This weirdly hurts me. Even though I've played through all of the FNAF games, I've never really been that huge of a fan of these games; if that makes any sense. I play them I read the lore and that's it, I don't read the book, and I don't buy the merchandising. But this game looked different at first. This looked like the first FNAF game to not have Scott's fingerprints all over it; what I mean is all of the OG FNAF games aka 1 through SL always had this feeling of passion, don't get me wrong this game has that feeling too, but it feels different, it's not passion to a piece of art your making; it's a feeling of living up to that piece of art. Think 'The Force Unleashed' or 'Ghostbusters Afterlife' That's the feeling I get and did they succeed........eeeeeeeeeehhhh no not really.
For starters, I really don't like the new animatronic designs. The thing that made the OG animatronics so scary was how emotional these robots were but also how expressionless they looked, they gave off this purposeful uncanny valley vibe that really worked for the suspense. As the games went on the robots stopped having that uncanny valley vibe but in some ways, it was still there, this game just completely doesn't have it. These animatronic are completely voiced acted and expressions making them seems even more alive; which on paper sounds great, but after the 6th section which Roxy trying to find you and hearing her say the same 4 or 5 recorded lines over and over again it just stopped being scary and turned more annoying. Hell the art style overall just became a lot worse. They're going for a neon futuristic 80's aesthetic, which again on paper sounds really neat; it's a drastic diversion from what we know from the series so far but if they could make it work I'm sure it'd be pretty neat, unfortunately, everything just ended up either looking the same; or looking really cheap, and all of the artwork that was made for the new animatronic looked like they were ripped from a Furry Twitter artist portfolio. I know they probably didn't happen, but I still wouldn't be surprised if the artwork was done by a Furry Twitter artist.
One of the things that really disappointed me was the gameplay. By the looks of the game, it was going for a similar style of something like The Joy of Creation, where it's all based around maneuvering around the robots in an open area. But the game fucked itself over by 1. making the spaces way too open for its own good, 2. the AI is beyond stupid which is not good for a stealth game like this and 3. the aesthetic given to this game made maneuvering around the large empty areas a slog at times since most of the time there isn't really any indication oh where you need to go since they never give you any waypoints and everything looks the same meaning you'd be running around avoiding the robots having to hear the same voice lines over and over again and still not knowing where you need to go. At that point once you lost that horror feeling you've lost the game. The reason why Joy of creation worked so well is that the AI was pretty decent and the areas were never stupid huge, they were more compact giving it a more claustrophobic feeling making the tension stronger and keeping that horror feeling.
On the topic of horror I wanna talk about how scary this game was, and how not scary this game was. I know what we as individuals find scary is completely subjective, what you find scary I probably won't be scared of, but I'm sorry this game was just not scary at all. One of the reasons the first handful of FNAF games worked so well was how they utilize tension. FNAF 1 did this by having everything you do take place in this small office with no way to defend yourself other than close the door and hoping to Christ the robot furries would leave. FNAF 2 did this by taking away the doors and making you're only means of saving yourself is by putting a mask on and hoping to god the robots are too stupid to tell you apart from the other robots, among a lot of other tomfuckry FNAF 2 throws at you. FNAF 3 sucks so I won't even talk about that, and FNAF 4 utilizes a lot of audio and the basic human fear of darkness to make you more worried about the possibility of the robots breaking in. This game doesn't really have any of that stuff from the past games, they just throw a bunch of jump scares at you and hope you'll shit yourself with fear. granted there is that one part in the Daycare with "Moon Man" but that part becomes tedious after the 4th try so I can't really say it scared me. For some strange reason this game follows the FNAF 3 approach where its main (and only) attempt of scaring you is just jumpscares, or locking you in a small room with a time limit and 2 robots whose AI is so stupid they don't even oppose a challenge. Most of the time I was just really bored; which I'm pretty sure isn't the feeling you want from your horror game.
The story is more of a mess than usual, I don't really have much to say about it other than I don't know how this fits into the timeline, and I really don't like the twist ending of this game, it just kinda makes the last games ending more pointless and hallow. Also the other non-canon endings are all done in this cheap comic book style with almost no sound. It looks really lazy and feels like they were added in at the very last second before the game was released.
One last major thing I wanna bring up about this game is how glitchy and unfinished a lot of this game looks. A lot of the textures look super pixelated and almost look like they didn't render in right. the ray tracing option is just not functional, not even my Nvidea Geforce RTX 2080 ti could handle it. This game is nearly 50 GB and it still looks like a game made on the PS3, for a primarily next-gen title this is unacceptable.
I know I've been super mean to this game but can't be too mean, this studio only has a small group of people and they tried to make a game with AAA quality, and unless you got a stupid amount of people working on this or a lot of money that's just not a reasonable outcome. This game really did have the trappings of being a great game in this series but just ended up really unfinished, misguided, ugly, generic, boring, and to top it all off it's not even that scary. This is probably the most disappointed I've been with a game all year.
For starters, I really don't like the new animatronic designs. The thing that made the OG animatronics so scary was how emotional these robots were but also how expressionless they looked, they gave off this purposeful uncanny valley vibe that really worked for the suspense. As the games went on the robots stopped having that uncanny valley vibe but in some ways, it was still there, this game just completely doesn't have it. These animatronic are completely voiced acted and expressions making them seems even more alive; which on paper sounds great, but after the 6th section which Roxy trying to find you and hearing her say the same 4 or 5 recorded lines over and over again it just stopped being scary and turned more annoying. Hell the art style overall just became a lot worse. They're going for a neon futuristic 80's aesthetic, which again on paper sounds really neat; it's a drastic diversion from what we know from the series so far but if they could make it work I'm sure it'd be pretty neat, unfortunately, everything just ended up either looking the same; or looking really cheap, and all of the artwork that was made for the new animatronic looked like they were ripped from a Furry Twitter artist portfolio. I know they probably didn't happen, but I still wouldn't be surprised if the artwork was done by a Furry Twitter artist.
One of the things that really disappointed me was the gameplay. By the looks of the game, it was going for a similar style of something like The Joy of Creation, where it's all based around maneuvering around the robots in an open area. But the game fucked itself over by 1. making the spaces way too open for its own good, 2. the AI is beyond stupid which is not good for a stealth game like this and 3. the aesthetic given to this game made maneuvering around the large empty areas a slog at times since most of the time there isn't really any indication oh where you need to go since they never give you any waypoints and everything looks the same meaning you'd be running around avoiding the robots having to hear the same voice lines over and over again and still not knowing where you need to go. At that point once you lost that horror feeling you've lost the game. The reason why Joy of creation worked so well is that the AI was pretty decent and the areas were never stupid huge, they were more compact giving it a more claustrophobic feeling making the tension stronger and keeping that horror feeling.
On the topic of horror I wanna talk about how scary this game was, and how not scary this game was. I know what we as individuals find scary is completely subjective, what you find scary I probably won't be scared of, but I'm sorry this game was just not scary at all. One of the reasons the first handful of FNAF games worked so well was how they utilize tension. FNAF 1 did this by having everything you do take place in this small office with no way to defend yourself other than close the door and hoping to Christ the robot furries would leave. FNAF 2 did this by taking away the doors and making you're only means of saving yourself is by putting a mask on and hoping to god the robots are too stupid to tell you apart from the other robots, among a lot of other tomfuckry FNAF 2 throws at you. FNAF 3 sucks so I won't even talk about that, and FNAF 4 utilizes a lot of audio and the basic human fear of darkness to make you more worried about the possibility of the robots breaking in. This game doesn't really have any of that stuff from the past games, they just throw a bunch of jump scares at you and hope you'll shit yourself with fear. granted there is that one part in the Daycare with "Moon Man" but that part becomes tedious after the 4th try so I can't really say it scared me. For some strange reason this game follows the FNAF 3 approach where its main (and only) attempt of scaring you is just jumpscares, or locking you in a small room with a time limit and 2 robots whose AI is so stupid they don't even oppose a challenge. Most of the time I was just really bored; which I'm pretty sure isn't the feeling you want from your horror game.
The story is more of a mess than usual, I don't really have much to say about it other than I don't know how this fits into the timeline, and I really don't like the twist ending of this game, it just kinda makes the last games ending more pointless and hallow. Also the other non-canon endings are all done in this cheap comic book style with almost no sound. It looks really lazy and feels like they were added in at the very last second before the game was released.
One last major thing I wanna bring up about this game is how glitchy and unfinished a lot of this game looks. A lot of the textures look super pixelated and almost look like they didn't render in right. the ray tracing option is just not functional, not even my Nvidea Geforce RTX 2080 ti could handle it. This game is nearly 50 GB and it still looks like a game made on the PS3, for a primarily next-gen title this is unacceptable.
I know I've been super mean to this game but can't be too mean, this studio only has a small group of people and they tried to make a game with AAA quality, and unless you got a stupid amount of people working on this or a lot of money that's just not a reasonable outcome. This game really did have the trappings of being a great game in this series but just ended up really unfinished, misguided, ugly, generic, boring, and to top it all off it's not even that scary. This is probably the most disappointed I've been with a game all year.