I decided I should finally check out the Five Nights at Freddy's series this halloween—a friend of mine is a big fan, the movie was coming out, and I'd never played these games at all. And so this Nintendo Switch collection was a reasonable entry point. Reviews of 4 of the 5 games to follow:
The first Five Nights at Freddy's game was almost surprisingly simple. You sit stationary at your office desk as the new night guard at Freddy Fazbear's Pizza. All you can do is watch the camera feeds as the free-roaming animatronics wander around the dark restaurant, getting closer and closer, eventually jump-scaring you and (presumably) kill you dead. This game is surprisingly effective at delivering tension, scares, and atmosphere. And despite how simple this is, I can see why this went viral.
Five Nights at Freddy's 2, the second one, is much more of a game. The premise is similar: you're a night security guard at a different Freddy's location. The number of threats is more than doubled, with shiny new "toy" animatronics joining in addition to "withered" versions of the original four, so it's a much more complex game. You need to stay alert at all times, reaction time is much more of a factor, and on later nights, there is precious little room for error. I found the gameplay quite fun for this reason, although ultimately, you're repeating the same few tasks again and again throughout each of the nights. Check your vents, wind the music box to keep the puppet satisfied, throw on the Freddy Fazbear mask to ward away any "withered" animatronics (or Mangle) that have teleported into your office, flash your flashlight at the hallway... This is all trial-and-error but you'll figure out the patterns that work if you want to get through all five (six? seven?) nights. It's repetitive as heck, like I said, but I found myself in an intense flow-like state of concentration, finding myself genuinely startled whenever I saw a face in my vent or a faceless Bonnie in my office, and the jumpscares probably subtracted a year from my lifespan in total. I ended up completing almost every optional challenge in this game (except for the hardest one), and it made me quite excited to try the rest of the series if the games were to keep improving.
Well... Five Nights at Freddy's 3, simply put, sucks as a game. If you're here for the lore, it might have something to offer, but frankly, watching gameplay or reading the wiki would likely be more satisfying than forcing yourself to play this game.
There's only one animatronic threat here, but he feels unfair in a way that the first two games didn't, even on their more RNG-dependent challenges. Your security cameras, audio system (used to lure Springtrap from room to room) and the building's ventilation can fail, and when they do, you're defenseless while you wait for the system to reboot. And during that time, it's almost entirely down to luck whether he makes his way to your office to kill you.
The concept behind this game isn't even necessarily bad but the execution is miserable.
I made my way through all 5 nights twice, the second time using a walkthrough to find the secret minigames and get the good ending, and I cannot recommend anyone play this.
FNAF 4 on the other hand, manages to be the best of the bunch I've played so far, and the most unique. Instead of a security guard, you're a small child, trying to survive the night in his own bedroom, as you're being stalked by "nightmare" versions of the original game's four animatronics. Instead of being sat stationary at a desk, you have to run between your bedroom's two doors, and you need to listen to sound cues to know whether there's a threat right outside your door. (Using headphones for this game is basically a requirement.) This game taps into the fear of being a child, and wondering if something just might be in your closet. And while you can check the closet from night one, it's not until later nights that a threat can actually materialize in the closet.
Because you're a little kid running to and fro, and you can't just rapidly cycle between camera feeds and flashing door lights, the threats coming at you from different angles feel genuinely threatening. You feel deeply unsafe in your bedroom, the very place where you should feel safest. And there's an impending sense of doom as the nightly minigames present an upsetting story, with a brutal ending. This game is scary, dark, tense, and clever. FNAF 4 is quite good and I'll stand by that!
I haven't played much of the final game in the core collection, Sister Location, yet, but I may edit my review once I have.