LogFAQs > #946581256

8. Five Nights at Freddys (franchise) (24 points)
Nominated by: Cavedweller2000 (0/5 remaining)


Importance: 10
Fear: 7
Snake: 7

Five Nights at Freddy's is the most important horror franchise to come out of the last decade. A multi-media merchandising empire, Five Nights at Freddy's is known for quick sequel production, animatronic jump scares, and lore that could fill up 6 encyclopedias worth. It's also a series you either love or hate. Many people will find the series cheap in nature, with rote simplistic gameplay all leading up to horror's proverbial punching bag, the jump scare. Others will find it mechanically rich and an engaging, a chaotic mess of power conservation and animatronic management, with the jump scare being penalty at failing encouraging you to get better and keep that fright at bay. I for one, fall in the latter, but it does come with a conceit. I think these games are far more fun to watch than play. I binged the entire Markiplier series on Five Nights at Freddy's, every game, and it's a total blast. The series is surprisingly complex with obscure Easter eggs and overwhelming stress especially on the hardest nights and modes that it becomes enhanced by spectacle: enjoy all its horror and secrets without the hassle. It offers the same thrills a horror movie delivers, we see Mark squirming in his seat through every minute as he's tormented by these robotic monstrosities while we also get scared due to the intense atmosphere of the games and jump scares just naturally being shocking. In this sense, FNaF is so much more than a gaming series. It's tailor-made for the internet age and came out just around the time LPers were getting extremely huge, first-person jump scare games were getting huge, YouTubers could easily spread word of mouth, and it created a community where everyone could get involved whether you personally experienced it for yourself or not. I think more so than any other game at the time, FNaF easily benefitted the most from this. A sequel was quickly produced in the same year as the first game, then the following year had two more sequels. Despite the close proximity of these games, you'd be surprised how wildly each one played and differed. FNaF 1 will always be the classic experience. Just you, your cameras, and your powered doors. FNaF 2 was FNaF 1 on steroids, removing the door mechanic and pumping up the amount of animatronics your way, with new mechanics like a music box and mask you could wear to trick the mascots. FNaF 3 is the most mechanically challenging of the original quadrilogy, with malfunctioning systems and hallucinations keeping the horror high and the player on edge. FNaF 4 went back to the classic two-door set-up, however, did it from the perspective of a child, and utilized noise wonderfully in a way that rewarded careful attention and mastery of individual animatronic sounds. The next two games would be the most radical changes however, as Sister Location introduced a more adventure-game style to the formula and Pizzeria Simulator incorporated business management as by day would actually design and create your own Freddy Fazbear's pizzeria. There's some spin-off games too but just focusing on the core series, that series had an impressive evolution over just a few years, always innovating while never deviating from its main aesthetic. It helped keep interest and audience retention high, and without too much waiting between installments, its story had just the right amount of pacing, cliff-hangers, and theory crafting to keep everyone hooked for months until the next would inevitably come out. And the story, told with incredible restraint and subtly you would never expect from a game known for a particular scare style, deals with dark and taboo subjects: child death, corrupt security guards, grinded to death in a Freddy Fazbear suit, animatronic bites, this is actually one of the most messed-up horror series there is and it's awesome!

People will always criticize the way this series is presented, how quickly its produced, and how "fake" the people who play it are. I don't see it that way at all however. I think this is a perfect demonstration of a series going for the jugular while the getting's good, a fresh and modern way of presenting horror that incorporates the nostalgic and the new, with elements of slasher films, internet creepypasta, killer toy movies, the uncanny valley, it's prescient and adaptive in a way few other horror series can even begin to muster up. I give the series a huge thumbs up, and with a new game just on the horizon, I'm excited to once again bear witness to the disturbing world of Freddy Fazbear's pizzeria.

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Bare feet on the tile with my head up in the clouds
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