Are you ready for the final chapter of the scary game “Five Nights at Freddies”?
The creator of the scary horror game series Five Nights at Freddy’s, Scott Cawthon, released a photo on his website this week teasing the final installment in the indie horror series. The image itself features a vastly different looking Freddy Fazbear, complete with an evil grin on his face and nice little top hat in his arms. At the left of the image are the words “The Final Chapter” The image also provides a date of 10/31/15, which many believe to be the scheduled release date for the final installment.
Five Nights at Freddy’s was created by Scott Cawthon in 2014. The game was released via Steam Greenlight on August 20th, 2014. The indie horror game follows Mike, who is a newly hired security guard for the kid themed pizza restaurant. Mike is tasked with guarding the restaurant at night from defective animatronics, who could possibly confuse him for one of them.
You are given two doors, two lights and a surveillance system to help you in the game. You monitor the animatronics with the cameras and try to block them off by shutting the doors. Once all the power is used for the door and light system, gamers are left vulnerable and will have to survive to the end of the night on pure luck. If you survive the night, you move on to the next night and next set of difficulty. If you survive all five nights, you then get to choose the difficulty of the animatronics for one final night before being fired for tampering with them.
While there are no concrete clues to what the final chapter of the series will entail, it is safe to assume that it will involve jump scares, different methods of keeping the animatronics at bay, and a back story that is more sinister than any other installment in the franchise. This game may actually have gamers re-live the events of the dreaded, Bite of 87, something that hasn’t been shown to gamers since the first game.
You first learn about the Bite of 87 in the first game of the franchise, where you are told by your job trainer about the incident and are warned to not let the animatronics catch you without a costume on. If you are caught by Freddy, Foxy or any of the other animatronics, they will mistake you for an exoskeleton and stuff you into an animatronics costume. Doing so kills the player instantly and forces them to start the night all over again.
Wherever the story decides to go in this edition of the beloved point-and-click horror game, I think fans will be thankful to Scott for giving the series a conclusion. With that in mind, I also hope fans are able to have a satisfying ending to the game as well. The previous games have held so many mysteries about the murders and other strange occurrences happening at the restaurant that it would really be a shame if the game was built up to a lackluster conclusion.
Besides the story aspect of the final installment, one has to wonder what new gameplay mechanics will be offered in the game as well. Will we see a return of the surveillance system that is used to track the animatronics as they roam around their given area? What about the mask that allows gamers to protect themselves when one of the creatures walk in? Will new gameplay elements be introduced into the game to make it just that much harder? If you’re a fan of the series, these questions and others are probably running through your mind right now.
I think it would be best to only introduce a few new elements to gameplay so that gamers only have a little bit of learning curve to go through; and so they can then look forward to getting past all the nights and reaching the conclusion of the game. One element that comes to mind is blackouts, where the entire electrical system cuts out abruptly, allowing the animatronics to scatter to other rooms for a few minutes without being detected by the camera. This will force the player to check and recheck the cameras when the power comes back on and make sure that an animatronic is not close to beating down their door.
Another element they can introduce into the game is a combat feature. This way the animatronics could grab you during gameplay and try to drag you to the costume that will ultimately kill you, but you could respond to this by either doing a quick attack by responding to button prompts on-screen, or try to deplete the enemy’s health bar through a variety of attack options. This would be a great feature to the game and create a lot of added fear when Freddy and his friends gang up on you and drag you to your death.
What features do you believe the final installment of Five Nights of Freddy should have in it? Do you think it should change any of the gameplay mechanics from previous installments? Are you excited to find out more about the Bite of 87? Let us know in the comments below!
