Five Nights at Freddy's is a series of Survival Horror games created by Scott Cawthon. In each game[1], you play as a featureless security guard who works the night shift at a local pizzeria. Sounds simple enough, right?
But there's a catch... At night, the animatronics come to life and try to attack you, so you have to keep and eye on them using the security cameras. And if they manage to get into your office, they'll Jump Scare you and it's Game Over.
The first game was released on August 8, 2014, and has since spawned several sequels, some spin-off games, several tie-in books, and even a movie (which had been in the works since April 2015, but didn't actually start filming until February 2023).
Games Released[]
- Five Nights at Freddy's (2014)
- Five Nights at Freddy's 2 (2014)
- Five Nights at Freddy's 3 (2015)
- Five Nights at Freddy's 4 (2015)
- Five Nights at Freddy's World (2016)
- Five Nights at Freddy's: Sister Location (2016)
- Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria Simulator (2017)
- Ultimate Custom Night (2018)
- Five Nights at Freddy's VR: Help Wanted (2019)
- Five Nights at Freddy's AR: Special Delivery (2019)
- Freddy in Space 2 (2019)
- Security Breach: Fury's Rage (2021)
- Five Nights at Freddy's: Security Breach (2021)
- AI Is a Crapshoot: The animatronics will try to kill you between the hours of 12 AM and 6 AM. Though, in the case of the animatronics in the first game, they possibly have the excuse of being possessed by the ghosts of the five children that were murdered long ago.
- Ambiguous Gender: Mangle's gender is a mystery. When asked about which gender he/she is supposed to be, Scott simply replied, "Yes."
- Anachronic Order: The timeline for the franchise is all over the place. 2 takes place before the first game, 3 happens thirty years after the first, and 4 is implied to take place before the first three games. Meanwhile, it's kinda hard to pin down when exactly Sister Location takes place.
- Big Bad: William Afton. In his own words...
I always come back! |
- Big Good: Henry Emily in Pizzeria Simulator, who manages to burn down the entire pizzeria along with the animatronics.
- Before that, there was also his daughter Charlotte (whose spirit possesses the puppet).
- Featureless Protagonist:
- None of the night guards have any physical attributes, and the only thing that sets them apart from each other is the fact that they each have different names. However, it's speculated that Mike Schmidt from the first game and Eggs Benedict from Sister Location are actually pseudonyms for Afton's son, Michael.
- Averted with Gregory, who actually has a fully-rendered human body unlike the previous protagonists.
- Harder Than Hard: Good luck trying to complete Night 7 in each of the main games (save Security Breach).
- Infant Immortality: Averted; the franchise as a whole has several instances of children being killed. The first game has a couple references to the murder of five children, 4 has the crying child's head being crushed by Fredbear's mouth, resulting in his death, and in the One-Star ending of Security Breach, Gregory is implied to be killed by Vanny.
- Jump Scare: This is the franchise's main gimmick. In most cases, a jumpscare will be followed by a rather creepy Game Over screen.
- Kids Are Cruel:
- The reason why Mangle is all, well, mangled, is because the kids would continually break him apart because she was an in-universe Replacement Scrappy for Foxy. And management eventually just decided to stop bothering to repair them every time.
- Michael Afton is a Big Brother Bully towards the crying child in the fourth game, though he comes to regret it when it results in his brother's death.
- Lighter and Softer: Five Nights at Freddy's World is a relatively child-friendly RPG, unlike the survival horror-based main series games.
- Something Completely Different: Security Breach abandons the survival horror-based gameplay of the previous mainline games in favor of a more open-world stealth-based style of gameplay.
- Suck E. Cheese's: The restaurants featured in the games look pretty worn down, though that's the least of everyone's worries.
- ↑ Excluding 4, Security Breach and the spin-off games