PixlBit

Five Night's at Freddy's is a game that sounds stressful to me. I love the setup, working a security guard at a Chuck E Cheese rip off at night when the animatronics come out to kill you. Not just kill you, but shove your body into another one of their suits even though the gears and mechanics inside them will kill you (which is a very disturbing thought). The thing is, just watching security cameras to know when to shut the doors as the power drains from the station does not sound like my idea of fun. It seems like I'd be frustrating and annoyed.

So why is it I bought the game still? Well that needs a bit of explaining. See, I was watching Jim Sterling play it, mostly to see his opinion on the game. And he made a comment I felt was very bizarre: That the game had some very interesting lore. This coming from someone who knows games as well as him, I thought was bizarre. This is the most made-for-Youtube sounding game I have ever heard. It's most appealing aspect is seeing people react to their sudden deaths.

So I went to the Wiki page and looked up this story. And was stunned, the lore to this series is unbelievable. But not just that it exists, also how it's told. Take the missing children incident, for example. Five children went missing at the restaurant, with a suspect convicted of murdering them, yet the bodies were never found. How does the game tell you this? Through these 

Just posters which change as you progress through the game. It's entirely possible to miss them, but those who pay close attention to details are rewarded for this. And better yet, nowhere does the game say what happened to the children or who the murderer was, just hints and clues in both these and other aspects of the game.

The result? Dozens of theories trying to piece together exactly what happened here. Some say the murderer hid the bodies in the animatroincs, and that's why they now have a foul odor with blood and mucus coming from their eyes and mouths. Others claim the spirits of the children now haunt the animatronics seeking revenge. Notice how I started those with "Some say" and "Others claim," two of the most cliched ways to go about horror story mysteries. Because that's what this is, a an  incredibly well told mystery.

And there are all kinds of theories like this. Theories on the different behaviors of animatronics, an incident where one of them bit off the frontal lobe of a person's brain, who the phone guy (guy who explains mechanics with vague comments giving backstory) and player character really are. And these are all based on the phone guy's comments to you each night, the locations shown in the restaurant, and in FNAF 2's case, an Atari 2600-esque minigame which shows what many think is the murders, but no one knows for sure due to the vagueness of 80's era sprites and gameplay.

FNaF has a story which shows restraint and subtlety, resulting not just in a story that's well told, but one that will make the game stick with people. I havne't even played it, but I want to know who the murderer was, what happened with the children, and whether these animatronics really do just want to shove you into another suit or there's something more sinister behind their actions. And that I may never know only makes me more interested and let me have fun with seeing what conclusions others came to. It also reminds me of all those Pokemon rumors, where we would discuss how to get Mew and Pikablue, showing how the internet can help spread rumors about a game rather than kill them as I once feared.

And you know what? I enjoyed myself enough and spent more than enough time reading these theories and exploring the lore that I felt the creator deserved the $5 his game costs. Even though I never plan to even install it.