For this instalment of my ‘Horror Show’, let’s look at a game in which you play as a security guard tasked with spending five nights watching over a pizza restaurant populated by beloved mascots. I know what you’re thinking, but it’s not Night Watchmen Simulator 2014. It’s Five Nights at Freddy’s, an indie point-and-click horror title developed solely by Scott Cawthon.

The game begins by forcing the player to listen to a ludicrously lengthy phone message from a man who explains that the robot-mascots who work in the restaurant are set on ‘free-roam’ mode at night, and if they see you, they’ll kill you in a particularly grim way.

Five Nights at Freddy’s looks and plays like it could have been released in the late nineties/early naughties. That isn’t the criticism it sounds like. Where as some games adorn themselves with mechanics to the point of disarray, here is a game that revels in its simplicity.

You are hauled up in a security room at the back of the restaurant. The player has access to cameras monitoring the rooms through-out ‘Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza’, except for the two corridors on either side of the security room, which have to be checked by flicking light switches on and off.

The player has to constantly check on the robots, who roam at will through-out the restaurant. If they reach the security room, there are two switches which, if pressed, close the doors leading to the corridors and keep the murderous mascots out.

However, it’s not as simple as that. The restaurant has a limited power supply. The more the player uses the cameras, the lights and the doors, the quicker the power runs out. If the power runs out, the poor night watchmen is left to the mercy of the titular ‘Freddy Fazbear’.

The ticking clock of the power supply adds a palpable sense of tension to the incredibly simple gameplay. At first, I was frantically clicking around from camera to camera and constantly flicking the light-switches on and off.

However, as I reached night two and three, I fell into a routine. There’s only really one camera that has to checked regularly, so it’s relatively easy to get away with only checking that one screen and the light-switches. It leaves plenty of power left over and makes it very simple to avoid the game over screen. The only times I died were down to lapses in concentration.

Five Night’s at Freddy’s was tense, but it wasn’t terrifying. The mascots look like the product of an Aardman Animation horror short, and for most of the game they are stationary figures, watched from the safety of the security room.

Sure, they’re chilling, but they never feel truly threatening. It’s because the player never really sees them do anything. Even when they arrive at the security room, they just pop their heads around the door, only to be shut out by a switch like the participants of a twisted game of whack-a-mole.

The horror is too obvious to be truly effective. The idea of aggressive animatronic robots running wild isn’t a new one (see the ‘Itchy and Scratchy Land’ episode of The Simpsons), and the reliance on coincidences is almost laughable at times, such as the fact that the two corridors on either side of the security rooms just happen to be the only ones not covered by cameras.

It also relies far too heavy on easy scares. Scott Cawthon does a decent job of building an atmosphere, but the only pay-offs are jump scares, which are effective for the moment they happen but have no lasting impact. There are moments that lean towards psychological horror, but they are few and far between.

It does build to a frightening climax, but it’s over and done with before it can get under your skin. It’s very easy to make people jump. It’s very difficult to unnerve people to the extent that they are still thinking about the horror after the game has finished.

I’d recommend Five Nights at Freddy’s to somebody who has never played a horror game before and wants to see if the genre is for them. It’s basically a survival horror game with the training wheels left on.

It only takes about an hour to finish, the gameplay is minimalistic and accessible enough to be instantly playable, and the horror is simple and tame enough to get the adrenaline pumping, but not brutal enough to mentally scar anybody. And if they finish it, I’ll take the training wheels off and send them running naked and traumatised around Mount Massive asylum.

5/10

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