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Five Nights at Freddy’s Retrospection, Part Three: Breaking The Rules
One noteworthy contradiction in life: adults always tell kids to play by the rules but also say that “life isn’t fair.” The Princess Bride, both in the book and film takes it a step further: “Life isn’t fair, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.”
When fiction isn’t fair, we often wonder how the author can justify creating a world with rigged systems. They can add fairness! But we also know that without that sense of injustice, a story about making amends or correcting past sins may lack the necessary emotional weight.
FNAF for several games gives us a world that is grossly unjust; security guards are underpaid to protect themselves from murderous animatronics while manning the graveyard shift. We see a killer that used a pizza place’s friendly exterior to find victims and hide their bodies. Nostalgia went down the drain. So did basic decency in the workplace.
What can game three give us? An ending, and some catharsis. We’ve gotten hints that while game one established the world, game two gave us higher stakes, game three would give us a conclusion. Until we got game four, we had a conclusion. And we got an answer that made up for the horrors we saw.
