Five Nights At Freddy’s Retrospection: Apathy In Game One

For this post, I’m going to talk about the first game in Five Nights at Freddy’s, the one that started the franchise and made us fear the dark. At least, it made me check the shadows in my house for lurking bots. Chica making eye contact with you is the stuff of nightmares.

To recap, FNAF is a survival horror game. You play a security guard taking the graveyard shift at a dilapidated animatronic pizzeria. Only you aren’t keeping thieves out; you are fending the animatronics or bots so that they can’t get into your office. They are in a free-roam mode and if they see you, they will stuff you into an animatronic suit, the equivalent of a fuzzy iron maiden. You have to man the doors and the lights, to make sure they can’t get inside.

Game one doesn’t have as much lore as the rest of the franchise does. While you can glimpse backstory in freeze frame bonuses, thanks to the Internet screen-capping, we don’t have a giant story that requires continuities. Instead, we get a glimpse into the flip side of children’s entertainment. And we cannot enjoy it.

The Horrors of The Day Job

According to the paycheck and what Phone Guy tells us, the game definitely takes place after 1987, but minimum wage is fairly abysmal. The player character Mike gets paid $120 for five…