Developed by: Scott Cawthon
Genre: Role-playing game
Game System: Microsoft Windows
Price: Free
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If you’ve been on the internet in the past eighteen months you’ve probably heard of Five Nights at Freddy’s. The indie horror game franchise created by Scott Cawthon, revolving around the story of a pizzeria that’s fun for families but absolutely terrifying for the night staff due to the animatronic characters trying their best to end your life by the end of the week, has gained a large fanbase that has spent lots of time and energy to uncover every secret in an effort to discover the secrets behind its hidden lore. And once everybody figured it out the fandom basically said “Whelp, our work here is done, but after the movie comes out I’ll probably forget this ever happened OOH, WHAT’S UNDERTALE?” But the games really were very fun and frightening (at least they were scary the first seven times you played them, then they get much less.)
Of course when Scott finally finished the main quartet of games, he decided that his franchise about a family pizzeria that houses robotic cartoon animals that try to kill the night guard due to being possessed by the vengeful spirits of children that were murdered by a serial killer disguised as one of the characters originally designed for the sole purpose of bringing joy to children but have now can only be remembered as the murderous nightmare creatures he has forced them to become would be a great subject for a colorful child-friendly spin-off! I can think of several problems with this brilliant plan.
Mommy! Mommy! There’s a FNaF movie! Can we go see it, Mommy?
Well, Billy, you love the completely family-friendly game so much, I don’t see why not!
3 weeks later…
Why is our son running around the house and shining a flashlight down the hallway every night until 6AM?
CHUCK E. CHEESE IS GONNA EAT ME!
And that’s why you don’t take children to horror movies. But hey, we’ll have to cross that bridge when we get to it. In the meantime, let’s see if this game is good on its own!
The story of this game goes that--
Genre: Role-playing game
Game System: Microsoft Windows
Price: Free
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If you’ve been on the internet in the past eighteen months you’ve probably heard of Five Nights at Freddy’s. The indie horror game franchise created by Scott Cawthon, revolving around the story of a pizzeria that’s fun for families but absolutely terrifying for the night staff due to the animatronic characters trying their best to end your life by the end of the week, has gained a large fanbase that has spent lots of time and energy to uncover every secret in an effort to discover the secrets behind its hidden lore. And once everybody figured it out the fandom basically said “Whelp, our work here is done, but after the movie comes out I’ll probably forget this ever happened OOH, WHAT’S UNDERTALE?” But the games really were very fun and frightening (at least they were scary the first seven times you played them, then they get much less.)
Of course when Scott finally finished the main quartet of games, he decided that his franchise about a family pizzeria that houses robotic cartoon animals that try to kill the night guard due to being possessed by the vengeful spirits of children that were murdered by a serial killer disguised as one of the characters originally designed for the sole purpose of bringing joy to children but have now can only be remembered as the murderous nightmare creatures he has forced them to become would be a great subject for a colorful child-friendly spin-off! I can think of several problems with this brilliant plan.
Mommy! Mommy! There’s a FNaF movie! Can we go see it, Mommy?
Well, Billy, you love the completely family-friendly game so much, I don’t see why not!
3 weeks later…
Why is our son running around the house and shining a flashlight down the hallway every night until 6AM?
CHUCK E. CHEESE IS GONNA EAT ME!
And that’s why you don’t take children to horror movies. But hey, we’ll have to cross that bridge when we get to it. In the meantime, let’s see if this game is good on its own!
The story of this game goes that--
O_O …What the heck was that?! Yeah, that is the first thing that you see when you first load the game. I repeat, this is the least scary of the franchise. As I was saying, the story of this game goes that weird things have been happening in the world of whatever they end up calling this place, they’re still working on it. Parts of the world have become glitched and monsters, some of which look eerily similar to the heroes, are attacking everybody. Fredbear has come to the conclusion that something must have gone wrong on the Flipside and asked Freddy Fazbear to try and figure out what’s happening. To do this he must enlist the help of just about every character in the main FNaF games. And by that I really mean EVERY character. Those paper plate dolls on the wall in FNaF 2? The hallucinated palette swap of Balloon Boy that is barely even noticeable unless you look really closely? The endoskeleton that was apparently inside Plushtrap but was never shown in-game? All of the above.
These characters randomly appear in the world, and you need to fight them in an RPG battle reminiscent of Scott’s first game, Legacy of Flan. These battles also involve normal enemies and bosses. The battles are fought by one of two teams you make up of four characters each that you’ve unlocked, and you can switch between them at any time. Each character has a set of three moves, and they have these since you first unlock them so there isn’t a whole lot of progression in that area. Also the way you switch out the characters means that the characters with worse moves won’t really be used at all. I also find it funny that Scott gave the franchise’s most hated characters, Balloon Boy and his weird twin JJ, two of the best attacks in the game early on (one of which is literally dropping puddles of hot cheese on the enemy that give a poison effect), so you will be seeing them very often.
These characters randomly appear in the world, and you need to fight them in an RPG battle reminiscent of Scott’s first game, Legacy of Flan. These battles also involve normal enemies and bosses. The battles are fought by one of two teams you make up of four characters each that you’ve unlocked, and you can switch between them at any time. Each character has a set of three moves, and they have these since you first unlock them so there isn’t a whole lot of progression in that area. Also the way you switch out the characters means that the characters with worse moves won’t really be used at all. I also find it funny that Scott gave the franchise’s most hated characters, Balloon Boy and his weird twin JJ, two of the best attacks in the game early on (one of which is literally dropping puddles of hot cheese on the enemy that give a poison effect), so you will be seeing them very often.
Another thing that can happen is some of the objects in the world are strangely glitched on purpose, and if you touch these you will end up a layer above the map, where you will meet super-powerful glitch enemies. I just love it when developers put in a fake glitch like this, it’s like a tribute to when game were simpler and entire new worlds could be created just by a slip-up in the code. Nowadays glitches are mostly morphed characters models and infinite black abysses you fall into, but this is fun. |
Let’s talk about the character designs for a second. As the main FNaF games were horror-based, the original designs were quite frightening. As such, almost every character has been redesigned to look more cute and cuddly. The character designs do look very different for the most part, especially the nightmare animatronics from FNaF 4. To your right you will see a comparison between Nightmare’s redesign in FNaF World and his original design in FNaF 4. If you can’t tell the difference I suggest getting your eyes checked, but I honestly really like the new designs, for the most part. Nightmare Chica is the only one I never really liked, though Scott has stated she was the hardest one to make work in this new style. |
An interesting part of this game is the fact that there are multiple endings. Some of these endings are hidden and others are easier to find than others, but they are all mostly worth getting. Two of them are actually really funny, as long as you’re okay with accidentally having to restart the entire game again (protip for avoiding this: don’t put Fredbear in front of your party and don’t go too deep into the code.) Also most of these endings will prove that this game really has no fourth wall (well, it does have one fourth wall, and the final boss throws it at you), and if you look hard enough you might just find an old friend from one of Scott’s lesser known games.
This game can be rather slow starting out, but once you get a good party of characters it can be very fun and it’s a nice tribute to the franchise that took the internet by storm for most of 2015. I give this game 7 surprisingly creepy introduction screens out of 10.