You play as a night security guard at a pizza parlor similar to Chuck E Cheeses. After the business closes for the night, the animatronic animals roam around, looking for employees out of costume. If they reach you, they'll stuff you in an animatronic animal costume. In reality, when they reach you, you're treated to a brief jump scare as the screen fades to static and you're forced to start the night all over again. The main goal of the game is to survive five nights without being jump-scared to death. The story is given to the player though brief messages left on the answering machine by the owner of the pizza parlor. He gives you some tips and a little backstory about the animals being driven mad by singing the same songs day in and day out.
The entire game is controlled by the mouse. You have two ways to defend against the animatronic killers: security cameras and a highly illogical security door system. You track the movements of the animatronic killers by watching the security cameras. Whenever they get close to your room, you can close the door (there's two doors on either side) and wait until they go away. However, you can't keep the doors closed for very long, because it takes battery power to keep them closed. Watching the security cameras also takes power, forcing you to take quick looks at the rooms, before putting the camera away. This system of looking for your killers, and strategically closing and opening the doors at certain times organically builds tension. Once you hear something thumping around the kitchen area of your security office, several questions run through your mind: Should you close the door now, or wait? Is checking the room next to the security office worth using some of the precious little battery power you have left? Once the battery power runs out, your only choice is not to touch the mouse and hope you can live out the last few moments of the night by playing dead. The core mechanic is solid, and the graphics fit the tone of the game perfectly.
The game's graphics are composed mostly of still images. The lo-fi gritty textures actually make the animatronic monsters look genuinely creepy (this effect is also enhanced by the characters themselves looking to be in various states of disrepair). Aside from the Fox animatronic and the jump scares at the end, you don't actually see any of them moving; they'll be there, but once you look away they'll be on the move, similar to the Weeping Angels from Doctor Who. With that said, there's a few solid problems that kept me from playing the game all the way through night five.
For a while, I was stuck on night four. At that point the owner met his end by jump scare off screen and his last message cuts off abruptly. After being jump-scared to death four or five times, the novelty of it wore off and I just became frustrated. As you play further into the game, the monster's patterns become more erratic and complex as they go all out to get to your room, however jump scares, by nature, are only tense and scary for the first few times. I also started to ponder the logic of the whole situation. Why do doors need energy to stay closed? If Freddy's is full of killer animatronic monsters, why do they need a night security guard? If someone were to break into the place, wouldn't they immediately be stuffed into a costume and killed? They don't seem to be interested in property damage, so you're not protecting the place from the monsters, and even if they were, the game gives you no other way to fight back against them. I've been a fan of horror films and media all my life and I know that it is sometimes fruitless to question the logic of horror. The genre works best when it is not over-explained, but I kept asking myself why am I here in the first place. If I were the owner, I wouldn't have a security guard and just let Freddy and his buddies have run of the place until it opens at 6 am. Perhaps I'm just overthinking it, and the grand question would have been answered if I stuck it out through the game's ending, but the mechanics wore thin on me fairly quickly. However, the entire situation has a surreal nightmare logic to it that is pretty interesting; nothing really makes sense at all, but no one seems to notice except for the player if left alone to his thoughts long enough.
The graphics are fitting for the game's tone, and the central mechanic is interesting, but I couldn't recommend the game fully because it only has one gimmick, which will wear off eventually, leaving you frustrated with nothing left to do but repeat it over and over again. There seems to be an underlying brilliance to this that perhaps I'm missing, but I couldn't feel compelled to finish the game. Eventually, I can see myself coming back to it to finish it, but it's not going to be a priority. For 4.99 on Steam it's pretty cheap, so try it out. However, from a quick look at the internet, you've probably already tried it out, beat it and mastered night 6 and 7 as well, so perhaps I'm just shouting into the void.