My niece sat across from me and kept saying the same thing: so it’s not scary but that’s why it’s scary right? I think that’s the negotiation made with children here, that they will get a preparable scary moment and the game will be about the preparation for either that moment coming or how to avoid it.
I do not love this as a horror design because doing well ought to not reduce the horror — see the new Resident Evil designs which scale to how you play them and what amount of supplies and abilities you have — if you oversucceed in those games, the difficulty measures and responds to that, that’s game design. I’d like to think the horror is the reward of playing a horror game, not the avoidance of it.
All that said, it’s a perfect format for the streaming breakthrough it experienced — in that there are broken moments of time designated to sitting and waiting, lots of dead air for a streamer to fill in.
I wrote about interviewing Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Chuck E Cheese, and my perception of the games through studying lore and playing the first game on The Twin Geeks — you can find that here:
https://thetwingeeks.com/2023/11/07/five-nights-at-freddys-what-we-make-for-others-is-no-longer-ours/
Game-wise, I surprisingly find there’s even less here than with the movie, which I can better understand as entry horror that does something I like (practical effects) vs a game wherein the horror devices are based upon limiting inputs and engagements.
That is always a central design in horror, to strip away mechanics until the absence of them are what creates a central tension. I just don’t find it that interesting to play here and understand very fully why it’s a game to be watched. It’s better that way.
I do not love this as a horror design because doing well ought to not reduce the horror — see the new Resident Evil designs which scale to how you play them and what amount of supplies and abilities you have — if you oversucceed in those games, the difficulty measures and responds to that, that’s game design. I’d like to think the horror is the reward of playing a horror game, not the avoidance of it.
All that said, it’s a perfect format for the streaming breakthrough it experienced — in that there are broken moments of time designated to sitting and waiting, lots of dead air for a streamer to fill in.
I wrote about interviewing Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Chuck E Cheese, and my perception of the games through studying lore and playing the first game on The Twin Geeks — you can find that here:
https://thetwingeeks.com/2023/11/07/five-nights-at-freddys-what-we-make-for-others-is-no-longer-ours/
Game-wise, I surprisingly find there’s even less here than with the movie, which I can better understand as entry horror that does something I like (practical effects) vs a game wherein the horror devices are based upon limiting inputs and engagements.
That is always a central design in horror, to strip away mechanics until the absence of them are what creates a central tension. I just don’t find it that interesting to play here and understand very fully why it’s a game to be watched. It’s better that way.