If you live in the United States, you have to be living under a rock if you've at least never heard of Chuck E. Cheese's. But for those of you who are unaware, let me sum up Chuck E. Cheese's right here: a place that sells low quality pizza, has games that give tickets for prizes (cheap toys and other small junk like that), and has an animatronic show, featuring Chuck E. Cheese himself and some other forgettable characters. In other words, a chaotic, fun time for kids and a living nightmare for parents.


So, with all of that in mind, allow me to present: Five Nights at Freddy's (2014). A low budget, indie, point-and-click, survival horror game that takes place in the fictional Freddy Fazbear's Pizza. You're the night time security guard, which would normally probably be a really boring job in a place like that. But not here. Here, the animatronic's roam around at night and if they manage to get inside your little security room, you are completely fucked. As a previous employee in the game describes over the phone to you on your first night, they will think you're a robot out of costume and force you into a costume, where you're stabbed by the metal parts meant to connect to the robots.

Inside your security room, you do have a few ways to help protect yourself, but of course, there are catches. There's a camera system, but the cameras don't cover certain areas, including the two hallways right outside of the security room. There's also one camera that has audio, but no video and occasionally, all of the cameras momentarily lose their video feed. For the two hallways outside of the security room, you can turn on lights, but the lights only stay on for a few seconds. And then there are electronic doors that you can shut to cut off the security room from the rest of the building. But here's where the biggest catch comes into play: all of these things run off of a limited power supply and once you run out of that power, you lose all of those defenses, leaving you at the mercy of the four animatronics: Freddy Fazbear, Bonnie the Bunny, Chica the Chicken, and Foxy the Pirate Fox.

As the title of the game states, there are five nights to the game. I'm only up to night four myself, but apparently, if you manage to get through all five nights, you unlock a night six and after that, a night where you can customize the difficulty of each individual animatronic. Each night gets more difficult than the last, meaning you'll die a lot. The previous employee I mentioned before calls you at the start of each night, giving a little advice and adding a little story to the game, though don't expect anything truly deep and groundbreaking. The game is definitely kept as simple as possible. And for that, I don't think I'm going to find much replay value in the game when I finish up all of the nights.

Something that I feel is pretty unique about the game is its use of pre-rendered graphics. Pre-rendered graphics were a popular technique for games back in the 1990s, which allowed for higher detail that 3D graphics at the time couldn't provide, but as a result, interaction with the pre-rendered graphics was limited. The early Resident Evil games used a combination of pre-rendered graphics (the backgrounds) and 3D graphics (the character/enemy models). But as 3D graphics have improved in quality, pre-rendered graphics have been forgotten about. As a result, I feel that Five Nights at Freddy's use of pre-rendered graphics gives the game a certain nostalgic edge.

If you like a lot of jump scares that aren't just cheap and irrelevant, then this game is definitely for you. It's simple, but very effective at what it does. As I said, I don't think the game will have much replay value once it's beaten, but I only paid $5 for it on Steam, so it's hard to really complain about that.