Since 2014, FNAF has taken the video game world by storm with their point and click survival horror game on Steam. In the FNAF game, you play a character who works at Freddy Fazebear’s Pizza, usually as a security guard. The game features a bunch of animatronic characters who come alive at night and do horrifying things. What could be more scary than a bunch of cartoon animal robots chasing you around and trying to kill you?
#8. FNAF Custom Night
Five Nights at Freddys: Custom Night has a different style of gameplay than the other original games made. The origins of the story is based from William Afton’s hell and set in a time period after his demise at the end of Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza Stimulator. Unlike the other games, Custom Night doesn’t have one location and one storyline. Instead the game features a customizable collection of wave based game modes. It allows the users to pick from a bounty of different animatronics found in previous FNAF games. The user can also pick their difficulty level in their gameplay based on what they can handle in terms of how hard it will be to navigate against their animatronic opponents. Once you’ve selected the animatronics and difficulty level, they will begin spawning.
Each animatronic features a minigame or survival method built around them that the player must memorize in case they attack. Although we love this game, it gets nearly impossible to survive, as the animatronics pile on into a barage of enemy waves. There are a decent number of jumpscare moments. However, since you’re bombared with an overload of attacks from animontronics, it loses the whole suspense of being scared and thus makes you want to give up instead. As fans, we like the build up and storyline of a game. This anticipation followed by the jumpscare when you least expect it makes a video game all the more frightening. Imagine knowing the enemy is coming, but you’re dying of anticipation.
#7. FNAF 3
In FNAF 3, we find ourselves in the role of a security guard who works in a futuristic amusement park known as Fazbear’s Fright. The amusement park is haunted by a ghost of a serial killer William Afton who now inhabits a body of a spring-trap animatronic that he previously died in. Throughout the game you have the springtrap William stalking us in the halls. The goal is to distract springtrap William long enough to survive the dreadful Five Nights at Freddy’s.
All of the other animatronics appear as phantoms in this game. These phantoms usually appear when switching camera feeds and provoke us with a jump scare. They also have the capability to shut down power of vents and cameras giving springtrap William our location. What makes this scary is constantly being stalked by these phantoms and knowing that the springtrap is watching over us through the cameras or doorway of his office. The environment displays a sickly green run down office and broken down amusement park. Overall, this game definitely keeps players on edge.
#6. FNAF 2
Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 features perhaps the biggest departure from the original game’s art style out of any of the following sequels. The animatronics certainly look far less creepy which already dings our ratings when evaluating how scary this game is. Scott Cawthon the creator of FNAF went with a lighter and brighter artwork for each animatronic. They looked like dolls from childplay similar to mascot’s you’ll find at Chuck-e-cheese.
However, this doesn’t mean that the game is devoid of any jumpscare tactics. In the game, you wear a Fazbear mask in the security office. And then all of a sudden you see animatronics show up right in front of you. The effect of seeing these creepy animatronics come alive through the lenses inside your mask is quite creepy. Another chilling aspect of the game is having the music box continuously cranking and playing child-like tunes even though we know the animatronics will come out. One of the scariest characters in the FNAF franchise appears in this game, called Mango.
Mango is made up from various pieces of scrap crudely boltd together. He’s the pink looking giraffe animatronic. What makes him petrifying is how he can jump at you by hanging and swinging from the ceiling. Although we can’t rank this game higher, we do believe there are some scarier moments. If some of the graphics had a darker tone, I think this game would be more frightening in the eyes of most fans.
#5. FNAF 6: Pizzeria Simulator
At first, the Five Nights at Freddy’s: Pizzeria Simulator caught most fans off guard due to it’s inital gameplay. In the release, the game’s steam’s page presented it as a free-to-play Pizza simulator in the classic 8-bit style of the cryptic backstory minigames. Basically when you first play the game, you enter in a 2d pixelated game where a bear goes around serving food in a restaurant. However, after it little while the game forces you to take part in the usual five night stay at Freddy’s. In this game, you play as a manager from a newly founded restaurant and your duty is to survive in the ventilation system. You are prompted to finish your noisy end of shift duties such as printing out orders.
The problem is that the game is full of killer animatronics making a return from previous titles. Before each night, the player will find scrapped animatroni mysteriously dumped in the alleyway and we can decide whether or not to salvage them. If you mess up during this salvage operation, then the animatronic junk scares you and becomes a recurring threat on your night shift. FNAF 6: Pizzeria Simulator had a genuinely unerving atmosphere and some incredibly dark and distrubing backstory sequences. Usually a combination of a great horror story followed by the appropriate timing of jump scares makes your the gameplay appalling.
#4. FNAF: Sister Location
FNAF Sister Location is the fifth game in the horror game franchise and took quite a radical approach compared to it’s previous games. This unique approach divided fans during the time of release. Instead of taking place in one room in a simple gameplay loop built around it, Sister Location had several different locations to traverse. One gameplay location was inside Circus Babies Entertainment and Rental, a warehouse where animatronics could be rented out to children for their birthday parties. In the game, the player must crawl from a cenral hub area through vents to different rooms in the facility each with mini game based objectives to complete.
One downside to this game is that much of the game is full of dorky humor and story exposition. Also we noticed that the player can go long periods without experiencing danger making the feel of the game to be less nerve racking than it’s previous FNAF games.
#3. FNAF 1
The original Five Nights at Freddy’s has to be by far one of the scariest games we’ve ever seen. This game introduced a world to a whole new experience with their unique blend of point and click movements combined with doll-like Animatronics. The main characters who are animatronics are Freddy, Foxy, Bonnie and Chica. There has always been a creepy eerie factor when it came to Animatronics. Scott Cawthon took this fear to a whole different level.
This game focuses on the player who is a security guard who must survive Five nights at the pizzeria against these devil animatronics. After hours, these animatronics become murderist characters looking only to torture and kill. The player must survive long enough until 6 am when the sun rises. In this game, you’ll spot Foxy dashing through the halls in Pirates Cove through the lens of your security cameras. Typically when you check the lights in this game, you may find Bonnie and Chica staring at you in the doorways. Lastly, you’ll find Freddy lying in the darkness waiting for you. Though there have been many sequels to the original, this one still remains a classic and popular.
#2. FNAF 4
What makes the Five Nights at Freddy’s 4 one of the scariest from the series is due to the fact that they play on the fears of people who are scared about monsters hiding in their bedroom closets or underneath their beds. In this game, you must survive a night by playing a child who is afraid of the dark. In the darkness of the child’s room lurk animatronics such as Nightmare Freddy, Bonnie, and Foxy. As you can see from the image below, their designs are some of the scariest out of all the games. The gameplay is also quite difficult because the user has to check both the beds, two doors and closets for incoming threats. You will also hear a faint breathing which cues you to where they might be located.
#1. FNAF Help Wanted
Five Nights at Freddy’s Help Wanted is the latest FNAF game and the first one to officially launch in Virtual Reality form. Just by adding virtual reality to this game, it makes the experience ten times more scary because we are put right in front of these evil animatronics. Since you’re in a VR view, you don’t get to see all of your surroundings and can only see one direct line of path. Another aspect that makes it crazy frightening is the depth of each animatronic. Since it’s VR, it’s more 3D than ever, so we can see the fine details of each character and the environment.
The game introduced a new scary animatronic called Glitchtrap. Still very little is known about him, but there are video tapes that sort of explain his backstory. It’s assumed that Glitchtrap came to the game through the scanning of old circuit boards. These boards contained memories of William Afton and that lives in video game coding. He’s made out of amlware software. Overall, this is by far the scariest of all the official FNAF games and we hope that for fan’s sake they decide to make more VR versions to enhance the gameplay experience.
