Five Nights at Freddy's game review

Here's what you need to know; you play as a night guard doing his night shift at Freddy fazbear's pizza, a place of laughter and joy by day, but a place of horror and evil by night, as the various animatronic animals come to life and seek to kill you.

That sounds like a very simple premise, but that's the first praise I can give this game. It's story isn't so much told as it is eluded to, hinted at by the phone guy's recorded messages and newspaper clippings and such. This is a great way of telling the story, since you have to find and piece the evidence together yourself, rather than following a conventional narrative. And without going into spoilers, this game's story is much deeper, darker and more twisted than you'd first think. But when you're on your shift you have more important things to worry about, like not getting murdered by robotic children's mascots. Gameplay breaks down into you are stuck in the security office, armed with your security camera feed, and doors. You can use the cameras to monitor animatronics, and should one appear at the office door, you can close it. The catch is everything you do eats up power, and when you run out of power you're screwed, so you need to be as conservative as possible with your power usage. This can be seen as a problem, when on the harder nights the animatronic aren't playing fair and you get trapped eating up your precious power, this game can get frustrating on the harder nights. This frustration can be made worse by the lack of variety; I know, it's an indie game, but it is something that can wear on you when the jumpscares stop scaring you. Speaking of jumpscares, this game does a very sound job at being creepy; with it's dark, dirty environments, the animatronics that wait until you look away, then make their move, ominous sounds of the mascots moving around. And the constant threat that 1 lapse in concentration and  a mascot could be right in your face, leading to a very unpleasant game over screen.

Five Nights at Freddy's is an interesting game, with a very interesting story and a cool and unconventional method of story telling, a sound grasp of how to creep you out, but a habit of getting annoying as you get into the later nights. It's a perfect game to play with a group of friends, like me and my friends do, and if you're alone and want to be spooked. But it's not some horror masterpiece, instead it's more of a playful little indie game that happens to be smart and well designed. it's worth a try anyway.