A new level of terror arrives for one of the most successful horror game series of modern times. Bloody Disgusting goes out for pizza and brings back a Five Nights at Freddy’s VR review.
Five Nights at Freddy’s is such a simple, stripped down horror series, that it’s frankly surprising it’s taken this long to make an official jump to virtual reality.
Still, better late than never. and with Five Nights at Freddy’s VR: Help Wanted, the long-running series gets a much-needed refresh whilst still holding onto the template of its success, namely putting you in a small security room with limited power and animatronic mascots creeping ever closer
This VR edition repackages several stages from previous games and brings them into creepy new life by plonking you right in the action. In an amusing opening, you’re sat in a cart on a Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza ride, as the company tries to remodel its image after the events of the previous games, oddly by allowing people to endure those events themselves in a ‘virtual reality experience’. It’s a fun meta turn to excuse the use of old material, and in combination with the VR overhaul, it’s a forgivable one too.
You then get to select ‘experiences’ from a monitor, starting with one recreating the original FNAF. You sit in the small security booth of a Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza restaurant, on a night shift until 6 am. You have a voice chatting away on the phone, and a wall of monitors to look at, so it’s easy enough right? Well, that would be true if the animatronic puppets, used to entertain children during the day, weren’t coming to life and heading right for you. You can watch them slowly advance on the grainy security monitors, and you can activate the emergency shutters to the security room, and turn on the lights to get a better view, but you don’t have enough power to last the night if you keep yourself locked up. Let Freddy or one of his friends in and that’ll be the end of you.
You control the room’s features by using a controller or wand as a hand, using it to physically push the various buttons. The issues here, on PSVR at least, is that it’s not always as responsive as it could be, leading to some panicked fumbling at inopportune moments. It gets easier to handle once you know its eccentricities, but it adds a level of frustration on the occasions where 6 am is coming and power is extremely low and you try to juggle your tasks. Things are smoother with the Move wand than with the controller at least.
Rather than play through multiple nights, each stage is a selection from the series, a pared-back experience, but it means the variety level is high for newcomers, and quickfire fresh perspectives for longtime fans. The horror of FNAF has always been in the anticipation and tension that builds up as you catch glimpses of the animatronic puppets getting ever closer. It’s truly dread-inducing to see one of the puppets suddenly appear on a camera feed, and the fact that they move and act differently to each other adds to the sense of being overwhelmed and powerless.
Speaking from personal experience, FNAF has always been excellent at capturing the unsettling nature of tending to a near-empty building through the early hours of the morning, as well as showing how boredom in that menial work can fire up your imagination to think terrible things (even if in this case, those terrible things are definitely real). It’s a series that makes a lot out of a little, an I’ve always greatly respected the approach to horror it’s taken.
The game hides coins away in each level, which can be used to unlock additional goodies at the prize counter in the main hub, so it pays to interact with the environment during the small, safe lulls during a level, adding a neat wrinkle to the already tense situation should you wish to pursue it.
The big scares that inevitably come are pure jump scares, and while there’s an effectiveness to this method, there are also times it gets obnoxious. The phrase ‘in your face’ gets very literal here and there’s plenty of instances where FNAF VR expertly deploys its greatest weapon, but it employs it so often that the novelty can wear thin.
Still, even with countless VR horror games coming before it and effectively siphoning the effective scare juice the series created, Five Nights at Freddy’s VR maintains the series’ identity and utilizes the headset to great effect. Any further attempt at delving into the virtual reality space should try to push new boundaries, but as an opening gambit? It’s an interesting and unsettling success with a few rough edges.
Five Nights at Freddy’s VR review code for PSVR provided by the publisher
Five Nights at Freddy’s VR: Help Wanted is out now on PSVR, Oculus Rift, and HTC Vive