The appearance and success of both Five Nights at Freddy’s games was certainly unexpected. I remember seeing the first game’s logo and somewhat generic script font and thinking I’d probably never play it. It seemed shallow, a scares delivery system, at best.

But then I saw former Giant Bomb editor Patrick “Scoops” Klepek play it on a stream and get completely freaked out by it, and I saw something I hadn’t before. It was still sort of what I’d first imagined, only way better. It was straightforward, tense, and highly effective at making me scream bloody murder.

However, even though it is a fairly simple game — a point-and-click experience at its most stripped down — the fact is that FNaF provided some of the most purely terrifying moments of last year. The sequel, which appeared in Steam only several months later, provided similarly excruciating jump scares and some added mechanics. More of the same, sure, but way fun.

Released last week, Five Nights at Freddy’s 3 attempts to continue terrifying hapless, desperate night security guards, and — to save the suspense — it totally works. Creator Scott Cawthon attempts with each subsequent game to both tweak the formula and build the mythos surrounding these characters but also create one hell of a scary game.

He has succeeded yet again, and Five Nights at Freddy’s is the most visually appealing, most sinister, and maybe most terrifying of the three.

Normally, players take on the role of recently-hired security guard, who is instructed to keep an eye on the footloose animatronic creatures that provide Chuck-E-Cheese-like entertainment for kids and patrons during the day. The trick is that if they get free, they’ll end up giving you a jump scare the force of which you only see in night-vision commercials for horror movies. It’s YouTube-worthy to see people’s reactions to the first game.

This time around, the setting is not a near-defunct Freddy’s Fazbear Pizza but a horror experience based on the previous Freddy’s Fazbear mysteries. It’s a bit of self-mythologizing, but it totally works for what these games are trying to accomplish. You get the basic set-up with some added wrinkles. Gone is the sort of baffled mid-level manager on the nightly phone call, replaced with a sort of baffled stoner-cum-entrepreneur.

Basically, you are stationed inside the ostensible security station, and you have two major jobs — watch the cameras and reboot the finicky communications tools: audio, camera, and ventilation. Do a good job, and you stave off the furry, googly eyed terrors that wander the facilities. Do a bad job, and, well, I think that’s pretty obvious.

The communications systems themselves are all pretty self-explanatory, save for ventilation. If the ventilation system isn’t reset consistently, one of the animatronics will appear, almost out of thing air, sending you in a hallucinatory, hyperventilating state of panic, which in turn increases your real life terror and tension.

Otherwise, each works in a different way, and neglecting each can bring about a different incarnation of the various monsters in FNaF3. I won’t divulge those here, because sussing out how the various systems interplay is half the fun of the game, but suffice it to say that they do, and the sooner you figure them out, the better off you’ll be.

I do have to stop here and say that, as the player, you’ll mostly be clicking around the screen. There is no exploration to be had, nor is there really anything else “to do” except stare at video cameras and reboot faulty technology.

In essence, you are actually playing the role of an actual security guard, without the glamor and tension of getting out of your chair and walking around with a flashlight.

That being said, the game doesn’t feel lacking with regard to mechanics, at least not to me. It is brief, surely — a perfect playthrough could last as little as thirty minutes — but satisfyingly challenging.

These games are known for being somewhat difficult, but FNaF3 ramps up way faster, to me, than the previous two. It really is about understanding how the systems work and exploiting them in order to deter the animatronics from causing you to soil your Hanes. Still, even then, I managed to make it to the fifth night with only a few hours work, which could be considered wonderful or way too short, depending on how you look at it.

It seems like the game reveals itself to you as you play it, and therein lies most of the fun. As you figure things out, you employ them to essentially prevent yourself from playing the game. You are not interacting with the world in order to actually fight off the ostensible evil; playing the game well entails not encountering the evil at all. The farther you make it without seeing Springtrap or Freddy Fazbear or Foxy the Pirate, the better you’ve actually played the game.

The user interface is less complex than the first (and definitely the second) Five Night at Freddy’s. It feels less like a game of perpetual Whac-a-Mole than the previous ones, but there is still plenty of compulsive clicking to be. I know that sounds sort of bizarre, given that most of what happens is pointing-and-clicking, but the game gives you very little by way of tutorial.

It basically sets up the things you can do but doesn’t divulge what you should do, and so you’ll probably spend plenty of time replaying levels to figure out how to keep the game’s villains from killing you.

What’s (funny and a little sad) is that the stuff I do in-game might not even be helping. I’m constantly clicking, creating these weird rituals for myself, being convinced that it’s actually doing some good, when, in point of fact, it could be doing the opposite.

You can rely on these patterns while the game isn’t difficult, but at a certain point, you’ll be forced to learn what is actually going on behind the scenes and develop a few fireproof strategies, which may or may not work. By the end of the game, you’ll be furiously veering from one side of the screen to the other, repairing systems and clicking through your map progression. It gets all very complicated.

The graphical aspect of Five Night at Freddy’s 3 is way improved on the previous two, but is still specific to the series. The art style is one of the more compelling aspects of the game. It provides a logical progression from the original game, which featured creepy but mostly intact figures, to the current nightmare-inducing versions. They are the hell that I imagine a Toy Story 4 would end up being, what happens when Buzz and Woody are left to rot in the garage for a decade.

What works about the game could also be interpreted as its downside. It improves upon the previous games’ formula, but there is nevertheless a formula here. If you’ve played the previous two games, you might have tired of the shtick by now, but you (like me) might also be utterly ecstatic for another opportunity to dive into this world.

Also, there’s the nature of the scares to be considered here. However, although I’ve largely become inured to the shock of it all, I do have to say that the scares themselves are pretty authentically jumpy-scary. And listen: I know that it’s kind of a formula of misdirection at this point, but I have to say that it’s a pretty effective system at delivering them.

The sound that erupts from speakers / headphones when THE MOMENT happens still sounds like Death personified, and there is no worthy alternative to it in a game I’ve played in a really long time…except, maybe, the first two Five Nights at Freddy’s games.

The Final Word: Like the animals themselves, the formula for Five Nights at Freddy’s might be getting a bit tattered, but there’s still life left in those cold, staring, animatronic eyes yet. Play it if you liked the first two games or need a reason to buy new underwear.