Reviews
[Review] ‘Five Nights at Freddy’s VR: Help Wanted’ Revitalizes Tried and Trusted Scares
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
Reviews
‘DOOM: The Dark Ages | Revelations’ Review: A Worthy Expansion That Delivers One Last Thrilling Battle
A couple of weeks ago when id held a digital preview event showcasing the new DLC for DOOM: The Dark Ages, I was left a little bit unsure of how I would take to it. Director Hugo Martin promised that Revelations would be pushing the challenge of the game further than the base game, incorporating some of the movement and feel of DOOM Eternal.
As someone who liked The Dark Ages but bounced off of Eternal, this made me a little bit worried. Thankfully, they do not remove the heavy combat that The Dark Ages’ shield brought into the mix, while layering on new options to add quick movement with the introduction of the new spear.
Revelations picks up right after the events of The Dark Ages, but quickly takes you down a peg and removes some of your high level upgrades, including taking away the iconic shield. It continues The Dark Ages’ strange insistence on being more narrative-focused, with dramatic cutscenes and self-important lore. This was something id started doing in DOOM Eternal, and I feel like it’s one of the things that pushed me away from enjoying the game.
I’m not entirely sure why, but it always feels sacrilegious to me when I see a third person view of the Doomslayer, especially after DOOM (2016) did such a great job of humorously rejecting deep narrative through its first-person sequences. I don’t remember this happening in other games, but Revelations even goes as far as to have narrative sequences when you walk through areas without being able to shoot anything, which feels very bizarre for a series that’s known for its focus on gameplay.
The game is asking me to have a reverence for the lore of this world that I just don’t feel like they’ve earned, which is off-putting to me, at times. Every time I get into a cutscene where I’m watching paper-thin characters discuss the war against Hell, I’m just looking at my watch waiting for the moment I can get back to ripping and tearing.
The Spear Changes the Rhythm of Combat
The biggest introduction that Revelations brings to the franchise is the brand new spear, which goes in your left hand slot where the shield resided. Eventually, you will be juggling both, but much of the beginning of the DLC is spent with only the spear. While the shield gave you the ability to tank hits when under fire, the spear is all about mobility, giving you a dash ability to dance between projectiles rather than blocking them. Replacing the shield ramming ability is a grapple that lets you pull yourself towards an enemy, albeit slower than the shield bash.
You can also slash with the spear, which doubles as the weapon’s version of the parry, making it a versatile tool that creates a different playstyle that’s distinct from the shield, but still fits into the established gameplay.
It did take me a while to get used to the spear, though. Oddly, the slash that you use to parry is mapped to a different button than the shield’s block/parry, which was an adjustment for my brain. Modern DOOM games are so much about muscle memory, so having to switch parry buttons depending on which weapon I was carrying always caused me to stumble for a fraction of a second, and those moments can be critical ones in such an aggressive game. Some of the more fun and useful moves, like the ability to chain yourself to an enemy and orbit around them while firing, were locked behind an upgrade tree, making it an even slower curve for the spear to start firing on all cylinders.
For the most part, once the narrative restored my shield, I was once again using that most of the time, switching to spear for the more movement-based exploration sections. The spear definitely had its usefulness in battle, but the rhythm I had with the shield from the base game was just too good for me to permanently make the switch.
Fresh Locations Keep Hell Interesting
After a brief prologue, the Doomslayer finds himself cast down into a purgatory prison, aided by a mysterious creature that resides within. To escape, he must complete three challenges in three different stages. These are accessed through a hub area that has a light Metroidvania aspect, allowing you to explore more areas as your abilities are returned to you. I actually had some fun trying to track down secrets, which usually come in the form of extra encounters and some upgrade resources, but the reward was usually the act of discovery itself, in this case.
My favorite example of these involved finding the anchors for chains and smashing them with your shields, then chasing down the reward that dropped once you broke them all. It’s not like the hub is the most compelling part of the game, but I did appreciate that Revelations rewarded me for exploring.
Despite really liking DOOM: The Dark Ages, I got a bit tired of its more bland medieval setting by the end, so I was glad to see that each of these levels changed up the visual style. The first section and the hub were ice-themed, bringing to mind the final circle of Dante’s hell. The brightness was a refreshing change of pace, with blues and whites being the dominant color palette rather than the muddy browns. The second level brought to mind the cosmic realm of the base game, leaning more into clever puzzles and shifting spaces that felt like DOOM’s version of Control. The final level is called Osseus, and its environments are constructed out of bones, making for some satisfyingly destructible arenas. None of these areas were too long, each about an hour or two, so the density of Revelations’ variety felt a lot higher than the base game.
Upon completion of each of these levels, you’re dropped in sections where you are playing as the Doom Marine. As I mentioned before, I’m a bit allergic to the lore of this game, so I’m not exactly up-to-date on how this may or may not help unify the Doom timelines narratively, but it was a cool change of pace to see the action in a more modern setting again. To make it feel more like the old school version of DOOM, your shotgun is placed in the center of the screen with a strong headbob, putting you right back into 1993. Oddly the actual content of these sequences felt a bit like Call of Duty, putting you on a linear path to blast your way through soldiers, but I appreciated the change of pace, and I’m sure DOOM lorehounds will eat it up.
High-Level Encounters Reward Skilled Play
Encounters in Revelations pick up right along the difficulty curve of The Dark Ages, throwing you into a high-level deep end pretty early on. Given your new set of tools, it’s a lot of fun to blast your way through hordes in well laid out arenas with strong encounter design. Everything I said in my review of The Dark Ages still stands, the combat is exciting and challenging, creating an exhilerating rhythm through the parry mechanic that adds a layer of complexity to an already great combat feel. While I still leaned a lot on the shield, the addition of the spear is awesome for those that appreciated the mobility focus that DOOM Eternal provided, so there’s something for lovers of all modern DOOM games.
There are a couple new additions to the enemy roster for the DLC, but unfortunately they were some of my least favorites. The classic Archville is back, but I didn’t like the style of challenge he brought to the encounters. He belongs to one of my least favorite enemy types, which is “guy who moves around the battlefield avoiding you and making things worse while still around.” He is constantly summoning glowing red spectral versions of standard enemies that continue to swarm you until he’s defeated.
As you’re getting overwhelmed, it becomes hard to spot him as he teleports around, especially when his glowing summons are a lot more visible than he is. Encounters where he showed up felt overwhelming in a frustrating way more than an exciting way, which made me sigh in disappointment any time he showed up.
Other than that, I appreciated the addition of the Cosmic Elemental, who flies around and throws smaller elementals at you. It was clear anytime that he showed up that he was an immediate emergency that needed to be dealt with, adding an interesting dynamic to the battlefield. While some of the encounters frustrated me with the inclusion of the Archville, I still came out of them feeling like an unstoppable killing machine, which is exactly the feeling I come to DOOM for, so mission accomplished.
In addition to the combat, there’s some nice traversal challenges and puzzle solving, though nothing like the precise platforming that I remember disliking from DOOM Eternal. The puzzles, which peak in the second trial, feel really clever when you have to alternate between using the shield and the spear to accomplish your tasks. Like other DOOM games, there are plenty of secrets to find hidden throughout, though this time they did not mark them on the map. It felt weird in The Dark Ages that their locations were shown to you, so I welcome this change, as it makes finding them feel more satisfying.
Endgame Content Gives Players More to Conquer
After completing the three trials, there is a suitably epic conclusion with some memorable boss fights and setpieces. While the narrative isn’t too deep or complex, it gets the job done when it stays out of the way, providing a satisfying-enough story that leaves room for further adventures. Given that id was hit with massive layoffs, a fact that was floating in the back of my mind throughout the entire time I was playing Revelations, it’s unclear whether or not they will be able to follow up on this cliffhanger or not.
When you complete the main story, you are given the Master Key, which opens previously locked doors throughout the stages. With this new tool, you can backtrack through levels and find new challenges, which come along with new rewards. There are Rituals of Power, challenge stages that award you a tiered medal based on your performance, Praetor Fights, extra-hard encounters meant to push your combat abilities to their limits, and Classic Levels, recreations of stages from older games. Fully completing Rituals of Power and Praetor Fights will give you pieces to another key that will unlock the game’s true final boss, giving you an Endgame goal should you decide you want more of what Revelations has to offer.
Completing the Classic Levels will eventually give you access to the ‘93 Shotgun, an extra-powerful recreation of the original game’s weapon. I’m not usually one for post-game content like this, but I did find the Classic Levels to be particularly satisfying, and playing them even made me re-install the classics on my Steam Deck.
It’s bittersweet to play DOOM: The Dark Ages | Revelations knowing that the team behind it has been left in a diminished capacity. They did an excellent job merging the successes of The Dark Ages and Eternal into one challenging package, putting a neat bow on this era of DOOM. Even if some of the enemies were more frustrating than fun, I left every encounter with a triumphant smile on my face, fistpumping at the carnage I created.
While I don’t have the reverence for the DOOM lore that the game wants me to, the journey the six to eight hour narrative took me on was a fun blockbuster with an appropriately exciting conclusion, along with post-game content to discover if you want more. It may not convert new fans to the franchise, but Revelations is a worthy addition to the series that feels like a triumphant culmination of the last two games.
Code provided by publisher. DOOM: The Dark Ages | Revelations is available now on the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series and the PC via Steam.
You must be logged in to post a comment.