finish the first 5 nights the game is named after you unlock a gold star, and a sixth harder night, if you complete that then you get another star and a 7th night in which you can change the difficulty level of each animatronic, which goes up to 20. If you manage to beat the 7th night with all animatronics on level 20 (also known as 20/20 mode) you unlock the final third star and earn bragging rights as even the creator himself thought no one could.
The story is where this game really shines, however. The games creator, Scott Cawthon, is incredibly clever and leaves just enough clues in the game to let anyone think of possible meanings and even create their own theories as to what everything means. Scott gives these clues through quotes from Phone guy and a changing poster on the wall that will become news articles that tell the dark story behind the Pizzeria. The newspapers talk about a killer who would dress up in a suit and lore children into the back room, and would kill them; it is thought that the children now haunt the animatronics looking for revenge on the man who took away their lives.
One of the other biggest parts of the games story is an incident known as ‘The Bite of 87’, an incident in which one of the animatronics bites out someone’s frontal lobe, causing the restaurant to make a new rule in which none of the animatronics are allowed to walk around during the day. In an effort to make sure animatronics don’t have problems, “something about their servers locking up or they get turned off for too long” as the Phone guy says, they let them walk around during the night time. Now since Scott is very cryptic in much of the story, not even what I stated above is 100% certain, but only what is most accepted. At the end of the 5th night you get a pay check that says your name, and doesn’t list the year. After the 6th night you get a small bonus, and after you finish the 7th night on any difficulty you get a pink slip and are fired for tampering with the animatronics, odor, and generally being unprofessional.
I could go on and on about theories and ideas about the story, but that could take hours. Instead I will leave you by saying there are two more games to look at after this, a fourth one planned to be the final one for Halloween 2015, and a possible chance of a movie coming out sometime in the next couple years based on the game.
