3.5/5 ★ – evasglory's review of Five Nights at Freddy's.

I think Five Nights at Freddy's changed indie horror forever. It's hard to give a fair review of a game that is quite literally history, but I will try. Also, I should say that I have obviously beaten this game previously, but I'm counting it to give it a good review and critical look. Five Nights at Freddy's had me shakin' in my boots for the first couple of nights. The atmosphere is great, the sound design is phenomenal, taking advantage of the creepy ambience to make regular pizza place sounds scary is really cool. It really does end up making you squirm in your chair as you scramble in the cameras to keep track of each animatronic. It is impressive to me that ten years later it can still be somewhat scary. Emphasis on "can," though. Due to the nature of Five Nights at Freddy's' difficulty spike, it leaves you focusing more on wanting to win in the later nights rather than being scared. It loses the creepiness quickly and becomes more of a challenge rather than a creepy... game. This is probably why you "beat" the game after beating Night 5, leaving 6 and 7 as more challenges for those who want a challenge in completing the game, but this imbalance still persists somewhat in Night 4 and definitely in Night 5. This, I think is a product of the game design as well as it just not aging super well in terms of having the same experience as you would playing it for the first time. This game has been out for ten years now and basically everyone has played it, if it had no RNG it would be a fixed game with how simple the gameplay is. This in of itself isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it makes it hard to get behind nowadays all things considered. Overall, at the time, Five Nights at Freddy's was phenomenal and deserved to become the hit that it did. Now, though, it's probably better to just go watch YouTubers play it. I have a lot of nostalgia for those old Markiplier videos.