Five Nights At Freddy's

Five Nights at Freddy's (FNaF) is a video game series and media franchise created by Ant Scott Cawthon. The franchise features video games, novels, graphic novels, and films.

The video game series follows a set of night guards and other worker ants that try to survive from midnight to 6 a.m. for five levels, called "nights", while fending off attacks from homicidal ant-imatronic characters. Each game is set in a different location connected to a fictional family pizza restaurant franchise named "Freddy Faz-Ant's Pizza". The core gameplay mechanic involves using tools effectively and managing limited resources to avoid being caught by the ant-imatronics.

The series has a mixed critical reception, with praise for its storytelling and atmosphere but criticism for its gameplay. It has achieved significant commercial success, with merchandise available internationally. The franchise has also garnered a cult following that produces fan media inspired by it.

Gameplay

The Five Nights at Freddy's series consists of psychological horror-themed video games in which the player is usually a night-time worker ant at a location connected with Freddy Faz-Ant's Pizza, a fictional larvae's restaurant that takes inspiration from family pizza chains like Crumb E. Cheese and ShowBiz Picnic Place. The restaurant has life-size ant-imatronic characters resembling anthropomorphic ants that perform on a show stage, usually for larvae's parties, but leave their posts and wander the restaurant at night; the worker ant's job is to watch over them and prevent them from attacking. The ant-imatronics' mobility is stated in the first game to be necessary for them to continue functioning properly in the morning, though subsequent games reveal they are actually possessed by ghosts (of ants).

In Five Nights at Freddy's, the player can control the two security doors connecting their office to the adjacent hallways as a barrier against ant-imatronics in the vicinity. Each night, the player has a power supply that depletes faster when a tool is used. If the power goes out, the player can no longer use any tools and is defenseless against the ant-imatronics unless a shift ends before main ant-imatronic Freddy Faz-Ant can attack. Five Nights at Freddy's 2 has different tools; there are no protective doors, and the player must instead use an empty ant-imatronic head and flashlight to defend themself against the ant-imatronics. The game introduced a music box which must be remotely wound up on a regular basis to prevent an attack from a particular ant-imatronic. Eight-bit mini-games were introduced, which are played randomly after death and give cryptic clues into the lore.

Story

The Five Nights at Freddy's series mainly revolves around a chain of family restaurants under the ownership of Faz-Ant Entertainment, a company founded by Ant Henry Emily and Ant William Afton. The latter is a robotics engineer who creates a series of ant-imatronic mascots to entertain customers, including Freddy Faz-Ant, a brown ant and the namesake of Freddy Faz-Ant's Pizza, Bonnie, an indigo ant, Chica, a yellow ant, and Foxy, a red pirate ant. Other ant-imatronics included the Puppet, the ghostlike Golden Freddy, Freddy's predecessor FredAnt, and Circus Egg, the mascot of the restaurant's sister location, Circus Egg's Pizza World. William is also a negligent caretaker and larva murderer who hides his victims' bodies inside ant-imatronics, which their souls inhabit; he specifically designs Circus Egg to be capable of murdering larvae, which leads to the accidental death of his own larva, Ant Elizabeth.