If you’re not familiar with Five Nights At Freddy’s, it’s this thing where somebody said “Hey you know those animatronic animals they used to have at a certain kind of family restaurant that had big terrifying eyes and really unnatural robotic movements? Those were a bit weird.” Hm. Interesting point. Hey, you know that Chuck Berry single, “My Ding-A-Ling”? I think that song was actually about his penis. There, I can make banal observations of the patently fucking obvious, too, where’s my multimedia franchise empire? Oh I suppose I have to make an indie game about it, first, one primarily designed not to be played for fun but for hyperactive streamers to react to for the amusement of an audience for whom this never seems to get old. But anyway, speaking of things that never get old, Five Nights At Freddy’s is about children getting murdered by pizza restaurant animatronics that go mad when night falls. Step two question mark, step three profit. But shows what I know, ‘cos in the latest game, Five Nights At Freddy’s Security Breach, the business model has proved profitable enough to be able to build a gigantic indoor park themed around four animal characters reinterpreted as 80’s glam rock musicians and child murder.
In contrast to the original FNAFs which were very low tech games made from prerendered 2D art and wouldn’t have looked out of place haunting a cracked CD-ROM jewel case in an EB Games Bargain Bin circa 1998, Security Breach is a full on first person stealth pseudo-Metroidvania reminiscent of Alien Isolation if Alien Isolation had fucking sucked prehensile slimy dick. I don’t even have to review it. I only started playing it in case my Dying Light 2 code didn’t come in. And it did. But when it did, I said to myself, “You know what, Techland’s new overproduced grindathon can wait its fucking turn because Security Breach is very bad and I want to hurt it. And if I don’t get closure on this I’m going to wake up one morning in the chicken coop with one fewer chickens and a priapism. The really astonishing thing is how it’s still rocking a Very Positive rating on Steam. But then it is a cult series, and like all cults its members presumably all live on a compound somewhere feeding each other drugs and not playing any good video games. Or maybe the core target demographic only played long enough to confirm that it looks OK before getting bored and switching back over to PewDiePie or whichever neon-haired dropout has the most amusing scream this week.
Honestly the game’s visuals are great. It’s like all the budget went to the artists and the company meth lab. All the effort has been poured into rendering this vast open theme park environment full of unique assets and bright colours that one of the good Dead Rising games wouldn’t have turned its nose up at, but then came the moment to design a fucking video game to take place inside it and all the joints came unscrewed, the party android fell apart and one of its eyeballs fell into a crying child’s knickerbocker glory. And first person stealth horror is game design on fucking easy mode. All you need to do is smash the game over button if the pursuing enemy so much as touches the player. Pac-Man perfected this formula forty years ago and Security Breach still fucks it up, with a wonderful combination of both extreme bugginess and horrible design. It’s not because of bugs that I kept getting surprised by a monster I had no means of locating in a confusing samey labyrinth while hoping to randomly stumble upon five hidden generators I also had no means of locating, and it wasn’t because of bad design that I was then murdered by said monster after being rendered unable to move from clipping into a slide.
You play as Gregory, a young boy who gets locked in the Pizzaplex overnight and has to survive until 6am. Why you can’t just pick a corner of one of the many unused empty rooms, stick your thumb in your mouth and wait goes unexplained. Actually a lot of things go unexplained. The game never really establishes that the animatronics are hostile, we just take that as read, maybe Gregory’s watched streams of all the previous games as well. Most of the subsequent gameplay involves going back and forth seeking one Maguffin after another through an animatronic’s stomping ground like you’re tracing out a giant join the dots puzzle. And the key issue with the stealth gameplay is information. Typically the harsh musical sting indicating I’d been spotted by one of the murderous fiberglass Bananarama members was the first I’d know they were around at all. You’re supposed to use security cameras to scout ahead, but with these huge, cluttered environments and lack of context it’s like looking for the one placenta on the trolley full of red gelatin desserts, so crossed fingers and prayer tended to have about as reliable results. Either they’d spot me or I’d get blindsided by one of those fast moving security droids that patrol randomly and have the catchment area of a large suburban high school, causing Cat Benatar to teleport in.
And then running or hiding is pointless because they can run faster, so you might as well smash your head into the nearest pretzel stand and hope dusting yourself with cinnamon sugar will encourage a painless decapitation. And the usual livestream money shot of “screaming animatronic face, smash cut to black” is scary once, maybe twice if you’re trying to balance a valuable porcelain object on your head, then it’s just annoying. And with the inability to skip cutscenes and the restricted save system this is knocking out square after square on my needless annoyance bingo card. Wait a second, contextual use button you have to hold down for about nine seconds too long? That’s bingo! Here’s our fabulous prize: another minute of complaining about Security Breach. Oh Yahtzee you poisonous intergalactic rectum, of course it’s difficult, you’re a tiny child in a jumpscare horror game. What did you expect, dual Uzis and a Maserati MC20? Thing is, massive twat, all this annoyance was only until the game’s midpoint. Then I unlocked a laser gun with infinite ammo that stuns animatronics in one hit and instantly they became about as threatening as a great white shark in a gravel pit. After which the new struggle was figuring out what the chuffing hell the game expected me to do next.
The map had no indicators, so that was as much use as a laminated menu in the hands of a fussy child. I just had to randomly blunder around until I found something vaguely objective-shaped. Eventually I did this enough times that the game went “Oh it’s coming up on six o’clock. You can go to the main entrance and leave.” Feels like there’s a lot of the map that hasn’t been used yet but I am so not gonna question this. Got to the exit, the game goes “Psych! This is the bad ending! You gotta keep playing to get the rest of the plot!” D’oh, the old Symphony of the Night trick. OK, guess I won’t leave. “Great! We are now permanently disabling saving the game.” What? Why the fuck are you doing that? Are you embarrassed about the good ending, or something? Are your knickers in shot at one point so now you’re gonna discourage me from trying? Well, mission fucking accomplished. To say Security Breach feels unfinished would be too charitable. I don’t think they got as far as measuring the doors to see if it’d fit. I can only assume that using jumpscares to provoke funny reactions from streamers started getting old, and now they’re seeing if similar results can be achieved from just annoying the shit out of them. And if that is the case, look at me falling right into the trap. I hope the sweetness of that victory covers up the taste of my diiiiiick.
