Five Nights at Freddy's (often abbreviated to FNaF) is a point-and-click survival horror video game developed and published by Scott Cawthon. It is the first installment in the Five Nights at Freddy's series. The game centers around a fictional pizza restaurant called "Freddy Fazbear's Pizza" (a pastiche of Chuck E. Cheese's and the now-defunct ShowBiz Pizza Place), where the player must act as a night security guard by defending themselves from the malfunctioning, homicidal and haunted animatronic characters by tracking their movement through the facility using security cameras.
Cawthon conceived of the game following criticism of his previous game, Chipper & Sons Lumber Co., for its unintentionally frightening characters who moved like animatronics. Five Nights at Freddy's was developed in six months using the Clickteam Fusion 2.5 game engine. The game was first released in August 2014 on Desura and Steam. Mobile ports were later released for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone.
Five Nights at Freddy's received positive reviews from critics, who praised its originality and atmosphere, and quickly gained a cult following. The game was the top-selling game on Desura for the week ending August 18, 2014, and the game became the subject of numerous popular "Let's Play" YouTube videos. The game's success led to the launch of an expanded series, including five sequels, two spin-offs, and five books (three novel adaptations, a children's activity color book, and a strategy/lore guide), with a film in production.
Gameplay
Five Nights at Freddy's is a survival horror video game with point-and-click elements. Players act as a security guard at the restaurant Freddy Fazbear's Pizza, where they must survive their shift that lasts from midnight to 6:00 a.m. (approximately 8 minutes and 36 seconds of real time, 4 minutes and 30 seconds on the mobile and tablet editions) without being jumpscared by the five animatronic animal mascots that inhabit the facility, who are Freddy Fazbear, Bonnie the Bunny, Chica the Chicken, Foxy the Pirate and Golden Freddy.
The player sits alone in an office and is given access to a network of security cameras throughout the facility to track the movement of the animatronics. Each animatronic character roams the restaurant and has distinct movement patterns, and most of the characters' movements take place off-screen. The camera feeds are barely lit and distorted; one of the rooms only contains an audio feed. The cameras do not cover certain areas of the building, most notably the two hallways directly to the left and right of the player. The player cannot leave the office, but can close doors for self-defense and briefly turn on the lights in the hallways to check for animatronics. Use of these actions consume the player's limited electrical power; if all the power is exhausted, the cameras become inoperable, the doors open and the lights go out. Once these things happen, Freddy will appear in the left doorway with flashing lights in his eyes while a music box rendition of "Toreador March" plays. After a random amount of time, the office will go pitch black and Freddy will jumpscare the player, resulting in a game over, unless the player makes it to 6 a.m. before this occurs. If the player is jumpscared by any of the animatronics, they must restart from the beginning of the night.
The game has five levels comprising five "nights" in the game (hence the game's title), each increasing in difficulty. Completion of the main game awards the player a star in the main menu and unlocks an even more difficult 6th "night", and completion of this level awards another star and opens up a "Custom Night" during which the player can adjust the AI difficulty of each individual character except for Golden Freddy. Completion of the game's most difficult challenge in which all robots are set to the highest level of 20 (often referred to as 20/20/20/20 mode or 4/20 mode) awards the player a third star.
Plot
The main character, Mike Schmidt, has started a job working as a night watch security guard at Freddy Fazbear's Pizza, a restaurant owned by the fictional "Fazbear Entertainment". Mike's predecessor leaves a voicemail message each night and explains different aspects of the history of the restaurant. He explains that the restaurant's four animatronic characters – Freddy Fazbear, Bonnie the Bunny, Chica the Chicken, and Foxy the Pirate Fox – come to life at night because their servomotors would lock up if they were left off for too long. The employee warns Mike that if one of the robots encounters a human after hours, it will automatically assume that the human is an endoskeleton not in costume and the robot will "forcefully stuff" the person into a spare mechanical Freddy Fazbear costume, killing the person brutally in the process.
Throughout the game, newspaper clippings and stories from the phone caller imply that the restaurant's image and standing with the general public suffered dramatically over time. The man on the phone mentions an incident called "the Bite of '87", which involved an animatronic going haywire and biting off a victim's frontal lobe. Newspaper clippings in the restaurant's east hallway reveal that a reported mass murder occurred on site, which supposedly occurred when a mysterious man lured five children into a back room before killing them. Later, the restaurant received complaints that the animatronics began to smell foul and became stained with blood and mucus around the eyes and mouth, with one customer comparing them to "reanimated carcasses", implying that the children's dead bodies were stuffed inside the animatronics and the children's ghosts are still possessing them. After the seventh night, Mike is fired for tampering with the animatronics, unprofessionalism and bad odor.
Development
The idea for Five Nights at Freddy's stems from the negative reception towards Scott Cawthon's previous game, the family-friendly Chipper & Sons Lumber Co., as players commented that the main character (a young beaver) as well as the rest of the characters looked like "a scary animatronic animal", with reviewer Jim Sterling calling the game unintentionally "terrifying". Although initially discouraged by the poor reception to Chipper & Sons, Cawthon, who had previously mainly developed Christian-oriented games, eventually used it to inspire himself to make something intentionally scarier. In the game, the animatronics themselves are rarely seen moving. This was revealed to be a deliberate choice on Cawthon's part, as he believes that in real life, such robots are scarier this way, telling Indie Gamer Mag "it’s when they are turned off that the veil is lifted, and you realize that they were never alive. They are, and always have been, dead." Cawthon used Clickteam Fusion 2.5 to develop the game and Autodesk 3ds Max to model and render the 3D graphics, and the game took six months to create.
