Freddy Is Freaky

Have you ever wanted to be a Chucky Cheese night time security guard? Well with Five Nights at Freddy’s you can realize that dream while also being horribly murdered by animatronic animals. The point of the game is survival and it’s not easy.

You play as the new night time security guard and you sit in your office monitoring the security cameras,  keeping an eye on Freddy and his friends as they walk around the restaurant at night—which seems simple enough, except if they do find you, you die a horrible, awful death. As you flip from camera to camera you use electricity and because the Freddy Corporation is cheap, you only have a finite amount of electricity each night. You have to make sure to manage your power efficiently because the only way to protect yourself is to seal the doors of your office, which is a major drain on the power and only should be used when they're about to kill you, so most of your power should really be invested into the cameras. The gameplay itself is fairly simple: between monitoring the cameras and shutting the doors there aren't many intricacies but the game is still very difficult, for one reason, and that's fear.

This game is probably one of the scariest games I've played and it’s all thanks to the characters and atmosphere. It preys on innate fears we have with the way the enemies are designed as well as the overall look and feel of the environments, which brings back creepy childhood memories of weird people in animal suits and jerky animatronics. The music is also really well done; it's really subdued and almost hidden in the background but it does a good job of scoring and setting the overall mood and feel of the game and really adds an ominous creepy feeling throughout.

Now as I was saying before, the gameplay itself is fairly simple but the difficulty increase from night to night but that's not what makes the game hard. The difficulty really comes from how scared you are and the game can really use your own fears against you. The more and more you play the more and more jumpy, anxious and generally scared you become and that's what makes you more likely to waste power from either over checking the cameras, closing doors when you don't need to or just generally being panicky. The game itself is a lot simpler if you can keep a clear and level head but the game puts you in these situations where you really can’t keep a level head and that's one of the challenges you need to deal with if you plan on beating this game.

In my opinion this is definitely a solid horror game that was really well put together. The gameplay and scare elements are well made and implemented and there's not really any jump scares so it's not like the game is using cheap tricks to freak you out. Now like most horror games there's really not a ton of replay value unless you just want to try and beat the nights more efficiently but other than that it's pretty much one and done. That being said, it's not an expensive game at a five dollar price tag, it's definitely worth it and if you still think it's too expensive, just throw it on your steam wishlist and wait for the next steam sale and pick it up.