Top Ten Reasons Five Nights at Freddy's is a Great Franchise

Now, I'm not saying jumpscares are scary. They aren't. It is a well-known fact. The reason these games are scary are they do something new. Most horror games gave you three options: You can fight, hide, or run from the enemy. Nights, however, gave you none of these. It only allowed you to delay the inevitable, through cameras, doors, and lights, which it also took away with the power system. There is a reason that Mark was scared the first time he played the game: it did something he wasn't expecting. You can see it in the first few seconds of his playthrough, where he used the keyboard, realized nothing happened, checked down to make sure he was using the right buttons, then subsequently was wide-eyed at the fact it did something new. Another thing to note is that all horror games hit the time when they aren't scary. The greatest horror games out there aren't scary anymore because so many times have we watched and played them. After one or two videos, you're no longer afraid. We see that with UCN especially, where Scott just has the model shake in front of you; it is a game over screen. Finally, we are terrified of what happens when we eventually do lose. Most lets players tense up when on harder difficulties because they're scared of getting killed and losing all their progress. Maybe I should rename this the games are incredibly tense but this one grabs the attention better.

Before Five Nights at Freddy's, there was one massively successful indie game which is Minecraft. However, around the time game designing was becoming more accessible, Minecraft had been massively popular. Plus, a month after Nights was released Mojang was sold to Microsoft, thereby making it a triple-A game. After Nights blew up, more and more followed suit. Undertale, Bendy and the Ink Machine, Doki Doki Literature Club, Hello Neighbor, Yandere Simulator, Cuphead, and so many more were all made to be a reality because of Nights. Indie games were given a better light thanks to Nights, it helped these games to be ported to mainstream consoles, console stores were flooded with indie games, and all of this would have taken much longer without Five Nights at Freddy's.

Nowadays, there are thousands of copycats running around doing the same thing the same way that Nights did but when it first launched it was one hundred-percent different. This also helped to make the game scarier as mentioned in point one.

Anyone can hop into the game and do well. The game does something most games don't do which is ease you into the gameplay. It starts off easy, but then quickly annihilates with AI that literally learns your playstyle and combats that. Even now, most people still don't have the perfect, one-hundred percent successful attempt rate.

Nights books aren't the best of the best. They don't compare to Zelda, Halo, or Doom when it comes to the quantity and quality of books. However, its books are decent with a very interesting series about a girl named Charlie, two fun little activity books to get for your kids, and a brand new series in the vein of the Goosebumps books of old. Also, it has the potential to be a great video game movie with real-life animations, Blumhouse Productions being the producer/staff, and finally, multiple scripts being written to be specifically tailored to pleasing new and old fans.

With the recent Nights ports to consoles, the door has been opened wider to even more people to experience these games. Before, you needed a computer to play the games. Then, they were given mobile releases which did open the door further. The real kicker was console ports because a lot of gamers have consoles which really allows more people to experience the game. As of 2020, PC games produce about 21 percent of game revenue with console being the same. Mobile games do give a lot to game revenue but that's due to gacha games dominating that market. So (excluding mobile) if fifty percent of gamers use consoles and Nights was only on PC, around 500 million people don't have the chance to experience the game.

The first game plays more into your childhood fears when you arrived in Chuck E. Cheese's. These big, terrifying robots with eyes that seem to stare deep into your soul. The sequels brought more and more destroyed robots with human-like animatronics (the scarier ones in my opinion) sprinkled in for flavor. The Nightmare animatronics are the definition of Eldritch Abominations. More teeth than the Olsen twins, these behemoths are also massive in the game, due to us being in the mind of a child, making them that much more imposing. No matter how stale the games become, the designs will always be the most pants-wetting part about these monstrosities.

This definitely could be considered a negative; however, I believe there is a much worse game series at producing too many games. They call him Mario. With over two hundred games and thirty-five years in the business, that equates to about five-six games per year. Scott Cawthon at his max got three in one year. Not to mention that, unlike Mario, each game adds new characters and new mechanics. Not to say Mario doesn't do that too, far from it. Most Mario sequels add one or two characters and one or two power-ups. However, there are usually quite a few games where they just keep some or all of Mario's characteristics and continue on with his adventures. In Nights, every character changes from game to game. Even Foxy, who has a look but not too often mechanic, is varied slightly from game to game. For example, you sometimes flash him with the light, or you turn on the Pirate Cove camera.

To summarize the lore into one sentence, it boils down to man kills child, child possesses robot, robot kills man, man becomes part of robot, robot kills more men, man and child burn together, all of it might be fake, man comes back from hell thanks to vicious malware, starts a cult, more robots in the world. That is about as simple as I can make it. If you don't want to play the game to get the lore, read about it or watch it online. Mostly because I don't know the lore myself.