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1Hey yo hi hello, I’m Hippie Rat and I liked Five Nights at Freddy’s. Fuck you, I’m allowed to like what I want. I don’t have to say “oh, Five Nights at Freddy’s has jumpscares in it, therefore it’s bad,” in fact I will punch you in the face by saying the exact opposite. But first, let me bring you back to the beginning.
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3On May 17, 1977, the first Chuck E. Cheese’s, then operating under the name Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theatre, opened its doors. A bunch of other stuff happened that isn’t as interesting, I just wanted to mention the very beginning because it’s poetic and stuff, until 30 years later, in the mid-double-o’s, where yours truly visited a local Chuck E. Cheese franchise semi-regularly while growing up. Now it’s not like I was there every damn day or anything, no, that would be silly. Imagine my current upload schedule. Okay now just about a quarter as frequent as that and yeah that’s just about how often I’d visit. Regardless, even as someone who would go once in a blue moon, I and all my friends knew the legends. The spooky aesopian tales of children never wanting the fun to end, so they remain inside the restaurant-arcade once it closes to spend all night playing games...only to find that the robotic Charles Entertainment Cheese and his friends hunt down and kill any kid still present in the after-hours. These were real urban legends that persisted among many children, which is a difficult thing to imagine now in a world where the leading force in Chuck E. Cheese inspired horror is, as we all know, Five Nights at Freddy’s. The persistence of these urban legends among kids led me to a thought I first perceived in mid-August, 2014: “How had no one done this yet?”
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5Yes, when Five Nights at Freddy’s debuted on August 8, 2014, it was met with astoundingly positive reception and cheers of “well...yeah, duh, of course!” Being the first to dip his toes into the utilization of a predominant urban legend, as well as introducing easy-to-learn yet still challenging gameplay mechanics for people of all ages to enjoy, as well as a surplus of lore and Easter eggs to uncover, made Scott Cawthon’s game explode in popularity. Soon enough, it was sequel time. Seeing as how the first game built two large mysterious events into its timeline without divulging enough details about either of them, the sequel would need to elaborate somewhat…
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7...Here’s where we start seeing some missteps. You see, when the first game was being explored by lore seekers, the two mysterious events included the murder of five children on the establishment with the subsequent implications of their bodies being hidden in the suits used to place over the animatronic characters. The other one was the Bite of ‘87. Right away, it becomes clear that what needed answering wasn’t the murder of the children...no, we understood that enough. The most deliberation over the game was who was the culprit of the mysterious Bite of ‘87. Could it have been Foxy and that’s why he’s out of order? Could it have been Freddy Fazbear since his suit shows signs of struggle against someone? Golden Freddy? The most enigmatic character in the game? Bonnie? Chica? [clip from Scream: “Everybody’s a suspect!”]
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9Now I’m not going to act like Scott didn’t give anyone any information at all regarding the Bite of ‘87 in the sequel, the game puts a date to the event, and details around it, including the fact that it connects directly with the ghosts of the children murdered by the guy who, by the way, dominates the lore. Seriously, he is all over the lore now, and all that was learned was that he wore a gold-colored suit while committing the crimes, which amounted to nothing but a bait and switch come the third game.
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11Now...I’m gonna start talking about why the first game was scary and this one isn’t. This can get somewhat subjective, because that’s how fear works, but the grimy, gritty look from the first Five Nights at Freddy’s game, as well as the jumpscares having a basis more in movement rather than just jumping out at the characters, creates a much scarier atmosphere, and thus disturbs you on a much deeper level. The tension, the payoff, even seeing the eyeballs popping out of the suit in the game over screen is more morbidly satisfying than what amounts to an image we’ve been seeing for the entirety of the game thus far. The textures from the first game looked more interesting, the sense of mystery was handled much more subtly, and...you know what, yeah, the first game was more subtle.
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13Everything about the second game feels like Cawthon was trying a bit too hard to up the ante from the first. The first game had an enemy that was defined by his more decrepit look? The second game has 6 of those. The first game had 5 enemies? The second game has 11. The first game had like five or six different types of hallucinations? The second game has a fuckton. Your sense of safety in the first game was defined by your doors? The second game has no doors. The first game gave creepy mystery exposition by means of subtle changes to in-game elements? The second game has playable cutscenes explaining it to the player.
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15Truly, the first game became a phenomenon through its subtlety, something that isn’t given enough credit because this is a game series criticized so heavily for indulging on jumpscares, but the second game heavily changed that direction to something more appetizing to a wider audience. Kinda like Saw. And I like the Saw franchise. So why don’t I like Five Nights at Freddy’s 2? To answer that, rewatch the last few minutes of this video, and pay attention this time. But what about the rest of the franchise?
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17[clip from Five Nights at Freddy’s 3 trailer]
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19For years, I’ve been operating under the insistence that Five Nights at Freddy’s should be looked at under the lens of being a trilogy. For three games, the story, while being loose and up for interpretation, still was contained enough for any general human to be able to glance at it and understand what happened, even with major details having been excluded, and it was around the fourth game that the series went off the rails, but I’ll get to that later. Sometime after gaming personality Lewis Dawkins completed the infamous 50/20 challenge in the eighth game in the series, Ultimate Custom Night, he was treated to an exclusive interview with Scott Cawthon, whose normal reclusiveness added to the mystery of the series. In that interview, Scott not only confirmed that he intended for the series to be a trilogy, but explained why it wasn’t. Do you want to know what convinced him to make a fourth game? You wouldn’t believe me even if I told you!~ I’m still gonna tell you!~
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21Here is a clip exemplifying why Five Nights at Freddy’s 4 exists. [clip of the Springtrap jumpscare from the left]. Confused? Give me a second to explain. The third game was criticized not only for being somewhat easier than the previous two games [clip from Markiplier talking about how much easier the ultimate challenge of the game was to beat than 4/20 mode and 10/20], but because the jumpscares from the main enemy of the game, Springtrap, wasn’t as intense as the previous games. I will repeat that, the game was criticized for not having jumpscares that were as intense, and this was enough to justify the creation of another game in the series, made almost exclusively to be more intense than the previous games. Remember when Five Nights at Freddy’s 4 came out, and PewDiePie made a video criticizing it just for being a jumpscare fest? In 2015, that was considered to be a controversial moment in PewDiePie’s career. And, here’s a sentence I won’t have many more chances to say: PewDiePie was right.
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23You see, the first few games had a setting that was grounded somewhat in the reality established by the universe up to that point. Twice over we saw it take place in an arcade-restaurant, and in the third game, it was the same building that used to be an arcade-restaurant, except it was renovated into a walk-through horror attraction, named Fazbear’s Fright, decades after the restaurant fell into bankruptcy as a result of various tragedies associated with the location. Now, there’s some minor plot holes you can grasp out of how they thought it would be a good marketing gimmick to turn what could have been a part of a strip mall into a horror attraction. I mean, the Chuck E. Cheese’s I used to visit is stuck between an Edible Arrangements shop and a Mediterranean restaurant. I can barely imagine a seasonal Halloween shop in its place, let alone a full-on horror show. But the storyline and some supplementary materials imply that this building is pretty isolated, as a result of taking place in the small town of Hurricane, Utah, and I guess it’s not too far-fetched to imagine a small building dedicated to being a horror attraction.
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25Anyway, it’s reasonably feasible for a horror game about the urban legend of the animatronic characters from Chuck E. Cheese’s coming to life at night to take place in a Chuck E. Cheese’s, but you start losing me when you place us in a child’s bedroom and introduce these monstrosities. Holy shit! These things are fucking...dumb. They got like teeth and claws and shit all over the place, half of them got mouths on their stomachs, these ones look like they’re on fire, this is ridiculous. Like, is it fair to say we have officially jumped shark on what makes these animatronics scary? We kinda did that back with Mangle, Mangle was fucking stupid. That second head? What’s that even for? This is just here because it’s scary and doesn’t fit enough in the universe to justify it. Here’s Mangle now. [cut to me screaming or breaking shit] I’m serious here, am I allowed to say that this isn’t scary? This was designed to be so scary that it is no longer scary. Here’s a word that y’all should start utilizing in your day-to-day lives: subtlety.
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27I revisited Chuck E. Cheese’s a couple years ago for my little sister’s birthday party, and with that chance I went to go look at the animatronic gang, and it was a horrific sight. Half of them had milked-over eyes, there was rust rubbed into the fur of the Helen Henny suit, Pasqually’s neck was frayed into a horrible mess of plush, and the main man himself had broken, left in a stilted pose, occasionally twitching eerily, with his microphone taped onto his hand. The parallels I could draw to how they portrayed the characters as decrepit in the first game… The costumes are stained with age, they’re frayed and torn, it felt legitimately like a franchise had these characters but lacked the money to continually repair them...or wash them...they twitch, their servos lock up, et cetera. The second game takes this way too much to the extreme and it suffers because of it. Bonnie is missing his entire face. Chica lost her arms. Mangle is fucked. Where is the subtlety? It was much scarier when it felt more like these characters were plausible to be seen. So what about Springtrap...? Springtrap...is my fucking favorite. I’m not even joking. You guys are probably up and arms immediately because he’s a zombie man stuck inside of an animatronic, and yeah, I do think the lore is a bit hokey here, somewhat convoluted, but Five Nights at Freddy’s 3 is a testament to subtlety.
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29Springtrap presents itself as a much more conscious, thinking, plotting figure, similar to Freddy Fazbear in the first game. The character design itself holds the corpse of the man who murdered those children years before, and you get to see the story of how he ended up in this animatronic unfold in a very clever way. The old training tapes are used to explain how the combination animatronic and mascot suit works, it’s weaknesses, and its fatal shortcomings that led to building renovations that kept it imprisoned up until now, and the playable cutscenes show why he met the fate he did. The style of the video game does not allow for a lot of traditional step-by-step storytelling, so Scott Cawthon worked around it and created a very chilling experience. I love how you can only see the corpse of the child murderer in certain angles, including the version of the jumpscare that you would naturally see less often. Being able to just barely see a rotting corpse past the suit in a series that so far has limited its gore to implications and pixel art is such a cool change of pace. And once again, I’d like to point out the methodical nature of the character, and connect back to the jumpscares. The Springtrap jumpscares in Five Nights at Freddy’s 3 are the best jumpscares in the series, even though they were not as loud and fast as the rest of the series. It’s so much more horrifying to see this thing slowly approach you like it does. I say “this thing” because it goes so much further than being an animatronic like all the characters in the previous games. The decay and grotesqueness is pronounced enough to deem beautifully uncanny, but subtle enough to not be dumb-looking, yet the way it reaches you is like an animal, prowling, stalking its prey. Yes, it’s a jumpscare, but it’s a damn good one. No, it’s not quite as loud and jarring, but that’s what makes great horror.
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31I guess what I’m saying is, sometimes what makes a character work in horror doesn’t exist at all in another, and that’s fine, so long as a decent balance can be met before we leave the plane of scary, and many things can help that balance. If the lore connects back in an interesting enough way, if the setting complements the characters, all that kind of stuff. See, in Five Nights at Freddy’s 4, the setting...doesn’t really work. Probably any other boogeymen would work here, but not these robot ones. I know Scott Cawthon had actual nightmares reflecting the events of this game, which was likely an inspiration for this game, but to make such a large leap in whatever pseudo-realism this series held up to this point, you cut my suspension of disbelief. So does the lore help? ...kinda? But not quite in a satisfying enough way, and especially not with how much the nature of the lore leaves the major factors of gameplay up to interpretation. This is kind of a huge flaw that makes taking in the story very difficult.
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33The largest consensus is that you play as the character known to fans as “Crying Child,” and the bulk of the game takes place in the dream state of the child, where a jumpscare does not mean death, it instead means waking up scared in the middle of the night, and he must fall back asleep and not be awoken again in order to complete the night, and these nightmares are the result of his older brother and his friends consistently bullying and frightening him with Fazbear Entertainment character masks. This reaches a dramatic climax when we learn that the final nights are his nightmares while in a comatose, dying state after having his head crushed in the jaws of the Fredbear animatronic after a prank gone wrong. Now, this interpretation is the least ridiculous, and calls for the least amount of a suspension of disbelief, because the shit that I was upset by, how ridiculous it is that we play as a child in a bedroom tormented by the most demented version of the antagonists to date, is explained relatively easily by the events taking place in a dream, while the Atari-style plot development represents the waking life of the player character.
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35Another interpretation is that these animatronics are real and actually tormenting the player character of Crying Child in the middle of the night in order to convince him to stay shuttered in his room so that he doesn’t get killed by the killer animatronics and killer people associated with the pizzeria. This is a stupid interpretation, mainly because it actually involves this...to be canonically fucking real and walking and tangible and this fucking ugly, as well as existing within a residence rather than its natural environment of anywhere else. If this is what was intended, then fuck this game. One more interpretation says that you play as a robot child that in other games grows up to be a robot man whose artificial flesh ends up rotting, but we’ll get there. I don’t even know what to say at this point, because if Scott Cawthon intended to tell this story in this way, and MatPat gives a somewhat compelling argument in favor of this theory, then this series is far gone in terms of being even somewhat grounded in existing legend, and especially far gone in terms of following the story with the existence of definitive truth.
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37And that’s not to completely trash the game or anything, it was extremely exciting when this game first came out to see unfold the events of the ever-enigmatic Bite of ‘87. It was the mystery I wanted spelled out to me the most and to see it unfold was too good to be true. Turns out it really truly literally was too good to be true because this isn’t the Bite of ‘87, it’s the Bite of ‘83. [let this sentence crescendo in intensity] Scott Cawthon had the gall to say that this was the Final Chapter in the teasers, hint at this game answering who the culprit of the Bite of ‘87 is, and instead of treating the opportunity like a chance to wrap up all loose ends, he instead introduced a completely new event filled with its own missing details, only to entice the player with a box implied to hold the answer to how those missing details mesh together in a logical way, and when people failed to come anywhere close he decided against ever showing the contents of said box and instead leaving the series off on an ultimate cryptic cliffhanger, a problem caused mainly by his own faults in storytelling, [suddenly, tone drops in intensity] and at that point, there’s nothing left to do but take the game advertised as the final chapter, throw your hands up and say “fuck it! We’re not even halfway done.”
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39And so, at least twice in a row, Scott Cawthon thought he would be happily complete with contributing new games for this series. He released a novel, which I’ll brush on later, but eventually decided to add more to the FNaF universe, continue the story that he decided couldn’t end on a locked box. I mean...he could have opened the box but “the fans wouldn’t like it that way.” So he went to work on a new game, advertised in such subtle ways before releasing a trailer, and even still sending fans of the series scrambling over all the new concepts and ideas. A spin-off title, finally breaking the trend of numbering each game, but oh, so many of us know it as Five Nights at Freddy’s 5. A shockingly scary piece. One that completely changed the tone of the series from its macabre drama to its tongue-in-cheek humorism. The show will begin momentarily. Everyone please stay in your seats… It’s mothafucking FNaF World! [“what the fu-!” from the trailer]
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41Yes, the commonly overlooked fifth title in the Five Nights lexicon, the cutesy RPG where you lead every character introduced in the first four games in the series on a quest to restore peace in the digital safe haven they all reside in, ultimately culminating in a battle against developer Scott Cawthon himself, FNaF World didn’t do so well critically. Generally speaking it seemed fairly well-received, but a vocal minority spoke out over the apparent rushed feel of production, which kinda made sense, Scott had made a habit of completing games ahead of schedule and just allowing it to be released as soon as it’s ready, and FNaF World was no exception. Now personally, I feel a little wary really critiquing this game myself, because I’ve never been huge on RPGs in generally and their “grindy,” “life-dedicating” nature, but of the RPGs I’ve experienced, FNaF World was a particularly fun one, with all its lore and different endings, and especially with Scott’s self-critical meta humor making its way into the game. One of the endings require you to defeat a boss structured after Chipper, a woodchuck character from one of Cawthon’s previous games, Chipper and Sons Lumber Company, which was poorly received as a result of the character animations, inspiring the creation of the original Five Nights at Freddy’s game. One minigame features a Metroid style shooter that has Freddy Fazbear destroying Scott Cawthon’s head floating in a tank of water, shouting mad ramblings over how he will milk the series dry with as many bizarre spinoffs as he can. You can play as a set of paper plates from one of the party rooms in Five Nights at Freddy’s 2, this game is fucking crazy. The game doesn’t connect largely to the canon series, but does serve as a commentary and satire on the success of it and the internet’s connection to it. As much as Cawthon tries to bury this game and ignore it, I enjoyed it and think it added a very interesting dynamic to a series that had made a bit of a confusing turn.
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43Here’s the funny thing though, because of the outspoken few who felt that FNaF World wasn’t a good way to end the series, Scott felt compelled once again to continue the series. It's a vicious cycle, you know. But then, most things in life are. The pendulum swings one way, then it swings the other. Now we return to darkness. It wasn't supposed to be like this. Now it's all a mess. He didn't know what else to do. He doesn't want to disappoint people. But his mind isn't right. He’s made something terrible. Her name is Baby. It's too late to deactivate her… [“The show will begin momentarily. Everyone please stay in your seats.”] Never before has a big bad in the series been given such a foreboding teaser. No Puppet, no Springtrap, no Nightmare. Baby was a threatening force out for blood. She was cold, methodical, and sentient. She was going to make Sister Location one of the most chilling experiences ever put into the series. Did you see her in that trailer? Holy crap is she creepy. I wonder how her character will operate. I guess we have to wait until it releases October 7, 2016. The day finally reaches, it's time to see her in action. Ladies and gentlemen, here she is! [cut to her lifeless husk on Night 5] …? [“what the fu-!” from the FNaF World trailer]
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45Five Nights at Freddy’s: Sister Location follows Eggs Benedict as he takes a job in an underground storage facility that holds a series of “Funtime” animatronics, a group of robots designed with malicious intent by the child murderer of the previous games, revealed to be a business partner that owns a significant portion of Fazbear Entertainment, William Afton. This game is notably different from the other entries in the FNaF series, in that instead of tending to one group of tasks for a period of time, and then having the next level be the same tasks with an increased difficulty, Sister Location orders new tasks from the player in every level. While this makes for the most unique gaming experience out of the entire series, it also makes for some relatively weak game design. It’s pretty frustrating the amount of times we learn how to play the game, only for that to never again be the game. The only exception to that is the Sister Location Custom Night DLC, released two months after the original release of the game, and it still does not affect the gameplay of the main story. 
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47On your first night you learn the importance of using lighting fixtures to see when the animatronics are on their stage, and the “controlled shock” mechanism that resets their system into making them return to their stage if they aren’t already there. You immediately find out that it doesn’t really matter, because the light for Circus Baby Gallery is broken, disallowing you from seeing Baby in her full glory in-game. It continues to become an even less relevant part of gameplay. On the second night, you hide from Bidybabs underneath a desk. You are never again in a situation of peril after tugging on the metal sheet protecting you twice, and you only ever return to this desk for optional lore. You then crawl through Ballora Gallery, stopping in your tracks every time you hear her music get too loud. You crawl through Ballora Gallery one more time later in the night, except the threat of jumpscaring and “game over” is eliminated, and you never do that again. This is the last time you ever encounter Ballora while she is active. After that, you must reset the breakers while Funtime Freddy actively approaches you, only losing interest when you activate audio prompts resetting his progress. There is no gameplay mechanic that works in this way in any other portion of the game. This is the last time you ever encounter Funtime Freddy while he is still active, but not the last time you encounter his hand puppet, which is named Bon-Bon, after Quinton Reviews’s cat [clip of Quinton in his Bee Movie video scolding his cat, Bon-Bon]. On night 3, you have to walk through Funtime Auditorium, flashing a beacon of light at the right intervals to keep Funtime Foxy at a distance from you. You only ever perform this gameplay mechanic once more on the way back, and you are scripted in the game to fail it no matter what. This is the last time you ever encounter Funtime Foxy while he is still active. This is the game and you know what, I’ll be that guy, all of this makes for one of the worst games in the series.
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49It’s better than FNaF 2, and FNaF 4, and FNaF World, but it’s such a flawed game that thrives so much in the fan community on novelty. It’s the Five Nights at Freddy’s game that isn’t a Five Nights at Freddy’s game. Wow. This game is kind of a mess. Like I said already, the style of introducing new mechanics only to never use them again is frustrating. It’s also disappointing to only ever encounter each animatronic each in one specific feature of gameplay, especially since you barely ever get any interaction at all with the two big bads of the game: Baby and Ennard.
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51Baby serves as a narrator of sorts for the game, but we learn that she’s somewhat unreliable as a narrator at the end when she becomes one with Ennard. It was beyond disappointing to have Baby hyped up as the biggest threat we’d ever encounter, only to literally never see her in-game, except for her deactivated form just fucking lying here like a deactivated animatronic. Ennard is also very confusing in and of himself. The concept of Ennard is easy enough to get, it’s an amalgamation of Funtimes Freddy and Foxy, Ballora, and Baby, but his actions in-game are really confusing. It’s hard to tell if Ennard represents Baby the entire time, and the concept of Ennard isn’t introduced to the game until the final night, and it just feels like a completely unwarranted climax. Like, it just happens. “By the way, Ennard exists, and he escapes the storage facility by using your body as a meat suit. Good night!” It’s just weird that Baby was such a huge thing in the promotional materials, yet literally all we get out of her in-game is that her programming is responsible for the death of Afton’s daughter, who now haunts the animatronic, but her individualism is left so unutilized because she just ends up part of Ennard. And that’s not even talking about how Ennard chooses to work. It instructs you to extract “the good parts” of Baby before sending her to the scooping room. I have no clue how Ennard would have a chance to go into the scooping room and meld with Baby’s endoskeleton before you make it to the scooping room, so that kinda just happens. It’s never explained what happens to “the good parts of Baby” after the fact. I guess it’s just eliminated, leaving Baby haunted by only the part of her soul that was corrupted by her father, the child murderer. I don’t know.
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53I haven’t even gotten to the private room ending, where you ignore the directions to the scooping room, yet instead of killing you, Ennard just fucks off, enters the private room before you, goes past that room into the other rooms off from the private room, and then turns back around and tries to kill you. ...Why?! This is described as the non-canon ending of the game, and yeah I can imagine why when it can only be accomplished by having your evil amalgamation of robots designed exclusively to kill decide to not kill and just go for a fucking walk into some other part of the building. This fake ending really only serves to provide the player with a chance to have a Five Nights at Freddy’s experience in this Five Nights at Freddy’s game, but then it loses that charm when in comes a much more full Five Nights at Freddy’s experience in the Custom Night DLC. And I still got problems. Check out our roster for the Sister Location Custom Night. Feel disappointed? I do! So not only were we deprived a full experience with Circus Baby in the main game, as well as lacking much of any experience with Ennard, both are absent in Custom Night. But don’t worry, we have two different variations of both Bidybabs and Minireenas. Why the heck do we need that? Was it really not possible to trade some of their mechanics with Baby and Ennard? Couldn’t Baby have done what Electrobab did? Couldn’t Ennard have done what Minireena 1 did? You didn’t even give Minireenas 1 and 2 unique names to differentiate each other! There’s a reason that Sister Location Custom Night is the most forgotten part of the entire series, even over FNaF World!
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55Let’s talk about the lore. Here’s the thing you should know: Eggs Benedict is actually Michael Afton, the son of William Afton, and thus brother of Baby. He’s also either the older brother of Crying Child or he is Crying Child if you subscribe to the idea of Crying Child being a robot. I will hate your guts if you do. Here’s what happens at the end of the game: you get your insides “scooped,” allowing for Ennard to use your body to blend in as a human. Unfortunately, Michael Afton’s flesh rots, and Ennard escapes, leaving him a purple husk of flesh, kept alive by the soul juice, called remnant, that is injected into you during the scooping process, as detailed in the following game. The way that this is shown to the player is deceitful. That is a simple fact. The reveal of Michael Afton’s fate is deceitful, because he is turned into the same purple sprite that represented William Afton, the child murderer, as he works in shadows, and he has a monologue about coming to hunt his father over footage of Springtrap, while having the exact same sinister voice as was given to William Afton’s voice lines.
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57This reveal implied so heavily that Michael Afton was actually the child murderer that ended up inside Springtrap, and it royally fucks up the timeline. Tons of people fell for it too, and that was no accident. It would have been easy to have Michael Afton’s final rotten sprite be green instead of purple. It would have been easy to give Michael Afton a less sinister voice. It would have been easy to make it abundantly clear when this game takes place so as to eliminate timeline confusion. But no. Just as he had teased so heavily that Five Nights at Freddy’s 4 would reveal the Bite of ‘87 only to add a completely separate bite without assuming people would get confused, Cawthon teased the identity of purple guy only to add a completely separate purple guy without assuming people would get confused.
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59Cawthon made a point that every game would partially exist to clarify a confusing plot detail from the previous. In Sister Location, you can view the bedroom from FNaF 4 by typing in the code “1983” in the private room, confirming the event as a “Bite of ‘83.” In Pizzeria Simulator, Springtrap is directly credited as William Afton to convict him as the child murderer. The thing is, Cawthon would not have to do this if he hadn’t created a scenario that would confuse people in the first place. So many simple fixes that weren’t utilized, convincing me that Cawthon deliberately introduced those aspects of the lore specifically to confuse and distract. And for all that, Sister Location loses so many brownie points, and I look back on this as a specific low point in the series.
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61For nearly a year, most updates to the series are books. In 2017, a sequel to the original novel was released, as well as a guidebook for the games and an activity book. Each of them held some level of lore reveals. The guidebook’s main reveal is a piece of art teasing Scrap Baby. The activity book was full of small lore bits that mostly relate back to Five Nights at Freddy’s 4. Now, I like to treat these kinds of things pretty lightly, because, you know, they’re just cute little Easter eggs included to add some more atmosphere to the book, but it gets pretty annoying to see some of the most ridiculous interpretations of the stories being built so heavily on these books, like Michael Afton actually being the character that is Crying Child, rebuilt as a robot man that, yes, got gutted and filled with another robot all while still being the same robot except rotten. Now, for all I know, these interpretations and the way that they’re made are correct, I don’t know, it’s not like Cawthon’s gonna spill the beans on that front, but in the case that it is then frankly I just think it’s too much to just sit with. I mean, hi I’m that guy, but just because it may be the true form of the story does not mean it’s good in my eyes. Stories going from a simple urban-legend premise to bizarrely complicated vague sci-fi chaos just aren’t what I’m subscribing for, as much as it may fit into the genre of horror franchises that go on for a bit too long.
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63With that, I think it’s time we tackle the novels. The trilogy of The Silver Eyes, The Twisted Ones, and The Fourth Closet was written by Scott Cawthon and Kira Breed-Wrisley. The novels chronologically follow Charlie, a young woman returning to Hurricane, Utah and learning the secrets of her past and her connections to the missing children incident concurrent with the events of the games. Now, you’d think that because this series exists, then we would be facing every question about the Five Nights at Freddy’s storyline being answered, but no. Scott Cawthon has infamously described the status of the book’s canon with the games as both being canon in their own separate universes. So essentially, “yes, the novels are canon, as in many details about Five Nights at Freddy’s would be revealed through these novels, but at the same time many aspects of the novels are not canon and don’t follow the games at all, blurring the lines.” Remember that ridiculous theory about Michael Afton being a robot? That theory exists because The Fourth Closet reveals that Charlie is a robot. These novels actually do what I was just criticizing the implicated story of the games to do, but to a substantial, quantifiable level, immortalized in print.
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65Does that mean the books are bad? Honestly, not really. Being a fully realized story written out in novels in full detail rather than having the lore hidden in Easter eggs helps build the more fictional aspects into a concept I can follow easier. I feel like I’m not being clear enough. Basically, it’s much easier to suspend my disbelief far enough to admit that perhaps our protagonist is a robot if dialogue states “hey, turns out you’re a robot,” rather than if the protagonist has a speech in one game that has a robotic voice effect added, he survives an event that is explained to be survivable by means other than him being a robot, and that other thing had dialogue state “hey, turns out you’re a robot,” and you have to spend five years piecing all that together in a somewhat comprehensible way, and you’re still not sure.
66
67My biggest annoyance with the novels are simply that it would have been so easy for details that don’t create major inconsistencies between these novels and the games to have been adhered to. It would have been so easy. You want to know how to accomplish it? Just don’t create those inconsistencies! Like Silver Eyes revolves largely around the characters breaking into the abandoned building that was Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza years after it shut down, and with it a lot of very clear details about the layout of the building. And spoiler alert! It’s not the same as the games. I mean, let’s assume that the location in the books is based more off the first game since, you know, it is. In the first game we have the main room and that’s where the stage is, that’s where all the tables are. It can be assumed that somewhere off camera there are arcade cabinets, like maybe right around here between the entrance to the hallways, or maybe they’re somewhere in storage. In this corner of the same room is Foxy’s stage. The only extensions to this main room are rooms off to the side like the kitchen or the backstage area, or small hallway extensions used solely for bathrooms, custodial closets, and the security room. But the description of the floor plan is so much more elaborate in the books. Pirate’s Cove is no longer just another stage in the main room, it’s a completely separate room off of a long hallway. There are many described separate rooms, including ones for arcade cabinets. There’s even a room designed similarly to the security room except it’s used to program the dancing of the animatronics and it exists inside the actual stage, which is its own can of worms regarding if this hollowed-out version of the stage would even be able to support the animatronics. My point is, the described floor plan of Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza in the books is so much more different than anything we’ve ever seen in the games, and that’s kinda ridiculous. That’s not something that should be hard to get correct, even if you just want more separate rooms for dramatic purposes.
68
69My current theory is that Scott Cawthon created the main layout of events of the story and commissioned Kira Breed-Wrisley to make something readable out of it, which I understand, but at the same time it doesn’t just excuse my frustration with how easy it could have been to keep details from going all over the place. If Cawthon wanted the books to hold the details that would have revealed the secrets of the games, then it would have been easier to just have it occur the same way as the games. Charlie was killed by William Afton. Does she possess the Puppet and spend her afterlife trying to protect other kids or does she get rebuilt as an android? Both are correct, it just depends if you got the game open or the book open. Michael Afton was the son of William Afton. Does he exist? Well, yes and no, after all, both the games and the books are canon, just not to each other. You know what Circus Baby looks like? Good job, great memory, but you’re also wrong because she’s actually the same kind of human robot that is made out of flesh or something, basically it’s the older version of Charlie but programmed evil later. Toy animatronics, funtime animatronics, twisted animatronics, nightmare animatronics, some exist, some don’t, some only exist in one, and some...times I want to play with matches. For how important the books seem for allowing the suspension of disbelief in relation to how certain interpretations of the story of the games are considered possible, they seem to distance themselves wayyyy too much from the games, and fuck me if that’s not frustrating.
70
71I feel like I’m being a little bit rambly here, such that my issues may be met with a resounding “so what?” And here’s the rub: if even simple details like the layout of a small building can’t be kept consistent, then it becomes downright impossible to truly come to a conclusion about which details are included in the novels with the intention of answering questions about the canon of the game. The reason I’ve been calling people’s opinions of how the story goes “interpretations” rather than “theories” is mainly because picking and choosing what details in this series parallel details in the other canon is akin to translating a play from Ancient Greek into English. “Well this word sometimes means ‘sun’ but sometimes means ‘moon,’ so we have no way of knowing whether this scene takes place at night or at daytime.” Does that mean we should toss the books aside and never use them for learning what is going on? Well, there’s one canon universe where we should, and one equally canon universe where we shouldn’t. Good luck.
72
73Now, other than the frustration I’m met with while trying to use the novels as a tool for dealing with the games, I actually like the novels a good bit. After all, they’re meant to be read as their own standalone experience, and you’re doing a disservice to them when you fail to read them at least once with that sentiment in mind. I’m a huge sucker for teen or young adult melodrama, whether it be a fun horror like Final Destination 3 or a raunchy comedy like Superbad or a quirky indie story like Life is Strange, and the relationships among the characters here are very fun to read. A lot of the more horrific aspects from the Five Nights at Freddy’s lore are played up, from the disturbing implications of death by killer robot to the adult horror of losing your child. It’s clear that Cawthon and/or Breed-Wrisley had a lot of fun playing around with what the reader knew at any given moment while reading, throwing in plenty of foreshadowing and details hinting toward the bigger picture, all with the knowledge that whoever was reading has probably also seen the Five Nights at Freddy’s Game Theory playlist several times over already and knew the gist of what the lore already had in store for us. I mean, if you’re a casual Five Nights at Freddy’s fan, I feel somewhat confident in saying that if you just tear your mind away from the games and pick up these books, you’re probably going to have a really nice time reading them.
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75So, here we are. Five main games, a spin-off game, three novels, and two variety books and we’re closing in on the end of the year 2017. No new game trailer has been released, so it’s well within plenty of people’s line of assumption that the series is probably done, just gearing up for that movie deal to deliver a finished product. Except wait, it’s December 4, and Cawthon just released something. Oh, well that’s nice, it’s a cute little Atari-style game where you play as Freddy Fazbear delivering pizzas to children. “Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria Simulator.” What a nice little ga-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-! [the video breaks]
76
77[fade in to the table with the cassette, Hippie Rat, mask, lying motionless across from the camera. the cassette begins] 
78
79Cassette Man: Begin tape. Leaving dead space. 3, 2, 1. The purpose of this game is to test the patience of the most dedicated of Five Nights at Freddy’s fans. Begin audio prompt in 3, 2, 1. 
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81MatPat Impression: The phantom animatronics were not actually hallucinations, they were reconstructed in Fazbear’s Fright by Springtrap.
82
83Cassette Man: Document results.
84
85[look down, look back up, I’ve moved] 
86
87Cassette Man: Begin audio prompt in 3, 2, 1.
88
89MatPat Impression: Mike Schmidt, the protagonist of the first game in the series, represents Carlton Burke, the ginger dude in the books.
90
91Cassette Man: Document results.
92
93[look down, look back up, I look pissed]
94
95Cassette Man: Begin audio prompt in 3, 2, 1.
96
97MatPat Impression: Phone Guy...is actually...Peter Venkman.
98
99[i lurch over the table and tackle the camera in a parody of the jumpscare, then cut to the regular review again]
100
101Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria Simulator was the chronological finale to the Five Nights at Freddy’s series, wherein you’re implied to be playing as Michael Afton, purchasing a Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza franchise some time after Fazbear’s Fright burned down. Throughout the game you try to make your pizzeria as well-presented as possible with your limited funds in order to attract as many children to your establishment as possible, though with the added task from a mysterious man to salvage any animatronic still active following the events of the first five main games. Those still active include Ennard, now under the guise of Molten Freddy; Circus Baby, now under the guise of Scrap Baby; William Afton, still trapped in a now, more damaged Springtrap suit; and the Puppet, who has been encapsulated by a containment animatronic known as Lefty. We learn that the mysterious man who instructed your actions is Henry, the founder of Fazbear Entertainment, father of Charlie, creator of the original animatronics, and vengeful business partner of William Afton. He burns the final Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza down, killing himself and Michael Afton, neutralizing the effects of the scooper, freeing Elizabeth Afton’s remnant from Baby, Charlie’s remnant from the Puppet, the remnants of the missing children from Ennard, and dooming William Afton to Hell, all while finally liquidating Fazbear Entertainment.
102
103You probably have a lot of questions going in, like “wait, the children’s souls were in Ennard? Wait, why are Ennard and Baby two different characters again? And hold up, why the fuck does Springtrap look like that?! Fire damage my ass!”
104
105The children’s souls were probably in Ennard, yeah. In the novels the Funtime animatronics were made not only as specialized killing machines, they were also infused with remnant obtained from the original group of animatronics that were haunted by the missing children. The process of “scuping,” or, “Scalable Creation of Ulterior Presence,” directly injected the Funtime animatronics with remnant, and the children’s souls were corrupted by the evil programming. Out of the new information introduced in this game, this is probably the most interesting, retconning a sci-fi explanation for the paranormal events of the games in a way that seems to fit within the rules built within the lore very early on, and it makes the character of Ennard, or Molten Freddy, much cooler.
106
107The explanation for why Circus Baby is no longer a part of Ennard is a lot less satisfying. You see, over the months before the release of the game, the source code of Scott Cawthon’s websites revealed a conversation between Circus Baby and Ennard.
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109Ennard - You are crowding us.
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111Circus Baby - Be Quiet.
112
113Ennard - You can’t tell us what to do anymore.
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115Circus Baby - Yes, I can. You will do everything that I tell you to do.
116
117Ennard - We outnumber you.
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119Circus Baby - That doesn't matter, dummy.
120
121Ennard - We found a way to eject you.
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123Circus Baby - You would be lost without me.
124
125Ennard - Ha, ha! Say goodbye to our friend!
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127Circus Baby - I can put myself back together.
128
129There is zero trace of any mention of this interaction in the actual game, so all that fans have to work off of is the fact that two promotional websites happened to have the integral piece of information, required to justify a character’s appearance in the game, hidden in the fucking source code for a brief moment of time during which the fanbase was not as active due to a lack of extra-prevalent teasers. That’s fucking dumb. Thematically, it does make sense that Ennard and Baby had this interaction. As we established, Ennard was the amalgamation of the five souls of the missing children. These souls were not evil, merely corrupted by William Afton’s programming. Elizabeth Afton, however, reveals at the end that she was a corrupted soul, hoping to continue her father’s work by a more personal corruption, no doubt furthered by Baby’s programming. Ennard ejecting Baby represented the innocent souls removing a corrupt soul. It’s possible that this also connects back to Baby requesting Michael Afton remove the good parts of her before she became part of Ennard, meaning we’re only seeing her bad parts and good parts of her did exist, and perhaps Michael Afton had that microchip pocketed when he burned. Who knows. I also really like Scrap Baby’s process when putting herself back together. The character design is full of tiny details relating back to the scenery of Circus Baby’s Entertainment and Rental, including light fixtures from the Circus Control room, and I think it’s fun to imagine her thought process when specifically choosing pieces that would be advantageous to her, like a huge fucking claw arm and her roller skates. It’s kind of annoying that all of the interesting character development for Ennard and Baby came after the game that was dedicated much more to them, and it’s a defined flaw of the series to have important exposition exist solely in a minute, impermanent way, but other than that, I’m impressed with the executions of these characters in this game.
130
131What was that last question? Oh yeah, what the fuck happened to Springtrap?! Now, a lot of design choices make sense, I won’t act like they don’t. It’s obvious that in the fire, William Afton lost most of his arm, a large amount of his bunny ears, and a lot of his flesh rotted away, leaving behind bone. But the part of his design that utterly baffles me is the mascot’s face. This snout is much more pronounced than his original model, and the teeth were replaced with giant buck teeth and spiky thorns. Let’s just talk about the lore right now. Does this fit the lore? No. This drastic change only has the potential to be explained canonically as the result of fire damage, but it goes without saying that ♩fuck no baby♩. One could argue that perhaps Springtrap lost his mask in the fire and he retrieved a different one sometime between leaving Fazbear’s Fright and returning outside Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, but that comes with the question of where he would find one after the objects inside all sustained so much fire damage, as well as when he would have really gotten the chance, as well as simply not needing it because we see Springtrap at the end of Sister Location and he isn’t damaged to a point of needing to replace this mask with one that inexplicably is also damaged and has a completely different style. The only reason I can assume Cawthon changed Springtrap’s character design is to retcon his appearance outright in hopes that Springtrap would look closer to this in the movies, more on that later. Even if we make it to a point where we do see Springtrap in the movies, I definitely wouldn’t want him to look like this as opposed to his previous design. To put it simply, this is not a scary character design. Sure, it’s disturbing to see William Afton so nonchalant about losing parts of his body, and to imagine him in a zombified state that prevents him from feeling pain anymore, but that’s all in the implications, most of which we already felt with the Springtrap roaming Fazbear’s Fright. This character design is fucking goofy. Springtrap looks like a cartoon character now, and sure that fits with the fact that he is designed for children’s entertainment, but that “designed for children’s entertainment” argument can go in the opposite way than I used before with characters like Mangle. Look at the animatronic form of Chuck E. Cheese. That thing is fucking weird looking with his flat face and beady eyes. Are you implying that, if Chuck E. Cheese existed as a hybrid-form animatronic and mascot suit then his facial features would contract enough that he would look like this when the springlocks are wound? Either way, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen the same characters undergo changes that can’t simply be explained by age or damage, but this is the worst of it we’ve seen.
132
133And I haven’t even started talking about gameplay. In the mainline series of Five Nights at Freddy’s games, this is the most involved of them, and it’s great. One half of Pizzeria Simulator features the most interesting task management game thus far in the series, providing elements based largely in luck, such that spending too much time in that room is likely to doom you before too long, while focusing too much on your tasks without taking any time to detract your threats will also doom you, forcing you to learn a perfect balance that would allow you to win. We’ve seen similar mechanics in Sister Location, except mastery of the mechanics in Sister Location becomes arbitrary when you only complete those tasks once ever, while in this game mastery is key to victory. The other half is a fun tycoon game where you customize your pizzeria as you see fit, adding games and attractions and all kinds of stuff. You even get to playtest the games, creating a diegetic explanation for the lore minigames that in all other games kinda just happened. Speaking of lore, by god is this the most satisfying game. Not only does it up-front tie all loose ends with its ending, removing ambiguity over any continuation past this point in the timeline, but it also includes all sorts of little hints tying up loose answers. One game shows the events leading to William Afton’s first victim, Suzie, who would go on to possess Chica. Another shows what seems to either be a parent’s reaction to the kidnapping of Gabriel, Jeremy, or Fritz, or it shows William Afton, shown in gold here because he’s no longer hiding in the shadows and he’s not literally purple, reacting to his younger son running away to possibly Fredbear’s Family Diner. I’m frustrated by this one still being a little ambiguous, but whatever, at this point either explanation doesn’t destroy the plot. One more minigame visualizes the possession of the Puppet by Charlie, and even one other reveals enigmatic stories of five dead children becoming one, hinting at the process of extracting the remnant of the missing children and putting them in Ennard. “Molten” as an epithet is a nice symbolic wink and a nudge on the backstory of this version of Freddy.
134
135What most people never really did realize is that, hidden in even more subtle details are the explanations of some of the biggest questions to haunt the franchise, like what exactly are the details of the mysterious “paragraph 4”? Who exactly is the perpetrator of the Bite of ‘87? And what exact object lies inside the lockbox at the end of Five Nights at Freddy’s 4? After years of obsessing and decoding cryptic images and dialogue in the games in a much more critical manner than Matthew Patrick or Lewis Dawkins ever could hope to, I came to a definitive explanation for all these questions and more: ...it doesn’t fucking matter. I’m not saying this as a naysayer who wants to jerk off my ego to millions of people online by saying that spending time trying to understand a fictional story is stupid, quite the opposite. I’m saying this as someone who operated under the assumption for years that Scott Cawthon was some kind of mega uber genius who planned every single piece of the lore from day one, and it was with the development of my critical sense that I realized that Scott Cawthon is only human. He’s one man telling a fun story that he was never sure would continue being told after any chapter he added. There’s no way that learning specific details could “reveal all” about what is occurring within the storyline, in fact if we did learn specific details, it’s more likely that they would just create plot holes more than anything. There is nothing that Cawthon could put into this lockbox that does not either contrive the plot to a point of incomprehension, or be one more piece of evidence supporting an ever-present theory about the series that has no chance of ever upending our understanding of this grand finale to the story or the motivations of every character involved leading up to it.
136
137This lockbox is much more akin to J. J. Abram’s infamous mystery box than one can imagine. For those unfamiliar, director J. J. Abram’s had a TED Talk in 2007 where he describes a childhood object that inspired some of his most impressive projects, including the television series LOST and the Cloverfield film universe. That object was a box, Tannen’s Mystery Magic Box, advertised to be $50 worth of magician’s props sold for $15, something that when he brought it home, he couldn’t bring himself to open it and reveal to him the mystery of the “mystery magic box,” and it was this that inspired him to create mysterious stories that sprinkle clues of their events without being explicit about the motivations and origins of mysterious entities within those stories. Over the years, this talk has been a subject of controversy, criticized for attributing a false sense of wonder on something so otherwise useless, and for empowering a sort of ego stroking on Abrams’s part, but the specific critique I have goes much further into the existential themes of this box and its use. The issue with this box is that it symbolizes the idea that Abrams can create a story that is completely incomprehensible, but insist that the answer to the mysteries in his work exists and is satisfying, but no one has been able to piece the clues together in quite the correct way, nor is he allowed to spell the answer out to the public, because that would ruin the mystery, leaving people continuously scrambling for the answers they believe exist, but ultimately might as well not truly exist. It doesn’t help Abrams’s case that the mystery magic box as a product sold by magic shops exists specifically to take various magic tricks that wouldn’t sell and present them in a discount with an added allure. The mystery box, as an actual physical object and as a concept to represent Abrams’s greatest stories...is a marketing gimmick. And on the exact same level, this lockbox, the infamously permanently-locked toolbox, holds nothing more than tattered threads. Story threads broken by an insistence on selling another tale. Discussion threads torn by the impossibly confused interpretations, tangled by the hands of those who claimed themselves fans of the series...myself included. “It's only now that I understand the depth of the depravity of this monster, this creature I unwillingly helped to create. As if what he'd already done wasn't enough, he found a new way to desecrate, to humiliate, to destroy. As if the suffering wasn't enough. The loss of innocence, the loss of everything to so many people. Small souls trapped in prisons of my making, now set to new purpose, and used in ways I never thought imaginable.” We sweat the small stuff, as though even the tiniest bit of moisture can loosen those locks enough to spring open. Perhaps...no...certainly, some things are best left forgotten, forever.
138
139...Pizzeria Simulator was great, and as bittersweet it was, I’m glad to see the story come to quite the close it did. Except it’s not over! [cut to me dancing like a tribesman chanting “One more game! One more game! One more game!”] That’s right, what good is a grand finale to the series without something to bring the whole cast of kooky characters together for one final hoorah? The biggest challenge to ever meet the previous victors of any high difficulty form of the last seven games. A game where you were given the opportunity to hold the fort on your security office for just one night against fifty eight of the biggest baddies, the baddest biggies, and a few assorted nuisances. Ladies and gentlemen, this is...Ultimate. Custom. Night.
140
141What a brilliant moment of fanservice from a man who cared so much for said fans. This game serves as its own kind of scary that hasn’t quite been done by any game in the series before it, nor have I seen it anywhere else before. The amount of tasks to accomplish at once in times of udder disorientation, all while balancing healthy amounts of disturbing implications [voice lines with disturbing implied violence], comedy [comedic lines], and lore. That’s right, more fucking lore. [the one you should not have killed lines]
142
143——————
144
145We thought every game was the last one since 3. Fool me once shame on you fool me twice shame on me fool me for the sixth consecutive time and I’m gonna go play Baldi’s Basics, you cunt.
146
147——————
148
149While I was writing this review, I stumbled on an article announcing the gradual eradication of the animatronic band in Chuck E. Cheese locations. When I saw this, and noticed that it had been in effect since 2017, it came with a feeling of shock and nostalgic despair. It turns out, interest in the robotic animals was waning among children, and the company had to acknowledge that kids were simply too frightened by the characters to be entertained by them. My concern was for a double-edged sword. The appeal of Five Nights at Freddy’s since its humble beginnings was the existence of Chuck E. Cheese locations housing uncanny animatronics with campfire stories to boot. Without the robots, the cultural relevance of the most essential parts of the premise...are gone. The company had to acknowledge that kids were simply too frightened by the characters to be entertained by them. The timing is hard to view as a coincidence. After all, in the words of Matthew Patrick, “Scott doesn’t do coincidences.” Five Nights at Freddy’s has entered a time where the elements of reality that lend to its relevance are set to be lost to the annals of recreational history, and its fate was sealed by its own hand. This announcement brought me to the realization that it was unfortunately inevitable. No matter what, this franchise was going to be its own undoing by just this manner. It’s impressive, really. Quite the bittersweet badge of honor, to say that it was so successful it doomed itself. I recognize, of course, that it’s silly to expect the company to keep itself on a track of lesser monetary success because I feel entitled to one day show my children an artifact of my own memories. All good things must come to an end, of course they should. It’s a downer to know that future generations will be missing ideas that would contribute to the ability to enjoy this piece of pop culture quite to the same degree I do, but such is life. I was fourteen years old when the first game was released. It’s difficult to not hold a strong fondness for anything that pulled so much of your intrigue during your formative years. Five Nights at Freddy’s was a phenomenon in the clearest sense of the word. A group of elements that came together in the right place at the right time. Lightning in a bottle, but the glass that formed the bottle is not impervious, and lightning is not the most controlled of shocks. Nevertheless, I will always look back fondly on this series, even if there’s not a lot of people who will. Here’s hoping well for Scott Cawthon, his family, his cast of characters, and everyone he’s helped along the way when all is said and done. And with that, I’m Hippie Rat, and thank you so much for watching.