Five Nights at Freddy’s 3 Review for PC

OH CRAP IT’S RIGHT OUTSIDE MY DOOR!

Oh God. Do I have to do this again? Why do I have to do this again? Please don’t make me do this again!

Please?

No?

Damn…

OK, welcome again to Five Nights at Freddy’s with Five Nights at Freddy’s 3 : You Are Some Kind of Sick Masochist Edition.

I kid, there’s no subtitle, but holy crap was I hesitant to do this review.

Five Nights at Freddy’s 3 is like taking everything that was scary about the original FNAF 1 and 2 and mixing it with all the worst parts of Alien: Isolation . It’s torture, in a good way, and by that I mean a bad way. I mean, the game isn’t bad, but it is so incredibly nerve wracking you feel like you are going to have a heart attack. It’s frickin’ scary, OK?

So here is how the game works. This time around it’s the future, and you are a security guard slash actor in a horror attraction themed around the original Five Nights at Freddy’s restaurants. The horror attraction has a whole bunch of blinking lights and memorabilia from the restaurants, and it specifically meant to make the whole thing give off a spooky vibe. This is all cool for the first night, where you just chill out and get to know your co-worker. But then things change when the company you work for finds a new animatronic, a golden bunny suit that somehow still manages to run.

There is only one animatronic that is chasing you the whole game, and he can only attack you from two areas, either the door to the left of your office or the vent to your right. If you just let him do what he wants, he will slowly make his way to your office and attack you. Luckily, you have control of the attraction’s speakers, allowing you to play that scary as hell child sound bite that Balloon Boy always played in Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 .Playing this sound bite repels the animatronic and can be used to control its movement. You can also seal off parts of the ventilation system in order to keep the animatronic from getting into your room via the vents.

If this was all you would have to do, it would be simple. But Five Nights at Freddy’s is never simple, is it? No! Five Nights at Freddy’s makes you click a million things a minute while you piss your pants in fright and Five Nights at Freddy’s 3 is no different. You see, the attraction that you work at is crappy, and the systems you use break down all the time. The cameras, audio, and ventilation systems can all break down, and to reboot them you have to look away from the cameras and look at a second computer panel, right near the door that the animatronic can attack you from. There you can either reboot one system fast, or initiate a slower process to reboot all systems at once, though this is slightly faster than rebooting one at a time.

When the audio system is malfunctioning you can’t play your sound bites to lure the animatronic away. You also start hearing screwed up static and sound clips that sound like they come from other games. When the camera system is down, you also can’t use your sound bites, and you can’t see where the animatronic is. When the ventilation system is down, you can’t close off the vents anymore. Also, you start tripping like, whoa.

You see, this is the main mechanic of Five Nights at Freddy’s 3 . While there is only one animatronic, there are actually a ton of jump scares. Lurking throughout the cameras and the rest of the attraction are telltale signs of Bonnie, Foxy, Chica, Freddy, and even Balloon Boy. They are just waiting to jump scare you, but they are not real. They are only phantoms, illusions of the old animatronics.

And this is where Five Nights at Freddy’s 3 is most evil. When one of these phantom animatronic jump scares you, you have to keep playing the game! You don’t die. In fact, you just black out for a second, which allows things to basically go completely haywire for a while. Systems start failing, the real animatronic starts making his way toward your office, warning sirens start blaring, and you become incredibly disoriented as you try to fix everything around you. But then as you try to fix things, you start hallucinating more because the ventilation system is broken, so you end up stumbling into more phantom animatronics that attack you one after another after another giving you yet more downtime and leaving you yet more vulnerable to the real animatronic. The entire game is this song and dance between luring the real animatronic away, keeping track of it, keeping your systems online, and avoiding anything that might trigger a phantom jump scare.

But then, there’s more! After every stage you get to play an Atari style mini-game, like the death mini-games in Five Nights at Freddy’s 2 . In these games you control one of the animatronics as you chase down purple Freddy, which looks like the secret purple Freddy character from the previous game. You chase them until you error and can’t go any further, which may have something to do with recordings you heard about a “safe room” programmed to be invisible to the animatronics. Then out of nowhere, the purple man attacks you!

This isn’t a spoiler as it happens basically any time you win, just with a different animatronic. The real draw of these mini-games is that if you explore around you will find clues. These clues point toward other hidden mini-games in the standard game stages. Usually these can be triggered by clicking on something in your office or in one of the backgrounds of the cameras. Of course, you have to learn how to trigger these mini-games while still dodging the animatronic that wants to kill you. Then, when you enter the mini-game, you need to figure out how to complete it. If you don’t do it correctly you’ll just exit out back to the main game. If you do it correctly, a tiny bit more of the plot will be revealed, but you’ll still be forced back into the main game. If you then complete the level, you’ll actually make progress toward the game’s true ending.

That’s the final new and interesting thing about Five Nights at Freddy’s 3 : multiple endings. The game has a bad ending, a normal ending, and a true ending. However, as much as I like (and I use the term like her very loosely, kind of as a stand in for “appreciate artistically but was actively scarred emotionally by”) Five Nights at Freddy’s 3 , I have to say that the multiple endings are probably the worst part about the game. To get the true ending you have to jump through multiple hoops and solve a ton of different puzzles all while an animatronic is trying to kill you, and the payoff just isn’t that great. It’s essentially just a different end screen, and it doesn’t reveal anything else about the plot that you couldn’t have already guessed from the rest of the game. For a game that was so well put together in all other aspects, the multiple endings were sadly unsatisfying and honestly feel kind of like a cheap way to extend playtime.

Speaking of playtime, FNAF 3 doesn’t include a special “custom” night, which makes the game feel shorter and less feature filled than other FNAF titles. There are number of “cheats” that you can toggle, raising or lowering the difficulty, and there is a full “extras” menu that lets you look at the animatronic character models, jump scares, and even lets you play whatever mini-games you want whenever you want. This is a treat for anyone who wants to delve more into the series’ lore, but it still kind of feels half done. Speaking of lore, be sure to read all the articles in the beginning and end newspaper clippings that the game shows you. You’ll get a little bit of insight into how the game was made and into Scott Cawthon’s history as a programmer.

Five Nights at Freddy’s 3 is a fantastic game, and since it doesn’t look like there’s going to be a Five Nights at Freddy’s 4 , I’d say this is a welcome end to the franchise. I couldn’t ask for a more terrifying game. I wouldn’t call FNAF 3 fun. In fact, it’s pretty much the opposite of fun. It’s tense and stressful and sometimes makes you want to cry when it’s not wrecking you with just the right amount of gore to put horrible thoughts in your head. But that’s the point. You play the FNAF series to scare whatever humanity you have left out of your hollow endoskeleton, and FNAF 3 does a superb job of that. I just wish its “true” ending was a bit more substantial because it falls short of a satisfying conclusion to the story we have been mulling over in the past two games. Oh, well. I guess it’s just more speculation fodder for years to come.

RATING OUT OF 5 RATING DESCRIPTION 4.0 Graphics
The strange zombified illusion are some of the most terrifying things I have seen yet. 4.0 Control
It’s still just point and click, but it works for what it is. 4.0 Music / Sound FX / Voice Acting
Considering Scott does all the voice acting himself, he does a pretty good job. 3.5 Play Value
The ending was a little disappointing. 3.8 Overall Rating – Good
Not an average. See Rating legend below for a final score breakdown.