1. Gameplay

2. Plot

3. Development and release

4. Reception

5. Legacy

6. References

7. External links

Five Nights at Freddy's (often abbreviated to FNaF1) 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 ShowBiz Pizza Place), where the player must act as a night security guard by defending themselves from the malfunctioning 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.

Gameplay

Five Nights at Freddy's is a survival-horror game with point-and-click elements. Players act as a security guard at Freddy Fazbear's Pizza where they must survive their shift, lasting from midnight to {{nowrap|6:00 a.m.}} (approximately 8 minutes and 36 seconds of real time, 4 minutes and 30 seconds on the mobile and tablet editions),^[2] without being jumpscared by the five animatronic animals that inhabit the facility, who are Freddy, Bonnie, Chica, Foxy, and Golden Freddy. More characters are added in later games.

The player sits in an office, 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 dimly 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 guard room, but they can close the doors for self-defense and briefly turn on lights in the hallways to check for animatronics.^[2][4] Use of these actions consume the player's limited electrical power; if the power runs out, the cameras become inoperable, the doors open and the lights go out.^[2] Once these things happen, Freddy will appear in the left doorway flashing 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, provided the player does not reach the end of the night in the meantime. 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, each increasing in difficulty. Completion of the main game unlocks an even more difficult 6th "night", and completion of this level opens up a "Custom Night" during which the player can adjust the AI difficulty of each individual character except for Golden Freddy.^[2]

Plot

The main character, Mike Schmidt,^[3] has started a job working as a night watch security guard at Freddy Fazbear's Pizza, a restaurant owned by the fictional "Fazbear Entertainment".^[2][9] Mike’s predecessor leaves a voicemail message each night (until he is killed on Night 4, after which there is just garble sounds during the call) 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 in the process.^[4]

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 person'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 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 are hidden inside the animatronics and the children's ghosts are possessing them.^[5] After the seventh night, Mike is fired for tampering with the animatronics, unprofessionalism, and bad odor.^[6]

Development and release

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".^[7][8] 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.^[7] 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."^[7] 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.^[9]

Reception

Omri Petitte for PC Gamer gave Five Nights at Freddy's a score of 80 out of 100, commenting that the game took a "less-is-more" approach to its design, and that, while "the AI isn't some masterwork of procedural unpredictability, it would [still] head straight to you and eat your face off, or it'll play around like an innocent child before closing in for the kill. Your mind will fill in the rest". The game's overall atmosphere was praised for emphasizing the fear and suspense of an approaching threat, rather than the arrival of the threat itself as in other horror-oriented games. However, the gameplay of Five Nights at Freddy's was criticized for becoming repetitive once a player masters it, as there is "not much more to expect beyond managing battery life and careful timing of slamming doors shut, so those with steely willpower won't find anything else past the atmosphere of it all."^[17] Ryan Bates of Game Revolution gave the game a 4.5 out of 5; comparing its camera-oriented gameplay to the 1992 game Night Trap, he praised the game's minimalistic presentation (with particular emphasis on its audio design and lack of music) for contributing to the terror of the game, along with the fact that the "nervous impulses" of its repetitive gameplay would "[reach] almost OCD-type levels, adding to the tense environment." In conclusion, he felt that the game was "horror done right", but that it was too short.^[16]

Legacy

The success of Five Nights at Freddy's led to Cawthon developing several prequels and sequels, beginning with the release of Five Nights at Freddy's 2 in November 2014.^[24] Two novel adaptations, The Silver Eyes and The Twisted Ones, were released in 2015 and 2017 respectively.^[25] The third novel adaptation, Five Nights at Freddy's: The Fourth Closet, was released in 2018.^[26] A spin-off, FNaF World, was released in 2016.^[27] A guidebook based on the series called The Freddy Files was released in 2017.

As of 2017, Blumhouse Productions has acquired the rights to make a film adaptation of Five Nights at Freddy's.^[28]

References

External links

• {{Official website|http://www.scottgames.com/}}
• Five Nights at Freddy's on IndieDB

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