Five Nights at Freddy's

Five Nights at Freddy's, video game created by Scott Cawthon. Released 2014. Five Nights is a survival horror game in which the player is the night guard at Freddy Fazbear's Pizza, a Chuck-E-Cheese-style children's restaurant. Like Chuck-E-Cheese, Freddy Fazbear's contains several animatronic animal robots that sing and dance.

Within the narrative of the game, the owners of Freddy Fazbear's have decided to let the robots freely roam the building at night so their servos do not seize up. The user must monitor several security cameras within the restaurant to keep an eye on the movements of the robots. The goal of the game is to survive for five consecutive nights as the night guard.

The player has a finite amount of electrical power to use each night in order to keep the lights on and monitor the cameras. If an animatronic animal makes it into the security booth, where the player is located, it will kill the player. If the player runs out of electricity, then the player will be attacked and killed by one of the animatronic robots.

The game utilizes elements of traditional "survival horror" games, including darkness, "jump scares," and long periods of tense silence. It also juxtaposes elements of childhood with fear (see, e.g., CHILD'S PLAY, IT, etc.). The narrative explanation for the player's death is that a robot encountering the player "will automatically assume that it is an endoskeleton that is not in costume yet, and 'forcefully stuff them' into a spare mechanical Freddy Fazbear costume, killing the person in the process." This adds the trope of humans turning into machines (e.g., the Borg) to the survival horror genre, which is typically motivated by exclusively supernatural elements.

RDE (with Chad & Mike C.?), updated, 12Ap20