Regardless of how you feel about the series, the crazy story, or the fandom, it’s impossible to deny that Five Nights at Freddy’s is a horror icon. From an insane amount of games, books, and even movies, this small indie series mostly started by one guy has exploded into the mainstream in ways no one could have predicted. It’s even given the credit for starting the mascot horror trend, a big trend in indie horror that is still going to this day! It’s impossible to not know about the series or its influence on horror games. And I have never played a single one.

Given how much I love horror games this might come as a shock! But the series just never really interested me all that much. Not only did the series and its game play get quickly oversaturated not only by imitators but by the rapid release of new games, the jump scare focused nature of the games really never interested me. Then you get to the convoluted story of the series that feels like it was designed more for YouTubers who love to over analyze things rather than the people actually playing the games. Which, to be fair, most people did just watch others play these games rather than play them themselves as Five Nights at Freddy’s got so much of its success from Lets Players on YouTube so it made some sense to make them in that way. To make the games fun to watch.

But I don’t want to talk about any of that! For this review, I am going to disregard where the series would go from here and how it would evolve. I’m going to review the original Five Nights at Freddy’s on its own and see how it really holds up as a game all these years later.

Five Nights at Freddy’s has a simple set up. You take a job as a night guard at the local Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, a kids pizza place with dancing and singing animatronic characters similar to Chuck E Cheese in the real world. A normal sounding job if you don’t notice that the job ad also mentions they aren’t responsible for any injury or dismemberment… Which is your first cue that something might not be right here!

From there, the game literally just throws you in to it. The entire game is played from first person inside the security office. The only thing you the player can do is close the two doors leading to your office, flick on the faulty lights outside said doors to see if anything is there, and look at the security cameras around the pizza place. There is no leaving your office or anything like that, you are there until the shift ends at 6 AM. The challenge of the game comes from managing your power with everything you do using some of that power. Not only that, the power is slowly draining on its own throughout the night. All of this is important because if you lose power you are a sitting duck for the killer animatronics that are gunning for you. This is all explained over a voice mail left to you by one of the other employees. This guy, who would be dubbed Phone Guy by the fandom, is not only your closest thing to a tutorial but is also your main source of story too. The calls are framed mostly around him telling you what to expect while working on the job but he sprinkles in plenty of story too such as talking about the animatronics themselves and how they can be surprisingly dangerous.

That is how the first night starts! Phone Guy explains that the animatronics can move around the place at night and if they see you, a human, they will try to shove you into a spare suit in the back thinking you are an endoskeleton outside of its suit which is against the rules. Those suits aren’t made for humans though and will kill you pretty horribly if you are shoved inside one! This is why it’s so important you make sure the animatronics don’t reach your office and even more important you don’t run out of power as that means you can’t close the doors.

So that is the game play loop. You need to check the cameras to monitor the animatronics as they roam around as well as check the lights outside your doors as those spots in particular are blind spots on the cameras. This is explained by the Phone Guy on the second night as well as another mechanic, that being Foxy. There are four animatronics you are dealing with, Bonnie the Rabbit, Chica the Chicken, Freddy Fazbear, and Foxy the Pirate. With each acting differently from one another.

Bonnie and Chica, who are the only two you deal with on the first night, are pretty straight forward. They slowly move around the place while coming closer to your office on either side. Bonnie will only appear on your left while Chica will only appear on the right. This is why it’s important to check the door lights since if you can’t find them on the cameras, they might be closer than you think… If you see either Bonnie or Chica right outside your doors, you need to close that door and wait for them to leave before reopening it. If you were to check the cameras while one is outside your door or wait too long to close the door, that’ll let them get inside and jump scare you, giving you a game over.

Foxy functions quite a bit differently that this. While Bonnie, Chica, and Freddy all start the night on the main stage, Foxy hangs out in Pirate Cove just to the side of the main stage complete with its own camera. Phone Guy explains that Foxy will only move when no one is watching him. You can see this by Foxy beginning to lean out from the curtains before beginning to move further and further off stage. If he is gone completely though, close your left door immediately as that means Foxy is on the run! You can actually see this if you check the camera in the hallway leading to your office. After banging on your door a few times though, Foxy will return to the Cove and the process will begin again. This means that you should always be checking on Pirate Cove to makes sure you know how Foxy is progressing. This is more important than you might think though as it’s not just about making sure Foxy doesn’t kill you. Each time Foxy bangs on your door, he takes some of your power! You might not notice it at first but each time it happens he’ll take more until he is pulling upwards of 15% away from you. This is the real reason you need to be monitoring him so closely.

And last but not least, there is Freddy himself. And I won’t lie, I don’t entirely understand how Freddy works exactly. Freddy starts being truly active on Night 4 which is when the helpful Phone Guy runs into some problems on his end. This means we aren’t given much of an explanation on how Freddy functions. From what I can tell he works similar to Foxy but comes from the right side. Seeing him on the cameras will stun him seemingly but he doesn’t have the sort of tells Foxy does like when you need to close the door. And very different from Foxy, Freddy will only enter the office if you are checking out the cameras. A decent strategy is actually to be swap between checking Pirate Cove and the main stage to try and keep Freddy there while also trying to keep Foxy in place too. Freddy feels like the biggest wrench that is thrown at the player to really change things up and that comes down to there not really being an explanation on how he works in game and instead needs to be discovered by trial and error. Which isn’t too bad given how short the game is overall, but still. There’s also Golden Freddy but he’s more of an Easter Egg jump scare than actual animatronic that you need to worry about.

By the time you hit Night 4 all of these elements are introduced and only ramp up from there! This is also when the game truly gets more difficult. Even with knowing how all the animatronics work it can still be a struggle to properly manage your power in order to make it last until 6 AM. And this is where the game can lose some people.

Like most horror games that rely heavily on jump scares, you really have to space them out in order for that to remain consistently scary and Five Nights at Freddy’s doesn’t really do that. As the game gets harder with each night you are obviously more likely to lose and get jump scared, and the more this happens the less scary this becomes. Eventually the jump scares are more annoying than anything and are more likely to get a groan of frustration than a scare. This is also how you get people calling games and scares like this ‘cheap’ as there isn’t much horror beyond all this. But I won’t say this is absolutely the case with Five Nights at Freddy’s. Thanks to the game’s short length, they do get away with it better than others.

Five Nights at Freddy’s is a short game. Like, if you really tried you could easily beat it in a sitting. This does very much benefit the game and even more than it does for other horror games. Keeping the experience a more bite sized one is perfect for this game, especially since it’s only $5, since the game play both has more depth than you’d think and also doesn’t at the same time.

It is honestly very surprising how much went into how each of the animatronics act. While they do each have set patterns and gimmicks, there is still some randomness to it all. Unless you go and look up how each one truly works, but if you’re just playing the game as intended, you’ll still be surprised! However, as the Nights get more difficult and strategies need to be formed in order to beat them, you will realize how little you truly need to interact with things, especially the cameras.

This is probably the biggest let down of the game honestly. One of the coolest things about the game play is the idea of being stuck in one place and needing to monitor all the things that are gunning for you. However, the best way to play the game is actually to barely interact with the cameras at all. As it turns out, the only thing you really need to use the cameras for is to check on Foxy and look for Freddy too if you want to try that. For Chica and Bonnie though, it’s much easier and saves way more power to just check the doors with the lights before checking any cameras. Looking for Chica and Bonnie on the cameras will help your understand how close they are but it won’t be effective in stopping them. In the end they will always reach the doors, something you’ll only known by checking the lights. So it makes much more sense to just check the lights instead. So the whole core of the game play isn’t actually about looking all over the pizza place, it’s just checking doors and checking Foxy, which can still be a challenge, but it’s still a massive let down. Some of the cameras I don’t think I ever really used. A shame since you can see some pretty spooky stuff on them. More people might not think of this game, and series as a whole really, as just being jump scare city if they got to experience some of the more freaky cameras moments but there really is no reason to.

However, with all that being said, I have to admit I am still very impressed with Five Nights at Freddy’s! This game is basic and barely has anything to it. I’ve played Flash games that are more feature rich than this game. Like, to give an example, Five Nights at Freddy’s doesn’t even have a pause button. If you hit Escape at any time, the game just closes. It doesn’t even take you to the main menu, it completely closes. At least on PC, maybe they changed this in the console ports. Not only that the game can easily be finished in a sitting, even when the difficulty starts ramping up. And it’s because of all that that the game impresses me so much.

Five Nights at Freddy’s is basically the definition of a minimal game. You might not notice it while you’re playing but the game is almost entirely 2D images. Your office, all of the camera views, even the animatronics out side of the jump scares, they are all just 2D images. The only things that are actually animated are Foxy running down the hall and the jump scare animations. Everything else, just 2D images. But like I was saying, this is not a negative, it is very much a positive!

While I am not a fan of horror games that focus on jump scares, Five Nights at Freddy’s proves that you don’t need a big budget or massive team to make not only a successful horror series but an iconic one too! There is always a way to make horror horror, you just need to be creative enough to do it. And I know that calling Five Nights at Freddy’s creative and original is real rich given how many games and imitators there are but back when it was just the original? It truly was something else. There’s a reason it has so many imitators after all! Even if that has died down massively in recent years.

So, with all that being said, is the original Five Nights at Freddy’s worth playing in 2026? Yeah, I’d say so! The game is short and overall very basic with the scares running out when you start getting annoyed with the same jump scares on repeat and especially when you realize how the game truly works and how little you need to look at the cameras. But it is fun to marvel at how impressive it is for such a small and basic game! The story itself is also kind of neat. There really isn’t much of one but there are plenty of little details in the environment that you can go poking around for if you want a bigger picture. People have literally made careers out of finding these small details and secrets so there is plenty to find there. The game does also have some replayability as well once you beat Night 6 and unlock Custom Night. This allows you to adjust the difficulty of each of the animatronics! I would have loved if this also told you about how each of them worked but it’s still a nice feature. And setting each animatronic to the highest difficulty is an insane challenge! So if you really enjoy the game play there is always that.

If I’m being honest I didn’t expect to enjoy my time as much as I did with the game. I don’t think I’ll be replaying it anytime soon or messing around with Custom Night, but for a $5 game it was a good time! Like I said at the start, some people hold Five Nights at Freddy’s in very low regard, mainly due to just how many games there are in the series and how quickly they were originally pumped out. It felt like no passion was put into them and the creator was just shoving them out to capitalize on the success the series was having. But this original one? Its got plenty of charm!

So if you’ve ever been curious about how this series started, give it a go for Spooky Month!

But those are just my thoughts! What are some of yours? Ever played the original Five Nights at Freddy’s? Thinking about giving it a try now? I’d love to hear your thoughts so don’t be shy!

And thank you for taking the time to read the post! If you enjoyed it feel free to leave a Like or share the blog with a friend. You can also follow the blog on WordPress or on Twitter if you want to stay up to date on new posts. Also if there’s a topic you’d like me to discuss sometime, go ahead and tell me in the comments! Any interaction is appreciated, even just viewing this post, so thanks again for stopping by.