fnaf 3 is ass. it's ass and it's boring, and it's unintuitive and its completely based on rng. fnaf 2, at it's core, was about reaction time and learning how to work under pressure. in the later nights there was certainly the argument to be made(and i agree) that it relied heavily on rng to win, based on how many withereds appear and if you keep getting fucked by so much before you can wind the music box... but not like this....

i know nothing of fnaf 3's gameplay loop. i mean, you have to keep springtrap away and reboot systems, yeah, but like... there never felt like a way to win. it felt entirely luck based. i cant fucking tell where springtrap is on about 75% of the cams because of SO MUCH FUCKING STATIC AND EVERYTHING BEING GREEN. like seriously, i cant fucking tell where he is unless he's in a position his eye shows up. so im just randomly shooting off audio lures hoping he gets to 8, 9, or 10 where i actually can tell where he is. hell i cant even look at the fucking cams most of the time, because all of that time is spent rebooting. so you finally get done rebooting all your systems after like 20 seconds, and hes fucking gone. 5 seconds after that he just peeks into your office. guess im dead. OR... the "winning" strat, where you're lucky enough that he hangs out in cam 10 for hours at a time... until its 5am , he disappears and you scramble sending off random audio lures hoping to get saved by 6am. thats it. thats the winning strat. get lucky and get him in cam 10 or somehow avoid him without knowing where he is, like i did for many nights. so i never learned the systems, i dont get any of the gameplay loop.

another thing is this game needs negative fucking sound to be played. fnaf 1/2 sound wasnt a big deal either, but at the very least you had to listen for mangle or the ambience and the vent sounds. here, i was so bored that i just blared the tartarus theme and won fine. your nights are so boring, btw. either he kills you at 1am with the most lukewarm scare or youre stuck watching him get trapped in one cam for the rest of the night and rebooting when necessary. its the antithesis of fnaf 2 where there was so much to keep track of all at once, theres like nothing to keep track of now, because you either cant tell where he is or hes stuck in the same cam.

lets talk about phantom animatronics. theyr're basically nonexistent for me on my winning runs, yet more proof the winning strat is entirely luck based. when they do show up theyre a nuisance/annoyance, full stop. not like the withered when they became frustrating as i got better, but instead theyve always been an annoying thing to deal with since night 2. anyway, I LOVE THE REBOOTING DOWNTIME. STAYING ON ONE SCREEN FOR A MINUTE AT A TIME IS THE GAMEPLAY LOOP I LOVE IN FNAF!!! IM NOT BORED AT ALL!!

night 5, on the other hand, seems to be the antithesis of 1-4. i beat those fairly easily, but night 5 took me hours. and not in the way fnaf 2's night 6 did. fnaf 2 was 80 percent skill and reaction time. but on most runs, even the ones where i blare music, i get to either 5am or he kills me at 1/2. theres no inbetween, honestly. it was the only night where i actually felt the need to learn the gameplay systems because getting 20 seconds away from victory, randomly, 3 times, is not the same as actual victory once. so i somewhat learned that sound does kinda matter but only for this night. it's weird. even if you didnt use sound you could just give mr afton a staring contest and it would work lol. im not sure if it was stockholm, but i did somewhat enjoy learning these systems for night 5.

that being said, it's not as if the other 4 needed them. night 1 has nothing at all lol. and even then, it was still entirely luck based. on my penultimate run of winning night 5 he killed me at 1 am again. so it's not like it's my problem like in fnaf 2, where i consistently got stuck at 3am because i didnt have solid enough reaction time, no it was just 100% rng on my winning runs for each night. sometimes i die at 5 am. sometimes 2 am... and that really fucking sucks, much like the game. if i used the number 5, it would likely be scored as such, but its gonna sit at 4.

i will not be attempting night 6 in this game.

See i actually wound up playing this on my 3DS uhhhhh.. but it was bugged,, i wasnt even really touching anything i just let my 3ds sit on the table and the vents and shit would freak but .. i never got killed!... so technically i did beat this before fnaf 2 but it doesnt really feel good or earned because i was just glancing back occasionally at a game beating itself on accident! but its so funny i cant not put it here.. i like how grimey and green this game looks though! and springtrap is awesome even though he sure does take his sweet ass time in this game
ill wind up properly playing it and maybe having more thoughts about this some other time i guess

This is like, the only one that's conceptually interesting, and yet, Scott manages to fuck everything up the most right in this one. Kind of frustrating given that it does manage to build a pretty decent atmosphere while also having the single best character that came from this franchise (the minigame sequences are also pretty soulful, even though you can certainly tell that its gimmicks are so unintentionally straightfoward that you just can't help but imagine scott writing them up and thinking to himself "goddamn ain't I clever?". Subtlety is certainly something this franchise is uncapable of providing anyway, but I digress).

Well, if I had to give some props, this one emphasizes the fundamentals of the first game to an extent that makes them actually more worth of paying attention; in Fnaf 2, checking the cameras was a mechanic that was pretty much reduced to just staring at a single room to prevent the puppet from attacking (and very occasionally checking the vents because otherwise, most animatronics you could deal without having to look for the cameras). On this one however you can actually feel the structure of the stablishment that you're in, so springtrap movement's are a lot more logical, and the audioplay mechanic demands you to understand this, you can't just press this anywhere on the map (and given how gloomy and grungy the setting on fnaf3 is, you actually have to put effort on spotting springtrap's location, so despite this game being technically the easiest of the franchise, at the very least it's never obvious).
The presentation is also perhaps the best of all games exactly because it reaches the maximum of it's design theory without just going straight up hokey like everything else that came after (I give fnaf4 a pass considering the fact the nightmare animatronics are just fragments of a dream, so their exageration makes sense, but the rest of the franchise...yeah, you just can't convince me that those things were once meant for a kids restaurant - some of them just look like torture machines no matter in which way you look at it). Plot wise, despite being a tad heavy handed on this department (although sister location would be a lot more in the future), I can't say it doesn't depict the most peculiar aspects of this franchise's lore because it's quite the opposite, this and fnaf 4 have the least convoluted narrative and that on itself gives a lot more credibility.

This is where my compliments end though. Aside from everything, it's still a fnaf game, which means...yeah, it's terrible and boring...but at least a lot more immersive than the rest.