Give Five Nights at Freddy’s creator Scott Cawthon due credit. For what apocryphally has origins as a programming mistake, it’s turned into a multimedia juggernaut. Like the supernatural mechanical mascots at its center, it may outlive my generation, maybe Cawthon’s. Because it’s fully ingrained in the pop culture psyches of today’s young adults.
With the release of the new game in the franchise, Into the Pit, I turned to exactly its audience: my now adult child who used to be known on the podcast as “Kid McCaw.” It may not specifically be this franchise that led him to begin a career in video game design, but it sure helped.
Where his father flounders at video games, Kid McCaw confesses that he just flinches with horror games. The mark of a decently scary game, which Into the Pit passes, is that he had to have either his friends or his sister in the room while playing. Together the siblings enjoyed playing through Into the Pit, especially having shared their terror with the prior game, Security Breach and its downloadable content. No question, they’re fans.
Though he unlocked all five endings, it’s funniest that developer and publisher Mega Cat Studios included one for the faint of heart. You can just leave the pizzeria as soon as anything scary happens. Which for some may be almost immediate, as the game wastes no time setting up an uncomfortable atmosphere.
The gameplay is different from the original games, using the hide and seek method of exploration established in Security Breach. The player explores each area and has to find a hiding place if one of the murderous animatronics shows up.
As the overall plot follows a character who has to uncover secrets from the past, the game also has a time travel mechanic via the ball pit. Don’t try this in your local kids’ play place. My son found it fairly intuitive and considered it a good feature.
The pixel art style lends itself well to the genre, expanding on the minigames in the originals. Each of those were in the style of a retro arcade game, CRTV lines included. Of course Into the Pit still has secret minigames, which also replicate the original minigame style. Another point for Mega Cat Studios.
The only drawback, and it’s minor, is that for some reason the main villain Springtrap (played by Matthew Lillard in last year’s film) drives you all the way home just to chase you again like a Scooby Doo villain. Typing that all out makes it sort of fall into place. Maybe.
Into the Pit takes its main inspiration from a series of novellas Cawthon wrote a few years ago. The minigames here reference other novellas in the Fazbear Frights/Tales from the Pizzaplex line as well. Technically, that makes it separate canon from the movie and the other video games. Which are separate canons from each other and the tie-in novels. Cawthon was doing multiverses before they were cool.
Just released on the Steam platform for PC, Five Nights at Freddy’s: Into the Pit makes a worthy entry in the series. Just don’t play it without someone else in the room, preferably a normal human.
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